Start an Odrive Wiki?

#1

Hi Everyone

How would people feel about starting a dedicated wiki for all things related to ODrive Robotics?

The readme files on github are a great place to start but I am seeing a lot of useful information coming up on this forum which is easy to miss, especially for those starting out like myself. A dedicated wiki page (think that used by the reprap community) could therefore become quite useful.

If there is interest I am happy to get something started on wikispaces or google sites (using a template with a 100Mb limit) but it might be best long term if it were hosted here on odriverobotics.com.

Thoughts?

#2

I think that would be an awesome way to collect all the disconnected information streams.

#3

I agree completely: We need a Wiki. There is a lot of documentation that should exist but doesn’t; and anything that can be contributed from the community would be extremely helpful.

What do you guys think is the best:

  • A full standalone wiki (like this)?
  • Use the wiki feature built into GitHub (like this)?
#4

The wiki feature built into github looks good to me. Its likely less work from your end to setup and people could be more willing to make edits if they are already signed in to github.

#5

I agree and think this is the best approach considering the code is already in github.

#6

and your time is very precious!

Wiki is a great idea.

#7

Turns out that the Wiki feature on GitHub is basically just a git repository full of markdown files. I think it’s better to just have the markdown files in the main repository, so that versions get updated with the code. If the README.md gets too long, we can just split it up into multiple files in a Documentation folder.

Basically, my suggestion is to simply welcome people to edit the documentation in it’s current form. To be clear, here is how to do that:

Step1, click on the actual README.md file:

click_into_readme
click_into_readme.PNG1685x1564 249 KB

Step2, Now press on the edit pen:

click_on_edit
click_on_edit.PNG1673x1379 227 KB

Follow the “fork + branch; edit; commit + send pull request” sequence that GitHub takes you through.

#8

Ok sounds good. Thanks for the quick guide on how to make the edits.

#9

I think the advantage of the wiki is the changes are instant, without the need for a PR, as well it might be easier to create new pages and link between them.

#10

While I personally tend to opt for fully open source solutions when possible Atlassian offers free licenses to open source projects. A project is free to admin their own instance or, if you’d rather not deal with it they’ll host it for you. They offer Confluence (wiki,) Jira (issue tracking), BitBucket (git), chat, file sharing, and a number of other (optional) features.

I’ve been experimenting with it for personal use lately.

Just a thought.

#11

Rather than create a new topic, I’ll stick this in the structure discussion:

Myself and another forum member have been idling in #odrive on Freenode.
As we do not currently have an official communication medium (except for the forum, obviously) I would like to suggest we use Discord to facilitate direct communication as a group.

IRC is fine for most purposes, but it is difficult to reliably access on some platforms, and lacks a history function if your client disconnects.

There’s nothing like the present for getting things done, so I went ahead and created a Discord team called ODrive

If you already have a Discord account, you can join me by visiting this link:
Create a User, or Sign-in to Discord - Connect to ODrive #general

If you do not wish to register an account, you can chat using a temporary membership by visiting
Sign in as a Temporary Member - Connect to ODrive #general
Temporary members are automatically removed from the servers client list when they disconnect.
Features like marking the last read message will reset each time you connect.

Oskar - I will hand over God access to you when you join. :slight_smile:
Once that is done I will edit my welcoming post to contain the two links.