What should be done about questions solely related to electronics?

Question

I was prompted to ask this because of this question: How to tell if you have a brushed or brushless motor?

Some questions are solely asking about electronic components and are not specifically related to drones or model aircraft. Many electronics questions could be related to drones but are really questions that are about electronic components in general and more suited to be asked in electrical engineering.

Should questions like this: How to tell if you have a brushed or brushless motor? be closed or answered here on drones and model aircraft?

Answer 1

Funnily enough, we've already got a very similar question here on Meta :)

My argument regarding this is as follows: While technically purely electronics related questions can be thought of as out of scope and redirected to, for example, Electronics.SE, some of them are very common in dronebuilding, and some have a different, nontrivial answer in the UAV/model aircraft context. For example, no one abuses their Li-Po batteries nearly like we do, so for most questions regarding lipos and protecting them from damage the non-drone answer would be "just don't expose them to very high currents, mechanical damage or over-discharge". Ha ha.

Even if that's not enough of an argument, and we do decide to move those questions to ESE, close, delete and otherwise remove them from our site, visiting drone builders and owners will still have them. And, not finding anything of the sort on the site, they will keep asking them. So it will be a constant battle of closing, redirecting, etc. I think a better solution is to keep one of each question of this type. Use our private beta powers to mold those to be the very model of question X. And then we gain two benefits:

1. Anyone who has the question will find it in search before asking another one, so we'll hopefully never get another such question ever again;
2. On the rare occurrence anyone when one does get asked, we can just mark it as duplicate of the canonical question and be done with it (if it is indeed a duplicate), or if it's a genuinely new (but still basic) question, do the same kind of makeover to mold it into another "canonical" question.

Answer 2

I think they should be steered toward SE.Electronics, unless there's a novel, drone-related component to the question. For general questions, there's a very good chance that the question has already been asked in greater detail.

For an example, I would steer "How to tell if you have a brushed or brushless motor?" to SE.Electronics because its completely independent of drones, whereas "What is the best way to cool a motor in a hotliner?" would stay here because the answer is uniquely determined by the context.

I agree with FlashCactus that we should have some kind of canonical wiki entry which groups together all the common electronics questions with curated links to answers on other SE sites.