Tools I use¶

No recommendations, no affiliate links. These are the tools I actually use, why I chose them, and the honest caveats.

Writing and knowledge management¶

Obsidian — all documentation starts here. Plain markdown files, local storage, no cloud dependency. The entire libdrone documentation lives in an Obsidian vault before it's published anywhere.

Why not Notion, Confluence, etc. — I've used Confluence in enterprise settings for years and it's fine for what it does. I wouldn't use it for anything I own. Markdown in a folder is a format; Confluence is a product. When the product changes or disappears, the format remains.

Documentation publishing¶

MkDocs with Material theme — static site generator from markdown. This site runs on it. libdrone.eu runs on it. mkdocs build produces a folder of HTML; nginx serves it.

Why not Hugo, Jekyll, etc. — I tried others. Material for MkDocs has the best documentation-focused feature set and I can configure it without fighting it.

Hardware design¶

CadQuery — parametric CAD in Python. The libdrone frame generator is 1,815 lines of Python producing all printed parts from a single variables file. I'm still learning it. It's hard. It's worth it, because the output is reproducible and version-controlled in a way proprietary CAD files are not.

FreeCAD — for work that doesn't need full parametric generation. Open source, improving fast.

Onshape — browser-based, useful for quick reference. Not my primary tool.

3D printing¶

PRUSA CoreOne — built from a kit. The build itself was a documentation lesson: the PRUSA manual is one of the best pieces of technical documentation in consumer hardware, and I learned from it.

AI¶

Claude (Anthropic) — primary AI tool for documentation work: the API for the libdrone pipeline, the web interface for thinking through architecture and drafting. Chosen for the quality of reasoning on complex technical subjects and for holding context over long documents.

Infrastructure¶

Synology NAS — hosts all my sites, including this one. Nginx serves static files. Simple, reliable, runs at home, under my control.

Git — everything is version-controlled: documentation, the CadQuery generator, site configs. If something breaks, I have the history.