How I AI - From zero coding background to hardware hacker: How Cursor + a Raspberry Pi makes AI fun

Episode Date: July 27, 2026

Maddie Reese is a vibe coder, hardware tinkerer, and builder. She builds things at the intersection of software and hardware, including a thermal receipt printer that people around the world can message directly, a fully functional Twitter pager running on a Raspberry Pi, and a personal API that tells you her coffee order so you don’t have to ask. Maddie approaches hardware the same way she approaches software: dump the idea into Cursor, let it interview her, get a shopping list, triple-check the parts before buying, and build. She got her start after her dad introduced her to Lovable, and she locked herself in her room and didn’t come up for air.What you’ll learn:How Maddie built a thermal receipt printer that accepts messages from anywhere in the world using a Raspberry Pi and BluetoothHow to use Cursor’s agent view to brainstorm a hardware projectWhat belongs in a personal API and why agents, not just humans, will be the ones using itHow to read just enough code to do some damage, without needing to understand all of itWhy building for fun, not practicality, is the fastest path to actually shipping physical projects—Brought to you by:Firecrawl—Power AI agents with clean web dataCustomer.io—Build customer engagement campaigns from a single prompt—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Intro(02:00) Maddie’s AI pill moment(03:53) The thermal receipt printer: live demo and how it works(11:10) The pager project(17:23) Why she uses Cursor’s clean agent view instead of terminals and browsers(19:05) The personal API: coffee order, pets, favorite snacks, and more(22:57) Lightning round and final thoughts—Tools referenced:• Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/• Lovable: https://lovable.dev/• Raspberry Pi: https://www.raspberrypi.com/• Resend: https://resend.com/• Cloudflare Workers: https://workers.cloudflare.com/• Supabase (Conduct database referenced): https://supabase.com/• Twitter/X API: https://developer.x.com/• Spoke pager network: https://www.spoke.com/• OpenClaw: https://openclaw.ai/—Where to find Maddie Reese:Website: https://maddiedreese.comMessage her directly: https://maddiedreese.com/messageX: https://x.com/maddiedreese—Where to find Claire Vo:ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/Website: https://clairevo.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/X: https://x.com/clairevo—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [e-mail].

I've always felt jealous of people who could code. And then when I finally was able to kind of join that world, I just started thinking, what else was inaccessible to me that's completely accessible now? And hardware was one of those things. Can you pull up your print me a message? Here is the webpage where people can send me a message. And you just go to Maddie D.Reereech.com slash message. And you fill in your name, you fill in whatever you want to send,

and then print a ticket and it prints out on my desk. I love it. So we're going to test it. I have your message Maddie website up. I'm going to click print ticket. There you go. Oh my God. It's so fast. So walk us through how we might build something like this. Welcome back to How IAI. I'm Clarevote, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today I have a really fun episode with Maddie Reese, who's building the hardware projects of my dreams using some retro gear that you might not expect. If you've ever wondered, what's my friend's coffee order and then thought it would be amazing if they had an API that told me, this is the episode for you. Let's get to it. Quick word from today's sponsor, Firecrawl. If you're building with AI agents, you've probably

hit the same wall. Your agent needs data from the web, but the right pages are difficult to find, buried in JavaScript, or blocked behind logins. Firecrawl is a web data API that lets agents search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale and get that clean structure data they can actually use. Over a million developers, including myself, build on it. It's open source and it's free to start. Stop fighting the web for data and start powering your AI agents and apps with firecrawl at firecrawl.dev. Use code how IAI to get 10,000 free credits today. Maddie, welcome to How IAI. I was so excited when you agreed to hop on the podcast because I think you do some of the

funnest projects in AI that I've seen lately. And what I love about what you're doing is you're intersecting software builds with hardware builds in a way I personally have felt has been really inaccessible until about the last six months. So what brought you to all these fun hardware projects? kind of my journey was that I always felt jealous of people who could code. And then when I finally was able to kind of join that world, I just started thinking, oh, well, what else was inaccessible to me that's completely accessible now?

And hardware was one of those things. So I just got really, really into it. And starting with my printer had it kind of snowballed from there into a bunch of weird things. Well, I want to pause about what you said, which is you were jealous of people who could code and then all of a sudden that became accessible. What was your journey there? Just tell us how you got from being jealous to hacking hardware projects personally. Honestly, through my dad, my dad introduced me to Lovable about a year ago. He's been really into AI for a while and he goes, hey, did you know this this is possible now? And I was like, no, I had no idea. Oh my God,

what do you mean? I spent days just unlovable, like just locked in my room. And I was like, just locked in my room, just completely, just building things. And then I kind of started exploring, like, okay, what's next? What can I, what else can I do with this? How can I expand kind of my, my knowledge in this? And it's been my whole life ever since. I love it. Ever since the magical last year, you have completely changed your whole life. Well, show us the printer because I want one of these things. And we got to show it on camera. For people that can't be, can you describe it? It's just a little mini thermal printer, a thermal receipt printer. It's a really tiny. It fits in my hand. And can you pull up your print me a message flow and just walk us through like what was the

idea and how did you end up building this? Here is kind of the web page where people can send me a message. You just go to Maddie Deerrease.com slash message and you fill in your name. You fill in whatever you want to send, do a little capture here, and then print a ticket and it print out on my desk. Honestly, I just wanted some way to interact with people that was kind of more physical because everyone that I had been talking to about these kind of things I knew online, like everyone I'd been talking to about vibe coding and AI, apart from my dad. I had been talking to them online and I wanted some way to kind of bring that into the physical world. it was something I knew was couldn't be too hard right like people people use printers all the

time that's how printers work is you you extend something from your computer to print out right so I knew it couldn't be too difficult I love it so we're going to test it I have your message Maddie website up I'm going to click print ticket oh my God it's so fast it's so fast I know front door there we go it says hey girl hey much and you're welcome for joining Hawaii. Thanks for having me. That is so adorable. I went to the Code with Claude event and they gave it these little like hard pewters and my nine year old immediately snagged it. And we've been trying to figure out a way for it to be like a messaging device. And we hooked it up and like runs through a Mac Mini in our house and then it like federates out to

telegram for us. But how cute would it be for him to be able to type little notes to me down in my office. I just think that's so cute. And so I have to ask, are you getting a lot of messages? I'm getting a ton of messages. I've gotten messages from all over the world. People on like the side of mountains, like then just telling you like, hey, this is where I am. This is where I'm sending a message from. People like from boats or ships in the middle of the ocean, a ton of countries. Yeah, I'm getting tons of messages and it's so cool. Can you pull up the GitHub and just kind of show us a little bit of how it works or tell us a little bit of the prompt that you gave it so we can understand how the system kind of flows? I have a Raspberry Pi on my desk over here and then it's connected to this to the printer via Bluetooth and there has the website here and then there's also a convex database.

I have it set it up so every time someone presses this print ticket button, even if it doesn't go through the printer, it still goes to my database so that I still have a log of a blank database. like what people tried to send me, which has been helpful because actually the printer, this is my second version because the printer just broke a few days ago because it had been on continuously since the end of October. How I kind of started with the, with the entire project is, again, I just dumped everything out from my brain into cursor. I'll actually kind of demo it for you now. Yeah, that would be good. What I just kind of did was I went like, okay, I want to create a printer where anyone in the world can send me messages from a website. How best would I

implement this? Let's brainstorm. So from there, I typically go on like a brainstorming session. Typically, I have it asked me questions. And I just have it keep asking me questions until all of my questions are answered about what how this works, how I can do this, then we kind of zero in on like what I should buy. If I'm starting from something where I don't already have the thing. Sometimes I'll like make a purchase like I have my my I knock G3. I just bought that off a Facebook marketplace and I decided I'll figure out something to do with it later. Because I just wanted it so badly. But in this case, I had the project first and then I.

on the printer. So it just kind of depends on the work club. I love it. And so you're really using this process of just, this is my grand idea, interview me, help me understand. And then because it's hardware, you're like, I don't know what I need. Like just give me a shopping list. I'll buy it. It'll be here in a day or two. Thank you, Amazon. And then we'll go ahead and hook it up. And you're you're proxing all this through just a raspberry pie that's sitting on your desk. Yeah. When on. buying pieces of part where I make sure to double or triple check. Like I'll say like, okay, well, what if this happens?

What if this happens? Like, are you sure this is still the correct piece of thing to buy? Sometimes it isn't. But when you're making, make kind of physical purchases, I don't want to just have something around that, like, I won't be able to use. Like, what's the point of that? So I make sure to always triple check and make sure that I actually will be able to use this thing that I've bought. So have you been led astray by your purchasing?

Like has, has Cursor ever told you to buy something that doesn't work? A couple times, but I've always caught it through the triple checking process, which is great. And it's never been like a big thing. It's mostly just been like, oh, you'll need these kind of wires. And then I'll look and I'll be like, I don't think that's correct. So you're a real trust but verify. Exactly. I love that.

So you had this, like, cute printer, which I think is adorable. I really want one. What I was telling somebody the other day, I was like, this is the revenge of the printer right now. Because I print so much stuff through my open claw. So I get my open claw, my husband gets my open claw to, like, print a daily newspaper for our kids. We're printing, like, one-off explanation sheets. We are just, like, printing up a storm. But I love the idea of this, like, little form factor of this, like, tiny cute.

receipt printer and then how satisfying is it to like rip that piece of paper off so satisfying so satisfying yeah and i have i have some execs that i work with on a coaching basis and just help them think about i i and they all want this receipt printer on their desk so they can get their agenda for the day like print it off in the morning they could just like rip it off or their to-do list like just ripped off i just think it's so fun to be able to get the like non-digital form factors So accessible using AI. Exactly. And sometimes it takes a little bit of kind of like that TDM of like, oh, here's your, here's your daily to do list.

And you get to add a little, little fun thing to it. It makes it feel not as bad. I agree. Let's have like a little bit more fun with AI. And so speaking of fun, you have done the thing that I actually really want to do, which is, you know, all of us parents in my age bracket are trying to give their kids what we're calling like, 90s childhoods where they're like not on the laptop and they have just a little bit more analog life. And when I was a kid, I had a pager and you have built a message Maddie pager. And so can you walk us through? Because you said before we joined the show, you said there was like

a little bit of trickiness to getting the right pager. And there's like a pager mafia or something that you have to get through. So walk us through how we might build something like this. To set the scene, there is kind of one paging network left. So pages go over radio transmission on specific networks. So there is this one paging network and it's called spoke. And that is where there might be some other smaller ones, but they're the big one. That is where all of your pages will likely get sent through if you decide to buy a pager and get set up with this network.

But they don't sell, like, the patrons themselves. You have to go through, like, authorized resellers. And that's what I did for this. So I bought it through an authorized reseller who typically sells to hospitals, hospitals and doctors and things like that. So they weren't quite accustomed to dealing with me. Their website looks like it hasn't been updated since, like, the late 90s, honestly. And that was the most modern-looking one I could find. That's why I went with them.

And it truly, it truly was, was something to behold their email address, I believe was pagers, one, two, three, and Gmail. Got the pager finally. It comes set up with a network. It comes set up with an email address and a phone number, which is great. So I have it set up kind of as a Twitter pager. I use the Twitter API to send notifications to my. resend email and then it sends it to a Gmail account because the email address that comes with

the pager doesn't accept new custom domain emails because it's it's it's it's very outdated it's ususus something dot net is the is the domain for the email address they gave me they're a very restrictive um restrictive email but the twitter page you'll kind of read through it here. So every interaction that anyone has with my Twitter account or my tweets gets sent as an API event to a Cloud Fuller worker. The worker does some things that sends it through resend as an email. Resend sends the email from a custom domain to a Gmail address. And the Gmail address sent it to my page your email address. So I have to go through multiple steps to get it. But then after that is when it finally displays on the pager. Or, oh my gosh.

I have to. So while you're telling this, I have to pull up and see if I can make this work. Yes. We'll see. We'll see. Sometimes the service is a little spotty. That's the only issue I've really run into because it's the page or network is just not, not super big. But I'll see. We'll see if it pulls up. This episode is brought to you by Customer I.O. You're here because you'd rather use AI, then talk about it. With Customer I.O., you describe the campaign you want to build, and the AI agent creates it for you, the audience, the messages, and the timing. You review it, make any changes you want, and launch. Instead of spending hours stitching together tools and workflows, you can focus on the work that actually drives growth. Every campaign is tied back

to results, so you can see what's working and what to do next. More than 9,000 brands use Customer I.O. to turn the data they already have into messages customers remember. Visit customer.io slash how IAI to try it today. Customer I.O. More impact from every message. What I love about this story that you've told me is that you're like, this thing is so outdated and so hard to hack, but I know it's possible to get from Twitter to this pager. I may have to traverse a bunch of very weird things.

I may have to do weird things, but it's okay to do weird things because AI is coding it. And it's fine. All I want is the ultimate kind of like endpoint. And so what I love about your approach is saying like, I don't care if it's like, of course it's not practical to like send it to Cloudflare and then resend and then proxy it through a Gmail and then send it to the official. Like, of course that's not practical. But guess what? It's fun. it's fun and so I think your idea of just throw out the idea that this has to be

practical or even like reasonable code and just build the thing that you want especially if it's for fun I think is really exciting okay I sent you an app message we'll see if it comes through I will also send you a little page through your through your website and we will see if it be does it beep like does it literally go like beep oh it does I have that turned off because it's annoying but it does Now, what's nice about the pager is like you can carry it around, right? Yeah. Do you strap it on like your jeans?

So it has, you know, the little thing, a little clint. But I have been discovering a lot of my pants don't have belt loops. What's the deal? So like that was my plan. And then I like put on my pants. I'd get dressed for the day. And I'm like, where do I clip this on? Where do I clip my pager on?

Exactly. A problem I never anticipated us girls would have in 2026 is where to clip my paper. Walk me through why you use this like agent view because I am like in opposite cursor. I am in terminals open, codes open, files are open, browsers open. Like I am in aggressive cursor version. You are in like very zen cursor version. Explain to me why this appeals to you. I want just this one new where I can just kind of brainstorm and get all of that through.

Like if I don't need to be seeing anything else yet, I don't want to have it up because it kind of distracts me. But later on in the process, I'll definitely pull up some terminals. Depending on what I'm working on, our browser or anything like that. But just for this starting kind of go, I want to just have it kind of clean and be able to just go, okay, let me get through my brainstorming. Let me get a solid plan for this and go from there. I love it. And then are you reading the code or you're just like, if it pages, I'm happy.

Yes and no. I mean, I don't fully understand it. I've learned so much. Or like I have a ton more knowledge than I did at like the beginning of this journey. And I can kind of understand some things. Kind of like how growing up in San Diego you kind of, you pick up a little bit of Spanish and can kind of understand it, but you can't, like, really speak it. That's kind of worrying that with code right now.

I actually really love that, that comparison. And you know what? I think it's good enough to be able to, for stuff like this, like, just grok it a little bit, you know? Just understand a little bit. Enough to do some damage is what we want. Exactly. Well, we'll wait and see if you can, like, you know, wave the page or by the window and see if it gets service. No big deal that it didn't go through.

But I want to talk about your third project, which I also love. And you have to tell us about the problem statement of the Maddie API because I think it is adorable and such a good idea. Thank you. Okay. So kind of how I started out with this is I had this idea about personal APIs. And that stemmed from kind of this problem that you have where you want to do something nice for them of coffee or buy them like their set, take them to their favorite restaurant and make a reservation. but you don't really remember, like, what their coffee order is or what their favorite restaurant is. And you want to do something nice.

You don't want to bug them about it. So I was like, well, what if there was a way where you could just hidden API and you get all this information about them? I kind of see it as a way to, like, bring people closer together. Like, my initial thought was like, oh, that's, like, too clinical and too weird. But then I was like, well, no, this is a way to. kind of reduce that friction of like, oh, I want to do something nice, but I don't want to bother them, so I just won't do anything at all. In this case, you would just be like, oh, I want to do something nice. I'll hit the API. I'll get the coffee order and then we can meet up. Right?

I mean, you're speaking to the one person on the earth. That's like, of course, that makes so much sense. Don't page me and make me call you and tell me your coffee order. I love it. Okay. So, So you have an API endpoint. And like, tell me what you have decided belongs in your personal API. Okay. So we have the basic stuff. We have my coffee order. Very important.

And then we can kind of go through here. So we have dates. I'll be in San Francisco. Currently has a question mark because I don't know when I'll be back. My pet info. This is very important. So it has my pets. We have Mabel, Lola, and Moon.

Very important, if you know me. Let's do favorite snacks. This is very important. My Orbel Red and Walker simply salted popcorn coded in specifically Bragg's nutritional yeast. Delicious. Time zone. This one's kind of just a nice to know kind of thing for when people are scheduling meetings. Oh, what's your favorite restaurant in San Francisco?

I got to see. Oh, yes. Okay. I have two. So it's called one's rocket sushi and it's literally just a like a sushi place where the food gets served on a rocket conveyor belt. they have the most delicious. I think it's called Hiyako. It's cold tofu with some kind of, some sort of cold broth.

Depends what it is. Interesting. Yeah, it's delicious. And then Seibel's front room. We're just like a topping food place. I love it. Yeah, both delicious. You know what I love about this idea of the API?

You're very adorable in that you think that, you know, humans are going to hit this API. But if I'm playing like futurist, I think the reality is, is agents are going to be doing a lot of this, like, kind of work for us. Like I can imagine my open claw where I'm like, hey, I had such a great podcast with Maddie. Go hit her API. Figure out when she's coming to San Francisco next. And like, let's make a reservation at her favorite restaurant. That all just the agent can do it. And then if you combine that with some of the like commerce stuff, the agenda commerce stuff people are doing.

Exactly. It's like a very interesting. flow. And it's giving me some ideas of like what could be an API. And again, we've like moved to this world where everything is a CLA, everything is an API. So like, why not, why not yourself? You know what you need? You need to add a post to your API where we can post to your page or post to your, to your printer. You're right. You're right. It doesn't have to be read only. Not only gets. We need, we need some posts. Exactly. I love this so much. This is super cool. Maddie, I just, I appreciate, just to recap your story for people, like, jealous of people who could code, dad says, hey, have you heard of lovable? You go super deep. It opens up your mind. And then you're like, imagining just fun things that you can surround yourself with that spark joy. And what I love about what you're doing is like, it's not disconnecting you from people. It is actually creating connection points between you and, and the world in a really human way. I sent you a very sweet note.

I set you a pager. Like, I'm going to page you every now and then because I think this is so fun. And it's just this, like, really novel way to come up with new connection points and also be creative, which is one of the things that I just love the most about, about AI. Well, let's get you to two lightning round questions. And I will get you back to your projects. My first one is if you had or could build any dream hardware project, what's on your mind right now? I want a dot matrix printer, the ones that can. do like the big banners.

I'm envisioning something where people send me banners, but no. So I'm going to have to come up with something with something else to do with it, but I know I want one. So one of these days, I'm going to get it. The sound is so, so enjoyable. This is z-z-z. Yeah. So you're, like, really into these, like, retro hardware pieces where you just want to, like, surround yourself with, like, kind of, fun retro pieces, but then intersect them in a new way.

I know that the Anthropic team, there was a Monet exhibition here in San Francisco, and they, like, hooked up the typewriter. And I just think those things are so delightful. Oh, my God. Yeah. Okay, so we're going to have to brainstorm something for your dog Matrix printer. You know what? You should have cursor print out an explanation of the code it wrote for you.

So you can read it. Something fun. I don't know. Something fun. Or banner. I don't know. Banners could be really great. Every meeting, you could print out a banner and then pin it up behind you on like what the topic is. Like, hey, Claire, welcome to how I AI. It could be very, very fun. Okay. Second question, I ask everybody. You seem very, very sweet. But when AI is not giving you what you want or it's sending you down a hardware path you do not enjoy, what is your? response, how do you prompt? Just telling it, you know, like, are you sure this is right? Yep. Like, I need you to double check. And then if that doesn't quite get there, well, first I do a lot of like troubleshooting. I like to get deep in there and be like, okay, well, is it, is it me that's wrong? Or is it, is it the AI?

Sometimes it's me. Sometimes it's the AI. But so once I get past that, then I go through like, okay, I need you to double check. I need you to make sure that this is what you're intending to do. I need you to make sure this aligns with what we're doing. I don't normally get too upset because I recognize that it's not like conscious yet. I don't know. I don't know how this is going.

But I do get kind of like, okay, like come on. Come on. But that's typically where it kind of plateaus. I'm not a very angry person. Okay. So you just kind of get like minorly frustrated. Yeah. You seem very chill.

You're going to be fine in the inevitable AI uprising. They are not going to come for you. Thank you. Thank you. That's a great compliment. Well, Maddie, this has been so fun. Where can we find you and how can we be helpful to you? Yeah.

So I'm at Maddie D. Rees pretty much everywhere. My website is Maddie D. Reese. On Twitter, I'm Maddie D. Reese. I'm Maddie D. Rees pretty much everywhere. can get it. Please don't steal it if I haven't gotten it somewhere yet. It's all I ask. Yeah, I'm just exploring kind of everything right now. I mean, we didn't get into it, but I have a startup, but I'm kind of in an advisory position. I kind of left one of my other businesses too to just explore a lot in the AI world. So that's just what I'm interested in

doing. If anyone has any opportunities for like exploring stuff, I would love. to chat. Amazing. I love it. Well, Maddie, thank you for joining HowAAI. This has been really fun. Thank you. I appreciate it. This was great. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and

learn more about the show at how IAIIPOD.com. See you next time.