Professional vs Hobbyist advice and potentially dangerous projects
This discussion was prompted by answers to this question.
While the answers are good (basically, when designing for the medical field, either be or hire someone knowledgeable about the specific requirements of that field), it is only relevant if the question was asked by a professional (or wannabe professional). In this specific case, it is possible to design what the asker wants in a reasonably safe manner (I think).
A lot of questions can be answered two ways :
- "here is how we do it, the components/design blocks/standards/etc. that are used to achieve that"
- "Here is the process, norms, certifications and documentation you need to be able to sell your device in the US/Europe/other."
What bothers me is I think the original question is interesting and deserves a technical answer as well as a process/compliance one.
- Should a good answer include both aspects?
- Should we use "hobbyist" and "professional" tags to specify what kind of answer we are looking for?
- Should we simply write more specific questions? ("What are the requirements when designing a device to be used in the medical field?" vs "I am hacking together an EMG in my college dorm, what should I pay attention to?"
- How do we treat potentially dangerous questions, like "How to build a tesla coil?" or "how do I control a firework show from an arduino?"
2 answers
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the original question is interesting and deserves a technical answer
So go write one. That's your call, just like it's mine not to.
We are all volunteers here, and are therefore never obligated to answer anything. I didn't answer with technical details because:
- I don't know all the specs for medical devices off the top of my head. I didn't feel like looking them up for the OP.
- My impression was that the OP is in way over his head and has no idea how complicated and rigorous the process is. He needs a reality check and isn't ready for technical specs.
- Even if I knew the specs and they were easy to spell out in an answer here (definitely not the case), I still wouldn't have given them. I got the feeling that if someone just gave the OP the specs, he'd run off and try designing the device and ignore all that annoying process stuff everyone was on about. Nothing useful would come of that, neither for the OP nor the public.
Should a good answer include both aspects?
Maybe, depending on the situation, but then again the answerers are volunteer and get to answer whatever part (including none) of any question they feel like.
You can leave a comment and/or downvote an answer you feel is bad. However, I wouldn't do that just because you think more could have been said. That's probably true of all answers here. I would judge an answer on the quality of what was said, not what was left unsaid. The only exception would be if the missing information is crucial to what was provided, to the point where the answer without it is misleading, thereby providing negative overall value to the OP and the site.
How do we treat potentially dangerous questions, like "How to build a tesla coil?" or "how do I control a firework show from an arduino?"
In whatever way you want to. If you feel like jumping into the technical details, that's fine. If you only want to warn of the potential dangers, that's fine. If you don't want to answer at all, that's fine. And, you don't owe anyone an explanation for any of the above.
In general, we don't want to tell others what parts of questions they must address. There are a few exceptions, like don't ever answer a homework problem directly. But overall, we don't want to tell the volunteers what they must do.
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The main problem with a question along the lines of "how do you design a product for medical applications" is that it's way too broad. You cannot reasonably write a somewhat complete answer because it would be a very long one.
The general approach of all these Q&A sites is that in case an answer to a question needs to be addressed by a whole book/paper/standard, then the question is almost certainly too broad and may get closed as such.
The safety standards for these kind of products do not describe a few but hundreds of things to consider, including things like general quality and documentation procedure beyond the pure technical aspects. All of this is woven together so you can't really separate the technical implementation from the standards. In general it goes like:
- Analyze the project and gather requirements.
- Write down requirements in a specification.
- Tie each requirement to a technical part in the product, like a certain circuit.
- Document how the certain circuit fulfills the specific requirement, as well as general requirements for the product (clearance/creepage distances, EMC standards or whatever might apply). You might have to list technical parameters like number of operations, temperature range, mean time to failure etc etc.
- Design a test that demonstrates how to circuit fulfills the requirement. Both engineering tests as part of product development and production tests, where applicable.
If we were to answer to leave out most of this and just say something like "use a hall effect sensor with 3.3V supply" then the answer is by no means complete and probably not helpful. Potentially dangerous too.
Should we use "hobbyist" and "professional" tags to specify what kind of answer we are looking for?
There are no such thing as "hobbyist med-tech" or "hobbyist safety-related" applications. There are only legal and illegal applications.
We also have a reaction feature next to the voting buttons where we can pick "dangerous". This should definitely be used on answers proposing "hobbyist" solutions to things like med-tech applications or the mentioned "use Arduino to control fireworks" topic. It can only be used on answers though - questions that aren't specific enough should be closed for that reason.
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