We are trying to keep this forum as useful to KiCad users as possible. This means focusing on KiCad related topics. There exists a continual danger of slipping to the subject of general electronics where people (hobbyists, newcomers) ask for help with basic electronics without any relevance to KiCad. These topics will often be closed without hesitation.
Nothing personal is intended, nor does it mean that the question or the topic isn’t useful or interesting.
Chances of questions being answered can be enhanced if you at least try to make it related to KiCad somehow, for example by attaching a KiCad project.
Sometimes general questions go under the radar, maybe even on purpose by the moderators, but we would rather encourage you to find some other forum for non-Kicad problems, for example:
- https://www.eevblog.com/forum/ (good overall forum)
- https://electronics.stackexchange.com/ (only for focused questions when you know what you have to ask)
- https://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/AskElectronics/, https://www.reddit.com/r/PrintedCircuitBoard/, https://www.reddit.com/r/ElectricalEngineering/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Arduino/, https://www.reddit.com/r/RASPBERRY_PI_PROJECTS/ (if your design is based on those devices and the question is related to them)
Sometimes you may also get good answers from an AI. If you have a clear question which you can formulate accurately, today’s AIs may give surprisingly good answers. And they don’t grow weary or become frustrated like we do. More than once some more experienced user of this forum has copied a question placed here and pasted it to an AI chat, just out of curiosity, only to get a full answer which you could have gotten if you would have done it yourself. We won’t do it for you and pasting AI answers here is frowned upon – even forbidden – but you can get your answers directly from an AI.
EDIT by Hermit:
Just to keep this from becoming a thread. I’m in the process of closing a decades old Amateur Telescope Making mailing list. Successful mail lists always started to fail because of volume. On a forum it is easier to ignore stuff but is still a problem for those trying to be helpful to the Kicad project. Overload is overload. It dilutes the useful on topic material and makes finding relevant information harder.