Electronics

Resources

Electronics

Software

KiCad is the go-to open source EDA. I’ve been using KiCad as my primary EDA for around 3 years. It has an immense library of built-in schematic symbols, footprints, and 3D models which saves alot of time when making new designs.
Altium Designer is an industry standard EDA tool. I used Altium Designer for a little over 2 years while studying at Okanagan College. It is a fantastic tool but I switched to KiCad primarily due to the licensing costs/restrictions associated with either buying a commercial license for Altium, or using the education license they provide to post-secondary students. However, if you’re a student and interested in learning Altium, their educational licensing program is pretty good as long as you don’t plan on selling your designs.
LTSpice is a SPICE circuit simulation, schematic capture, and waveform viewing tool by Analog Devices for electronics design. I’ve used LTSpice through my education at UBC Okanagan and it is quite powerful, but I’ve found Paul Falstad’s CircuitJS to be a bit more convenient, and accurate enough for most of my simulations.

VSCode is a (mostly) open source IDE made by Microsoft that has an extremely mature library of extensions available. I’ve used VSCode for all types of programming: embedded, web, Java, Python,
PlatformIO is an extension for VSCode that enabled embedded development across a variety of different frameworks, platforms, and libraries. I’ve primarily used PlatformIO to write Arduino and picosdk code for the Raspberry Pi Pico, but it supports many other embedded environments.

Omnifixo is the best general purpose workholding solution that I have come across for soldering both through-hole and surface mount components. It utilizes spring loaded parallel clamping grips that are affixed to a base plate with a magnetic ball-joint which allows them to be repositioned in 5 different degrees of freedom. It has several other useful features as well that are better detailed on their website.
Stickvise is another soldering workholding solution that is top-tier, but is specifically designed to hold pcbs in a low-profile manner. I’ve found the stickvise most useful for placing/soldering smt components, as it gives something to hold the PCB by without grabbing it directly.
Pinecil is a small form factor, portable soldering iron made by Pine64. It can be powered through a barrel jack, or with USB-C with an (up to) 65W PD compatible power brick which makes it easy to use on the go with most modern laptop chargers. The Pinecil is my go-to iron for most of my soldering as it is easy to power, heats up in under 10 seconds, has hot swappable tips, and the tips have the heater core in the tip itself, which gives much better localized heat which makes for better solder joints and an easier soldering experience. Additionally, it can use any TS100 compatible tip, which are readily available on Amazon or Aliexpress. Lastly, the Pinecil is also open source which makes it easier to repair or upgrade if the need arises.

Raspberry Pi Pico (commonly shorted to Pi Pico, or just Pico) is a series of development boards (as well as an individual board) made by Raspberry Pi that utilizes their in-house developed ARM Cortex-based chips such as the RP2040 and RP2350. The Pi Pico has become a staple in my electronics arsenal, as the whole dev board only costs around $8.00CAD on Digikey, and the RP2040 chip itself only costs around $1.50CAD, while also having an open source C/C++ sdk, Arduino support, wifi+bluetooth variants, and robust documentation. On top of all of the other features, the Pi Pico also comes in a package with a combo through hole pad + castellated edge pad flat bottomed dev board (with multiple different footprint variants in KiCad), which makes it easy to bootstrap simple PCB projects by mounting the board directly onto the PCB.