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Wait, wait, hear me out. I love the RPi just as much as the next person, however it isn't about personal feelings. Well, maybe a little. The EP&D Proposal is in progress, and we've been discussing what would be on topic should the site make it to beta, and Arduino and Raspberry Pi questions would fit perfectly.

This site has a fantastic average number of visits per day, but not a lot of questions being asked, and 100% of questions asked would be on-topic in a general embedded programming and design. Visitors would also benefit from:

There's a high probability that users of site Y would enjoy seeing the occasional question about X

Almost all X questions are on-topic for site Y

This is in no way trying to take away the 'RPi Space', or even shamelessly plugging the EP&D proposal, as I'm sure some of you may or may not have seen on already on Area 51 (No one from here is following though as of yet).

United we stand, divided we fall.

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  • I answered this question, but you may notice that it's off-topic for the meta.
    – ramblinjan
    May 3, 2013 at 3:40

3 Answers 3

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Well, my experience so far here is the RPi site is very much a bikeshed questions site, while Embedded Programming aims for more professional, more "closer to the bones" problems.

My three recent questions:

got no answers. Nobody knows anything of the inner workings of the board, nothing below the userspace layer - or nobody wants to tell.

My fourth question wasn't very related to Pi - it could be any Linux site. Answers I got only solved problem partially, e.g. if the remote server was up but the WWW server was down or malfunctioning, the solutions would fail.

The questions on the main site are mostly introductory level Linux questions and hardware troubleshooting. There are some more advanced questions but they rarely get worthwhile answers.

So, I'm not opposed to keeping the RPi site as separate. It's a good site for newbies who make first steps in the embedded world. Just send all experts to EP&D if they get disappointed with this site.

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I'm not entirely convinced that Raspberry Pi actually fits that well within "embedded programming." It's more like a PC than it is an embedded system (though, admittedly it shares some attributes of both).

Also, I'm pretty sure sites in beta don't generally get merged into sites currently in definition phase. A site that is gaining success on its own probably should not be used to prop up a site that hasn't been started. If the embedded system site is worthwhile, it will stand up on its own--that's sort of the way this process works.

Additionally, you missed some really important parts of the text you quoted:

In general, if a site makes sense as part of a bigger site, it's better to have one big site than a bunch of little niche sites. Site X should be subsumed by site Y if:

  1. Almost all X questions are on-topic for site Y
  2. If Y already exists, it already has a tag for X, and nobody is complaining
  3. You're not creating such a big group that you don't have enough experts to answer all possible questions
  4. There's a high probability that users of site Y would enjoy seeing the occasional question about X

In this situation, the Raspberry Pi site is further along than the proposal. You treating Raspberry Pi as Site X, when it's actually Site Y.

The fact of the matter is, there exists a community of Raspberry Pi SE users who probably would not find a site centered around Embedded Systems with the "occasional" Raspberry Pi question very useful.

In fact, there's a reason we worked so hard to end up with our own site and community. We followed (and are continuing to follow) the proper process and did not build this site on cannibalizing other ones. If Embedded Systems launches and does significantly better than Raspberry Pi, then and only then is this a proper discussion.

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  • You make some good arguments, however remember that EP&D was only started 3 months ago. Also, #2 in the faq:If you're site Y, you don't have a tag for X, even though we're not site Y yet either technically b/c we don't exist, from your reply though I know you see the potential (though not entirely). I'm not thinking along the lines of 'cannibalizing' other sites, but look at it this way: How many more visits would both sites get, and also one can argue that both sites would show the same category of advertisements if it ever came to that point. Thanks for the reply, I guess time will tell.
    – MDMoore313
    May 3, 2013 at 12:47
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    Great answer, I'm of the same opinion.
    – Jivings
    May 3, 2013 at 15:52
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As @jandjorgensen has said, RPi is a bit of both (PC and embedded system) by its characteristics. But its usage is not limited as in the case of an embedded system. RPi is being used in many interesting applications like a media center, a web server; it has even been integrated into a boat to perform circumnavigation. Using RPi for these applications require the user to be knowledgeable not only in Embedded Programming & Design but also in many other things like how to setup a network, managing applications, etc. Merging RPi with Embedded Programming & Design proposal will deprive the users of RPi of those kind of information. After all, one cannot forget that RPi was originally designed to encourage students to learn computer programming. The second point in the text quoted by @jandjorgensen clearly states that two sites can be merged If Y already exists, it already has a tag for X, and nobody is complaining. Well, the site for Embedded Programming & Design is just now in its Definition Phase. So it doesn't actually exist now and that clearly means the two sites cannot be merged.

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