Improving the Table of Hardware (TOH)?

[tmomas]

@RollingStar

export as UTF-8. most parsers and programs prefer it, and it reduces ambiguity. Pandas doesn't autodetect the ANSI format and complains about it.

You mean the export https://openwrt.org/_media/toh_dump_tab_separated.zip?

@RollingStar

normalize brand names to all start with a capital. this will fix sorting (A-Z). alternatively, have two fields - as-is and normalized.

Brand names are shown as best fit ascii representation of the brand, including capitalisation. Normalizing is no option.

@RollingStar

replace the max with group_concat

Already done: CSV Hardware Download Version field uncomplete - #11 by tmomas

@RollingStar

share the latest SQL in somewhere easily accessible (wiki?)

?

There is no SQL available for any of the toh views. The data plugin handles all the SQL. Out of this datatable definition

---- datatable ----
cols       : Device Type, Availability, Brand, Model, Versions, Supported Current Rel_releasepage, Device Page_page, OWrt Forum Topic URL_url, Device Techdata_pageid
headers    : Device Type, Availability, Brand, Model, Versions, Current Release, Device Page, OpenWrt Forum, Device Techdata
align      : l,l,l,l,l,l,l,l,l,c
dynfilters : 1
rownumbers : 1
filter     : Model!=@@Model@@
sort       : Brand
----

the data plugin creates https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_minimal_all
No user editable SQL involved (except for the csv export, which is not part of the data plugin).

@RollingStar

Many fields should be converted from text to numeric. With this being so common, is there a technical reason preventing this? (GPIOs , OpenVPN perf, Wireguard perf, buttons)

See https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:data#data_entry_input for available datatypes. Numeric is not available.

@RollingStar

underlying fields should be split apart, and rolled up alongside the underlying fields (USB3 + USB2 = total USB; Gig + 100Mbit = total ethernet)

?

USB2.0 is something different than USB3.0, therefore just counting 1+1 together is wrong. How does a user find devices with USB3.0, if he has only "2x USB" information available? Same for Ethernet ports.

@RollingStar

a simple "supported" field. Either true/false or with like 3 values: "stable", "dev", "false". As an end user I am keenly interested in buying a new OpenWrt device that works, not browsing something which hasn't been supported since 15.x.

• Stable: a stable release is listed in the dataentry
• dev: snapshot is listed in the dataentry
• false: device is not in the ToH. We still have some unsupported and / or WIP devices though, but much less than when we started the ToH in its current form. If there is useful information about a device and it is actively being worked on, we show it in the ToH (e.g. "PR pending").

Apart from that: Your expectations on stable and dev are not matching reality. A device with "stable" support might have serious issues (thinking of WiFi on WRT3200 etc.), while a device with "snapshot" (=dev) support might work perfectly.

@RollingStar

The default sort should only display supported/dev devices.

If you are searching for a device to buy, use the right ToH view with appropriate filters already set, e.g. https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_16128_ax-wifi, instead of the "show me all" view https://openwrt.org/toh/start which shows the status of each and every device.

@RollingStar

I'm not sure what 'PR pending', 'snapshot', and 'external image' mean, but those can be fit in somewhere.

PR pending = A PR has been created, but has not been merged yet.
snapshot = dev
external image = someone has created an image (external to OpenWrt), but that's it. No PR has been created yet, no official image exists.

@RollingStar

where a range of fields is possible, store the range. This may run into technical limitations of the filter functionality. See the 4, 8 MB ram here.

That's not a range, that are two distinct values 4 and 8, not 4,5,6,7,8.
In the data plugin, separate values are separated by comma.

@RollingStar

explain the use of ¿ on the main TOH page. the conventions link explains some: "¿: unknown (ALT+168; used for filtering reasons. Please avoid '?' and use '¿' instead)"

Some explanations or "legend" could be easily implemented.

@RollingStar

Why not, for example, NULL? - is already reserved for NA/not applicable. importing this into many data science and SQL tools would be seamless, while ¿ is not a standard.

¿ was the first thing that came to my mind when I realized that ? does not work with the data plugin.

@RollingStar

Firmware links should be computed rather than hardcoded where possible (use the version, device name, target etc. to generate the URL)

?
Can you please elaborate on this?

@RollingStar

Availability field is useless due to lack of maintenance.

The Availability field allows you to filter out devices which are discontinued and possibly not easily available any more. I agree, it is in poor shape (I blame it on the community which only want to have, but doesn't want to give back), but removing it would be the wrong choice.

@RollingStar

Hot take: replace this with an automated system that uses FCC data.

That would be an additional information, but would not replace the availability field.

@RollingStar

Sites to purchase (Amazon, etc.). I can't think of a case where this is useful.

See this as a confirmation that someone has actively checked commercial availability, rather than an extensive and complete listing of purchasing sites.
If someone sets "Availability" to "Available 2022" without providing "Where available", I immediately question this entry. This attitude comes from yearlong experience where I have seen many dataentries being created with "I whish it was supported, and creating a dataentry and putting bogus information in there certainly helps to get this device supported!!!11" in mind.

@RollingStar

I would, however, find an ebay link quite useful. That would let me quickly find the going price of the item.

I think this could be easily implemented. What's the ebay query syntax for e.g. "WRT3200"?

@RollingStar

Similarly, I don't quite understand the use case for knowing whether a device is still being made.

Users do want to get an up-to-date device, click a button and receive their device 5min later, at least that's my impression. Searching to buy specifically "v5" while "v12" is already available might be difficult and time consuming. You have to ask yourself: Does it really need to be that special device that has been discontinued by the manufacturer 8 years ago and which takes weeks or months to source via ebay or other channels?

@RollingStar

Sort the columns by use case. The first set should be for general users

https://openwrt.org/toh/start

@RollingStar

the next set should be for slightly techy users (cores, Mhz, port speed)

Table of Hardware: Standard, all devices

@RollingStar

the next should be more info (URLs to wiki, forum search, wikidevi), then "devs" with stuff like Gluon support, and finally should be "data" which is listed not so much for quick browsing, but just because it happens to be stored for use on the device page.

https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_extended_all

@RollingStar

If there is a problem with rendering speed, this would help - only a subset of columns would need to be shown at once.

https://openwrt.org/toh/views/start

Select the view which matches your usecase, and you will get a table with a subset of columns (more or less).

Apart from that, I agree to jow's reply: It needs someone who does it (it = integration into the wiki).