Crow & end-user documentation

GitHub is a perfect example of my need for some gentle introductory help.

I assume that the GiHub site has some helpful information but it would be most excellent to have something here that provides some tips for getting a start on navigating GitHub.

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Can you recall what was confusing about github or what you were trying to do? If you’re not coding, usually you can go to a ‘repo’ or repository (which is pretty much a folder) and download that folder.

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It’s as simple as arriving at a site and not finding it particularly intuitive to understand.

Pretty basic stuff that may sound stupid but nonetheless a bit confusing.

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Again, a little more substance on what you’re trying to achieve would help in terms of providing or pointing you at better docs. So for example, which of the following are of interest?

  1. Getting the latest version of a particular script
  2. Keeping track of your own revisions to that script
  3. Contributing your changes back to the original author

There are a ton of tutorials for git out there, of various levels of quality/user-friendliness. Without knowing what you’re trying to do, it’s harder to point you in the right direction.

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Understood. And thanks for engaging with this.

My issue is basically that I’m not even sure what I want to do yet! So what would be helpful to me is a “for dummies” primmer kind of introduction, enough to give an indication of what is even possible…

Sorry if that’s ultra lame…

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Not lame at all!

Have you seen this thread? It’s where I got my start with github/git :slight_smile:

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Maybe a couple good general github tutorial links would be helpful. I think I’m navigating it okay, but there are a lot of words like ‘blob’ and ‘commit’ that can be confusing.

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Hmm, I wonder if simply sitting down and recording a screencast where I walk through making some changes to a script would be helpful??

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Very interested here! Thanks so much!

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a helpful thing that devs can do is provide a download link & instructions right at the top of the readme
(copy and paste the link for download zip)

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collected some of the initial q’s: https://github.com/monome/crow/wiki/FAQ

how does this sit for folks? any blind spots? anything to improve?

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@dan_derks I think this is a great start, thanks for doing it! Would be nice to know what norns programs support Crow, like maybe a running list. Would save digging through the library to sort it out. I’m sure I will have many more questions upon delivery and installation but I’m confident this awesome community will point me in the right direction, as they always do.

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unless folks used the crow tag to tag their norns apps which speak to crow…

oh dang, that might work.

but yes, I’ll collect as much as is feasible for now

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This looks great! Thanks so much! :pray:t2:

Of course I already have a question: Why 3.33 volts? I’m not asking that expecting you to explain it there, but maybe a link to why that matters would be helpful.

Second immediate question is how can we learn about the syntax Crow is expecting?

There may be more questions but that is what initially hit me…

Sincerely not trying to be critical or annoying here, just sharing the “in the moment” thought process as I’m experiencing it…

This is so helpful!!!

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it’s just an example that shows you can pass floats to crow :slight_smile: . is there a less mysterious number? sincerely!

otherwise, updated the FAQ to reflect this feedback

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Even just that first Question and Answer was super helpful! Thanks so much for putting this together.

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333 is my favorite number!!!

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Tutorial on this for noobs would be great. I’ve tried to figure out what all this “git pull request” business is all about to no avail. As of now I manually download and replace any script I want to update via Cyberduck:man_shrugging:

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OK, let me see what time I can find to do this. Likely to be a rambling tour, but hopefully enough to get you started. BTW, a “pull request” is a way of asking the owner of a repository to merge some changes that you’ve made, but I’ll go through that in detail in the video.

I will say that I’m an old school command line guy, so will be using the command line git tools. There are some nice, much friendlier GUI tools available, but that’s not really my thing, and I think it’s worth learning the underlying tools.

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@dan_derks there was a comment (which I now can’t find) made about the pullups about not enabling this on Crow if it was also done elsewhere (TT i2c bus board?) . Can you add some commentary about this, and what happens if you do? Does it simply cause issues in data transmission over i2c? Or something worse?

Edit to add: sorry, I see there is a comment about only one needing to be enabled, but nothing to say what happens if you mistakenly enable a second.

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