One of the best ways to find solutions to problems is to ask other people, other people including those who you don’t know. After all, there are probably more smart people out there than can be found on any one Rolodex. And this is pretty much the basis of the TI E2E Community that was established by Texas Instruments in April 2008 for engineers from around the world looking for info about subjects ranging from pre-design planning to troubleshooting.

And this is evidently working out fairly well for all concerned because they’ve just passed the 50,000-member mark.

First TI logo.  Old school classic.

Explained one of the early participants, Jens-Michael Gross, a German engineer, “While I originally joined the community because I had a problem that no datasheet could explain, I spent some time to follow other threads out of curiosity. I quickly discovered that other peoples’ problems can be a source of inspiration for my own projects, and trying to understand what went wrong for them can be the first step for my own implementations. That’s how I got here and why I stayed.”

You, too, can become a part of it by checking it out here.