1. spread sheet! 

Ever since getting into this hobby going on 3 decades ago, the main go to tool for developing ideas has been and continues to be a spreadsheet. I use Microsoft Excel every day at work, but at home I use the free Open Office Calc spreadsheet... it does most of the same functions and formulas... and it's free.

2. Dia.

This is a free program that lets you create both flowcharts for program flow AND entity relationship diagrams for data base work.I learned of (and used) this when taking classes.

3. Python! 

While my first language was G BASIC on a Radio Shack TRS-80, my favorite of all time is Python. It is free, well documented, has a deep user base and I can follow the logic. I am not a user of virtual environments because these lottery scripts are stand alone. I use all of the math and science libraries available, also freely available.

4. R Studio.

This is a statistics based program that I learned about in class and kept using after graduation. Easy to generate visualizations of data, and work flow can be incorporated into python and vice versa. Free (Open Source).

5. Pencil and Paper.

True classics never go out of style!

6. Texas Instruments Nspire graphing scientific calculator.

Bought to take calculus, kept for it's power and relative ease of use.

7. Computers...

First is an old laptop with a quad core I7 bought when starting school, now 9 years old

Second, a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB of RAM running Linux. Both set up with Python and I can run long programs on the RasPi and send the data back to the windows laptop. (Those rare tests that take days to complete...)

Nothing was purchased with the lottery hobby in mind, but through that hobby, I am able to keep using the software and hardware and not forget everything I learned in school.... ALL of the software is open source, so it is free. I could never imagine paying for lottery software, that defeats the purpose of the hobby... hits (and even playing at all) is secondary to the thrill of discovery.