Designing a PCB is not that complex. You can find a YouTube video, download the design software, order it from PCB Way, and get it in a few days. The problem is finding a useful product worthy PCB idea.
You make it sound like knowing electronics is an afterthought, who cares about what a capacitor, resistor, transistor is and just throw some microcontrollers on the board and the magic happens.
Sorry for the rant, I need to google what ground is.
I understand, but from a college room in 6 months, you can learn all the basic electronics and complex schematics. 2 weeks would be enough to study all of the components; there are not many. Starting with Ohm's law and logic after that would be sufficient. People are confused because of the tiny boards made by cutting-edge companies that look like magic.
Breadboard kits are $30~. I designed many ESP boards; it is well documented, and if I mess up something, asking Claude or ChatGPT helps because the documentation is very thorough
It boils down to chips and MOSFETs at the end. Swapping a chip on a premade design with your own idea, especially in the ESP era, is not that difficult, with AI and software testing before sending it to PCBWay.
An ESP32 can nearly meet all the computational needs of a small project, such as a keyboard. You can come up with your own version in a few days, literally. WiFi, BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy), RAM, disk space- all in one chip. The rest is Python (yes, Python if you don't want to learn anything else). You can build a custom board with what you need; there are countless ESP projects out there that come with board design already. Once you feel comfortable, you can switch to a more specialized chip for a specific purpose.
Can’t you just link markdown files together with regular hyperlinks?
Claude Code is my “note taking app” these days and it does a great job organizing and linking my markdown notes together, and I just open the folder in Zed and render the markdown if I need it.
The point is that Synology tried to vendor-lock their customers for profit, and even though they didn't follow through, they told us what they stand for, and it is now considered ill-advised to buy their hardware because of that.
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