Cheek! SiWi to charge for Open-AT Tutorial!

Eric,

Thanks for the valuable comment. The good news is that Sierra Wireless has decided to better support developers online. That’s why we are currently:

  • building up a developer zone website in order to better support developers (still in beta, but please have a look at it if you did not already: feedback welcome!): developer.sierrawireless.com/
  • getting more Sierra Wireless folks eyes on the forum in the coming months
  • make sure product teams leverage feedback like yours to enhance the products

In your a), are you referring to the documentation coming along with AirPrime products / downloaded on the corporate website / downloaded on the new developer zone website? Could you precise which documents?

Regarding the Open AT tutorial book, I’ve well noted and reported the inconvenience to the product team. This book should be accessible online soon on the developer zone. We may want to keep it for sale as a real paper book anyway, for people who prefer this format (especially for big books like this)

.Thibault.

Dear Thibault.

Thank you very much for your positive reply.

I will look at the link when I get a chance over the next few days.

With respect to (a) I have been reading he documentation included with the install package (which I downloaded from the corporate website). The target is a Fastrack Xtend with version 7.43 firmware in the Q2687. There was no documentation supplied with the device.

As mentioned the product hardware looks very robust and I know that products like the Q2687 form the basis of many other commercial products from third party vendors. Its just that I found the steep learning curve considerably harder than it ever needed to be. Any work that SW does to make it easier for new developers to “pick and run with the product” must be good.

I’ve noted a quite a bit of confusion on the forum about some core aspects like using GPIO’s That’s one area where more examples would definitely assist. The Telemetry example is OK but it does more than read GPIOs (for example its doing SMS text messaging as well). Perhaps a series of graded examples building on the GPIO base would be good, starting with assigning one GPIO as input and another as output, using a timer to scan the input for state changes and reflecting the state change on an output. The second stage tutorial might for example add code to assign the serial port to the application and write a message about the state change to the serial port. etc etc. The final tutorial in that series could be all of the previous code in one example as in the Telemetry example. Diagrams showing the event flow might be helpful as some people are visual learners. Anyway, some food for thought…

Again, thank you for responding.

Regards,
Eric.

Thanks Eric!

I’ll loop back with the team about your suggestion. BTW, do you already have such examples (or part of them?) you’d like to share with us here? (if so, I’m kind to add them on the dev zone as well, linking them to you as owner)

Anyone else with good ideas is welcome! – you can as well vote for Eric suggestion by +1-ing his post.

.Thibault.

Thibault,

I’ll be happy to provide examples as soon as I feel I have a solid understanding myself of how to use ADL and OpenAT and the relevant services. I don’t particularly need attribution to myself for anything I contribute - I will be happy just to contribute and help others.

In the first instance I think it would be wise to take any examples I (or others) create and have someone else (perhaps yourself?) review and try them before posting them as tutorials. If we don’t do that we run the risk of causing frustration rather than helping people.

By the way I have looked on the developer forum and indeed there are a few more resources there. In particular I viewed the YouTube video on debugging and found it a bit hard to follow because:
a) the recording volume was too low so even with the volume control turned up near full on the laptop I could hardly hear it
b) the screenshots were really hard to see detail on, I guess because the resolution was too low.

Otherwise the video concept was good. I’d suggest allowing people to download the videos rather than just watch them on line as some Internet connections are not fast enough to allow uninterrupted streaming.

Regards,
Eric

Regarding examples: I do agree. We’ll manage to have someone test them as you said. I’m not worried that much about frustrating people if we pay attention to comments/rants and quickly fix/enhance tutorials accordingly.

Regarding videos: we’ll need to higher the quality of such videos then. About downloading the video, you should be able to pause the streaming, and let your browser download it fully before playing it, even if your connectivity is interrupted – works fine in my Firefox & Chrome at least.

Thanks for the feedback Eric.

.Thibault.

the support trends to need a couple of days to a week for answering an email and the contactdistributor page gives me a http 504 (The remote server disconnected unexpectedly) error…

so where can i purchase this book in/from germany?

Hi,

Just tried, and it seems the link is working.
Please try that link to get the list of German distributor:
sierrawireless.com/wheretobu … me=Germany

Regards,

Hello Eric,

Just a short notice to tell you that low volume issue is fixed.
Thanks for your valuable feedback !

Kind regards,
Christophe

Dear all,

I’m glad to tell you that Open AT Tutorial Book is now publicly available on Developer Site.
Have a look into Tutorial resources to find it, and start to browse it.

Regards,
Christophe

It´s good that you changed your mind and set it for free. :slight_smile:
But it would be cool if one could directly download it as a PDF.

Currentyl i would have to go to the last page, to get the number of that page and then print it from page 1 on, on a PDF-printer… but you´ll get an error, that you can´t print more then 50 pages in one step…
After 11 steps, which result in 11 pdf-files, one has to put them together, to get the book as a single pdf-file, which isn´t very comfortable. :unamused:

Potential new customer here. Unless the tutorial is made as a PDF, I can’t reccomend SiWi to our design team. Simply shocking that the ‘fix’ was to make it an online e-book reader!
Holding back information that should be readily available isn’t going to earn you any customers.

Dear chiptech,

I understand your point, that’s right Sierra Wireless doesn’t have plan to publish a PDF version.

In order to improve Open AT Tutorial Book reading and printing experience, here are some details about the reader:

[attachment=0]eReader.png[/attachment]

About the printing, it appears that there are effectively a limitation of 50 pages maximum at a time. Limitation is due to the reader in place. That was not in our initial expectation, there is no restriction from Sierra Wireless to let you manage complete printing of the book.

I invite you to try the bookmark feature which is cool, helping browsing the book and going to expected page immediately.

is this some licensing thing? aren´t you allowed to publish it as a pdf, but as a whatever this might be called?

Thibault,

With all due respect the web SW viewer is a very inefficient (and painful) way of reading the document compared with downloading and reading a PDF. It also mean you have to be on-line whenever you want to read the document - that seems daft!

I know you’ve said

but I believe that’s a backward step. Why on earth can’t you make the “book” available to developers in PDF format for download? Is there some issue with the original publisher of the book?

Eric

Guys, I understand very well all your arguments here.

I’m currently working with the product team in order to find a better solution.

Stay tuned. I’ll keep you posted here.

.Thibault.

Hello people,

Even if you want to print the book on paper, it may not work well. On the web site, i have printed a single page on a paper and saw that the pixels were horrible :cry: Printing quality is not good.

i also have a pdf printer on my windows pc. if i successed a quality copy, i would print all pages 50 by 50 to pdf and merge it for you as a single pdf file. But no luck :slight_smile:

I completely agree with the comments on this thread. I have been a member of numerous developer programs starting with Microsoft, continuing through Novel’s DIO program etc. etc. They were put in place to encourage developers to adopt their platforms because they knew that without applications they were dead in the water. And they were enormously successful. When I first saw the Sierra Wireless Developer’s forum I was encouraged. It looked pretty comprehensive. Only on closer inspection did I find that although it looked good it was nearly impossible to put into use by a busy practicing software engineer. In particular the Open AT tutorial is presented in a way that is 1) Not searchable (there is a search box but it won’t accept text!!), 2) no clickable table of contents or index. 3) Not printable. Even though there is a print option you get a blank page. In other words, you have to page through a 508 page document using Abobe reader. Simply not usable.
By not making the document available as a .pdf, by charging for a paper copy of the manual and by implying the only real way to get the documentation necessary to develop code for Open AT is to attend the classes, Sierra is in practice, if not in fact, behaving as though training was a profit opportunity for them as opposed to a way to encourage product sales by expanding the applications for the Fastrack devices.
Sierra Wireless has a very promising product. Open AT looks robust and powerful. But there are a number of companies out there with competing products and the race will go to the company that can build good developer relationships. Please please, get a .pdf copy of the Open AT Tutorial on the site as soon as possible!
Thanks!

Really, it just needs to be a PDF :exclamation:

It’s a no-brainer - that is the standard, ubiquitous, universally-accepted delivery format.

Dear all,

Hoping that you’ll all enjoy it, the Open AT Tutorial Book is now available as a PDF for download.

Christophe

Excellent :exclamation: :smiley:

Comments here: https://forum.sierrawireless.com/t/open-at-tutorial-book-now-available-as-pdf-download/5925/1