Do questions need to be about design and/or specific problem solving?

Question

I have been told that Electrical Engineering.SE is about design questions but while there is a specific design tag not all questions are tagged with design (much less circuit design). There are questions about optics, leds, optoelectronics

I have been told that the site is about solving a specific "problem" not about collating encyclopedic information.

How is What is LED starter? a design question, how is it about solving a specific problem; since the above question is on topic shouldn't I be able to ask about how a device works or how are 2 devices designed differently?

Answer 1

Rules can only give a condensed and approximate synopsis about which of all possible questions are on-topic. And rules leave grey zones. Grey zones also evolve. Lawyerism certainly is inappropriate to try and sketch an exact "ontopicness threshold" in stackexchange. The ultimate arbiter is the moderation (including the community moderation).

If you ask grey zone questions, do anticipate that some, but not all, will be closed or downvoted.. This is not an issue, but will eventually guide you to an understanding of what people in a specific stackexchange want and what they don't want.

Answer 2

Do questions need to be about design and/or specific problem solving?

The scope is supposedly this one - What topics can I ask about here? Which is a rather brief and not the whole story. Examples of other types of questions not mentioned that are widely accepted here:

• Component identification questions.
• Electronics assembly questions.
• Tool questions about EDA or simulators.

These are all closely related to electrical engineering though. Basically they are questions which some electrical engineers will be able to answer for sure.

As opposed to "How does device x work?" kind of questions, which isn't answerable by an electrical engineer but rather the electrical engineer who was involved in the design of that specific product or works in a specific niche of product development. It's no longer an electrical engineering question, but a "branch x" question. Like the "LED starter" question - it's a question asked to the branch of electrical indoor lighting products. So perhaps a better place to ask it would have been https://diy.stackexchange.com/ where you'll encounter lots of electrician users with hands-on experience of using these products.

Now as it happens, lots of electrical engineers have a nerdy interest in all things electronics, even when they don't work in that particular branch. So they may be able to answer it & find the question interesting still. Also, something simple and bare bones like this which appears just to essentially be a fuse is far easier to explain how it works than some complex electrical (sub)system product.

Common sense will get us very far - if a question can reasonably be answered by some electrical engineer with knowledge of the specific technology, it ought to be on topic, whereas questions that can only be answered by someone with knowledge of a specific product are probably not on-topic and likely better off at some site dealing with such products.

For example, not every EE is an expert of RF electronics. But some are and so RF questions are on-topic. But very few, if any, are experts about indoors lighting products - you'd have to be lucky to stumble upon someone who does. And so the question is no longer reasonable because it isn't interesting to the majority of the users and borderline off-topic.

Similarly, while discussing remote keys to cars, I could ask a theoretical RF electronics question at the car mechanics site and maybe with some luck there will be one or two users there who happen to also work with RF electronics. But for the vast majority of the user base there, such questions will be uninteresting and borderline off-topic.