Here you will find some interesting links, apps, books, and tools that could be a very handy asset to have in System & Electronics, PCB or Product design, Management, Productivity, and life.
Electronics & PCB Design Apps
Altium Designer
Is a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) design software, Power Delivery Network (PDN), Signal integrity (SI) and Impedance simulator. The software is just awesome and used at CERN, SpaceX, INFN, and others. It features many courses online.
Price varies – Free 30 day trial
KiCAD EDA
Is an open source Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software for Windows, OSX and Linux. It will help you create PCB circuits for free. Officially supported by CERN, it also features many online courses and a wide user base.
OPEN SOURCE – FREE
EasyEDA Designer
Is a browser-based EDA tool suite for PCB design, circuit simulation, project sharing and direct manufacturing links. It is easy to use, learn and definitely my goto when teaching high school students on how to do PCB design from scratch.
FREE or 4.9$ per month
Electronics & PCB Simulation Apps
QUCS
Is an integrated circuit simulator, which means you are able to setup a circuit with a graphical user interface (GUI) and simulate the behaviour of the circuit with DC, AC, S-parameter, Harmonic Balance analysis, noise analysis, etc.
OPEN SOURCE – FREE
Saturn PCB toolkit
Is a PCB design related calculator software with a very simple GUI that can help you to compute Microstrip, Stripline and Differential pair impedance, Via & PCB trace max fuse current, Planar inductor, Crosstalk and much more.
FREEWARE – FREE
PathWave ADS
is an electronic design automation software that provides an integrated design environment aimed to the development of Radio Frequency (RF) and MicroWave (MW) electronics devices. Steep learning curve, but very useful.
PRICE VARIES
Fast Field Solvers
Is an ElectroMagnetic Workbench (composed by FastHenry2, FastCap2, VoxHenry, FastImp) that can help with inductance, impedance and capacitance estraction. The GUI might not seem so intuitive at first, but worth the effort.
OPEN SOURCE – FREE
emGine
Is a full-wave 3D electromagnetic field simulation environment solving Maxwell’s equations in time-domain. The development is stalled for the moment and there are issues in the software, but being free, it might be of use for someone.
FREEWARE – FREE
FEMM
is a Finite element solver (Finite Element Method Magnetics) for 2D and axisymmetric magnetic, electrostatic, heat flow, and current flow problems with graphical pre and post processors. Definitely not as user friendly as the first three softwares here, but powerful.
FREEWARE – FREE
Worth to mention:
Management, Productivity & System Design
Trello
is a web-based (with desktop and mobile apps) Kanban-style list-making application. You can create ToDo Lists on a virtual blackboard, stick post-its, move them from “doing” to”done” and keep tracking your project developments. I use it for everything.
FREE + premium plans
Whimsical
Is a browser-based online white board that can be shared between team members to think together over flow charts, wireframes, and mind maps. Very useful in Project and System design to define block diagrams and the inter-relation between the project’s domains.
FREE + premium plans
Strategyzer
Is a company working on improving the way new ventures and businesses create value (oversimplified). They offer plenty of canvas to design and evaluate your business, hopefully, to design better solutions.
FREE + Premium plans
AutoHotKey
Is not itself an application that you can use out of the box, but a scripting environment to automate operations you would otherwise do manually on your PC. Available cross platform it can save you plenty of time. (see here an example).
OPEN SOURCE – FREE
Everything
Is a windows based search application to locate files and folders by name instantly. You can find it both in portable and installer version for x86, ARM and x64 platforms. Paired with a shortcut on your keyboard it is miles ahead of any seatch features on windows.
FREE
Worth to mention:
- Who knows what’s coming
Writing & Content Creation
Overleaf
is an Online browser-based text editor running on the Latex environment. If you’ve always been writing documents in Word and are in search of a better way, Overleaf will let you focus on your content while handling all the typography work for you.
FREE + Premium Plans
Grammarly
is an online and addon based grammar and logic analyzer engine built to help you in having a feedback on how your content sounds and be warned of any possible grammar or logic error. If you’re not a native speaker, this could help you more than a normal corrector.
Free + Premium Plans
Canva
Is a web based design aid tool to help you in the design of almost anything. It will provide thousands of templates for invitation letters, advertisements, book covers and much more. very useful if you want to design something without professional tools.
Free + Premium Plans
This page is constantly under construction. If you have any resource to suggest, feel free to contact me
Nadim Conti 