Here is a list of resources I’ve found useful over the years on many different projects or that have been strongly recommended by experts but I’ve never had the opportunity to use. Thank you to @jacob_rintamaki for some of these suggestions.
- Component vendors (gantries, linear rails etc)
- Custom part manufacturers
- Craftcloud (3D printing)
- Craftcloud is ridiculously cheap and fast and can do many different scales of design. This is my go-to vendor for 3D printing.
- Parallel Fluidics (microfluidics, very cheap and fast)
- JLCPCB (PCB manufacturing)
- Craftcloud (3D printing)
- Electronics
- Raspberry Pi + A4988 guide (stepper motor control)
- Miscellaneous hardware
- Software tools
- OnShape (CAD software)
- OnShape is very similar to solidworks but is completely free and runs in the browser so you can easily share designs and most computations are performed server-side.
- Cline (VSCode AI extension)
- Cline is a really good extension that can write to your local file system so you don’t have to copy+paste from a chat website. Works with any LLM as long as you have API access.
- SQLite (Database engine)
- SQLite gives you the functionality of a SQL server as a file so you don’t have to actually host a server.
- PyLabRobot (Hardware-agnostic liquid-handling robot interface)
- Flask (Python library for servers w/ APIs)
- Redis (General in-memory key-value database)
- OnShape (CAD software)