RIOT Summit 2024
Breakout Session: RIOT in teaching, lower entry level, documentation
Teaching and Training
- RIOT Box used for teaching and tutorials
- having a self-consistent dev environment out of the box (i.e., PI) is quite beneficial
- alternative approach: cloud-based environment, virtualized hw
- might not feel like IoT dev
- students like to touch hardware
- what you can do: codespace provided by GitHub; is a good starting point but for advanced topics (and understanding) you easily reach limits
- distinguish between teaching and training (outside university)
- Web serial API would be nice to flash boards using a Web browser
- nice goal would be to have a browser-based dev environment but with option to flash real hardware
- Forschungs-Campus Wien: https://wiki.elvis.science/index.php?title=Category:Documentation
- Border router is too complicated to setup
- lack of IPv6 connectivity, use WireGuard tunnel
- any experiences with AWS?
- lowing the entry level for beginners
- how do we handle fragmentation of excercises.
Next steps
- create teaching.riot-os.org, and maybe training.riot-os.org, www.riot-os.org/teaching
- overview page that shows in which courses RIOT is used
- also to share experiences which topics are appropriate for which level of students?
- to prevent fragmentation due to too many excercise repos, we could regularly check the different repos and pick those excercises that are of general interest (and not specific to a dedicated course), and merge them
Documentation
- Tom works on extending the documentation to make it more beginners friendly, lower entry level
- why do we not have proper beginners guide?
- we do not lack documentation but it is hard to find the right pieces.
- proper linking of the documentation in the API documentation
- we should reconsider the page behind the “Getting started” button
- much simpler website insteas of the main page of the API documentation
- what is the state about the improvements Koen started.
- fear of inconsistent content between guide and documentation
- redesign look and feel of API documentation
- Leandro, Jose started somethin; Carl too
- Discussions on converting XML to HTML5
- should we add documentations check to releases
- how much can we automate?
- at least checking links can be automated
- add docuḿentation/getting started checking to the release specs
- more advanced steps: create beginner videos
- make it part of the CI
examples include in guides
- Examples are a mess, gnrc_networking good entry-level usage example
- Always important to mark todos
- Hannes: Let ChatGPT write documentation as experiment? Oleg: Did not actually do it yet.
- Conclusion: Spirit of how to improve things is there and people are willing to do it
Breakout Session: How to contribute?
- Person proposing the topic not in the room
- Tom: Only real newcomer here, apparently: Confused about communication channels: When to use Matrix, when to use forum, when to use issue tracker?
- Martine: Forum for questions where you think the answer can have value for other people, too. Matrix for quick questions where other people do not need the answer (where do I find XYZ?). Issue-Tracker for bugs you encounter (even for documentation bugs).