Comments on Creating a FAQ: how to read a datasheet
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Creating a FAQ: how to read a datasheet
After reading various low quality questions Someplace Else today, it (once again) occurred to me that a whole lot of people, mostly hobbyists and engineering students, have no clue how to do the most basic thing of all: how to read a datasheet.
Specifically, what the various parts such as absolute maximum ratings and electrical characteristics mean. What parameters to design after and which ones that are stress values. How to design with margins. How to quickly determine if a certain part is suitable for one's purpose and so on.
There's also lots of engineer jargon like analog/digital characteristics, ambient/junction temperature etc where the reader is expected to know what it means in advance.
I know of no reliable online resources that tell you have to read a datasheet, so I thought about creating a FAQ post about it here. The target audience should be electrical engineering students, not complete laymen.
Ideally this would be some community-maintained project that many users can contribute to, but we don't have "community wiki" like SE.
Question: what is the best way to create a FAQ post like this here if I want multiple users to contribute and maintain the post? The "Papers" category don't quite seem to fit the bill(?).
I am also interested in feedback about what part that would be a good example datasheet. I was thinking about using the classic LM317 LDO from TI as an example, since it's a common and reasonably complex product, but not overwhelmingly so. (And this post shouldn't need to get deep into the technical details.) The datasheet from TI is very good and detailed, containing everything one might expect to find in a generic datasheet, including some extras like lots of applications and layout advise.
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I think the Papers section can be suitable. In the category description post it says:
Example of paper topics: [...] A survey of scattered information, with the paper putting it all in one place.
A self-answered question would also work well, I think, as such questions are also popular on the StackExchange sites and get a lot of attention.
As for the example datasheet, I would perhaps go for some widely used general-purpose op-amp. Op-amps are covered in EE education so most terms in the datasheet should at least be familiar. Using an op-amp should also be a good case study since you can hook it up in different ways and have different part of the datasheet matter more for a specific application. This way you can demonstrate how to quickly look for relevant information, which I think is the #1 skill for reading datasheets.
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