Skip to content

docs: Improve documentation contents for users bringing up their DIY-assembled PlanktoScopes #141

@ethanjli

Description

@ethanjli

This is a tracking issue for our project to improve the contents of our software documentation to help users who have just finished building a PlanktoScope to bring it up into a correct, fully-operational state.

Motivation

In the PlanktoScope Slack workspace, we see many people building PlanktoScopes and then encountering and asking for help about many different kinds of problems which are all grouped together with a single error message from the Node-RED dashboard: "There is probably an error either with your camera or with the python service. Please restart your machine". Often these error reports are not accompanied by a log from the Python backend, because often the log just doesn't get displayed in the Node-RED dashboard. Many of these errors have similar root causes or failure modes, while other errors are very distinct. All of these errors prevent users from operating their PlanktoScopes to collect data.

Often it is quite challenging for us to help our users solve their problems with their DIY-assembled PlanktoScopes, which can be a frustrating experience for everyone involved. This is especially critical for us now because many of our users are evaluating PlanktoScopes to see whether PlanktoScopes are suitable for their own projects.

Goals

  • Make the documentation easier to understand
  • Structure the documentation so that project maintainers and community members providing assistance can just paste a link to a section of the documentation in response to any common question
  • For (KPI) 90% of all questions asked by at least two users on the PlanktoScope Slack channel about their DIY-assembled PlanktoScopes, have a specific section of the documentation with an associated link we can paste into the Slack.

Steps

(these steps will be converted into tracking issues for stories)

  • Improve documentation for helping users to assemble their PlanktoScopes correctly
  • Improve documentation for helping users to configure their PlanktoScopes correctly
  • Improve documentation for helping users to operate their PlanktoScopes correctly
  • Improve documentation for helping users to troubleshoot their PlanktoScopes
  • Improve documentation for helping users to understand how their PlanktoScopes work
  • Improve documentation for helping users to understand common failure modes of freshly-assembled DIY PlanktoScopes

Unresolved Questions

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    documentationImprovements or additions to documentation

    Type

    No type
    No fields configured for issues without a type.

    Projects

    No projects

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions