Great Lowcost/Free Engineering software & resources

It looks like finally you can design the space shuttle with free tools have a look at the treasure trove here. What I'm missing is chemistry and gene editing simulations and general medical and biology knowledge if people can recommend serious stuff they've used and been impressed with please leave info in comments.

Pure Hardware Development Resources

Predictable Designs Great advice for beginners & experts on designing stuff from this mailing list and blog.
Digital Fundamentals by Floyd a true lowdown on how Digital Electronics work.

Xilinx Student Edition  in it's current incarnation go at this if you want to become a digital hardware engineer. Learn VHDL/Verilog.

LTSpice for Linux  this is an powerful free open source electronics simulator LTSpice with loads of electronic device models it is designed to run on Windows & runs on Ubuntu via a windows emulator called Wine, install pSpice & Oregano if you want to stay open source pure. Windows version of LTSpice available here it kind of runs under linux via the wine windows emulation layer but i would not recommend it. This stuff is not for the faint hearted no pain no gain especially in electronics simulation.

KiCad Free Printed Circuit Board (PCB) design software this is getting good and it should now be possible to get boards running at 500Mhz with this software rather than expensive Altium which costs around 10,000 euro.

Paul daniels openboardview is great for viewing schematics while repairing boards for watching this being used by a master I advise you to look at Louis Rossmans youtube channel you'll learn loads about the reality of PCB repair their from a master.

To learn how to design high speed PCB's read the pdfs from this Google Link
https://www.google.ie/search?q=texas+instruments+hi+speed+pcb+design+pdf
Designing high speed PCB's is hard and unless you are very confident read content from Predictable Designs for advice. Signal integrity checking for high speed designs, demands someone who is eats Maxwell's equations for breakfast and God knows what else high end expensive packages like Altium & Orcad have this, buy these if absolutely neccessary.

OpenCores free open source electronics intellelectual property.

Static Free Software free VLSI ( Microchip ) Design software

How to install Ubuntu, Ubuntu is a version of Linux, a great operating system you don't have to pay a thing for & almost all the software for it is free too.

Ubuntu Linux distribution download

First thing do is figure out what a unix shell is, look at bash keyboard shortcuts,  & in the unix shell type "man ls" "man cd" "man pwd" "man which", figure out what a path variable is & learn bash scripting.

Resources for Firmware Developers

My coderdojo how computers work tutorials are here the first tutorial is completely self contained and requires no extra understanding, I would recommend learning a bit of C code in  Beginning Linux Programming or   C/C++ Programming lessons before tackling the stuff with gcc, for loops, variables and printf in the second tutorial.

Beginning Linux Programming a classic by Wrox press if you know everything in this book you'll be a good programmer by reading this book alone, just install Ubuntu,

Embedded Linux Systems the book you need to look at if your going messing with a Raspberry pi

Pro Git  git is a tool to allow multiple programmers work on the same source code at the same time and keep backups of working code, I have a love hate relationship with the program, it's absolutely neccessary for you to become proficient with at least github if you want to work with multiple programmers as a pro, it's complicated but absolutely neccessary.

x64 assembly language programming introduction

Linux Device Drivers a classic, essential read before going at the guts of Linux

Resources for mechanical engineers & architectss.

Freecad now does finite element analysis see here

Mech eng tutorial here

Mech eng basics here

Blender also helps to produce 3d printed titanium or stainless steel parts from sculpteo.com

I believe the alloys could be 3d printed on sculpteo.com.

To learn blender i recommend Blender Guru and join his mailing list to download the blender key cheat sheet expect to spend 200 hours to learn blender and freecad each.

Openscad text based programming 3d printing software is easier than blender and freecad if

you can't handle loads of complex keys in the long run its slower but it'll take years for most

humans to get proficient with blender and freecad.

See below for demo drawings rendered in blender in about 10 mins in my late 2008 macbook.

I'm not sure of the best chemistry simulators, I only did chemistry to high school leaving cert level, but ,I believe knowledge of the schroedinger equation, and, knowledge in the following alvin ash video would go a long way in designing a chemistry simulator for small molecules, but the pertubations of the calculaions even for a single molecule would require serious computing power, if even feasable.