For my blinky++ project, I needed a debug probe to interface with the SAM D21 that the design centers around. There’s a lot of options in this space - Microchip has a few of their own debug probes, and there’s also vendor-independent debug probes like J-Link and I-jet. I also came across the Black Magic Probe, an open-source vendor-independent debug probe based around the STM32F103. What really sold me on this option was the fact that you can convert STM32 Blue Pills to Black Magic Probes, which can be had for $8 or less.

For my personal projects, I use KiCAD for design capture. KiCAD has had a 6.0 release in the works for a while, but as of this writing has not released yet. The features of 6.0 are available on GitLab main branch and in the nightly builds that are officially provided for many platforms, not including Arch. One of my older machines has a long-standing install of Arch that I don’t have the heart to remove, and I wanted to get KiCAD nightly working on this machine without the need to build it every time it’s updated.

Here’s a link to the talk that I gave for The Open Source Club at Ohio State: