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

July 27, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Maddie Reese had never written a line of code before her dad showed her Lovable, an AI-powered coding tool, about a year ago. She spent days locked in her room building things. Then she started wondering: "What else was inaccessible to me that's completely accessible now?" Hardware was one of those things. Since then, she has built a thermal printer that prints messages sent from a website onto her desk, a Twitter-to-pager bridge that sends notifications to an actual retro pager clipped to her belt, and a personal API that tells friends her coffee order, favorite restaurants, and pet names. Her approach is less about technical mastery and more about using AI as a creative lever — a way to turn whims into working objects without needing to become a developer first.

From jealous of coders to hardware hacker

Reese's entry point was purely emotional. She had felt excluded from the world of people who could build things with software. When she discovered that AI tools like Lovable and Cursor could generate working code from plain English descriptions, that barrier dissolved. She started small, building web apps, and then realized the same logic could extend into the physical world.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **From Jealous to Builder** - Maddie explains how she went from feeling jealous of coders to building hardware projects with AI
2 (04:04) **The Message Printer Demo** - Maddie shows off her thermal receipt printer that prints messages from anyone in the world
3 (07:06) **Maddie's Build Process: Brainstorm First** - She reveals her workflow for starting hardware projects using AI as a thinking partner
4 (11:36) **The Pager Project: Hacking Retro Hardware** - Maddie walks through building a Twitter-connected pager using outdated infrastructure
5 (15:32) **The Philosophy: Practicality Doesn't Matter** - Maddie explains why it's okay to build weird, impractical things with AI
6 (17:21) **The Zen Cursor Workflow** - Maddie explains why she uses Cursor's agent view instead of working with terminals and files
7 (19:17) **The Personal API: Maddie's API** - She introduces the concept of a personal API that tells friends useful information about you

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

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 Bluetooth
How to use Cursor’s agent view to brainstorm a hardware project
What belongs in a personal API and why agents, not just humans, will be the ones using it
How to read just enough code to do some damage, without needing to understand all of it
Why building for fun, not practicality, is the fastest path to actually shipping physical projects

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Brought to you by:

Firecrawl—Power AI agents with clean web data

Customer.io—Build customer engagement campaigns from a single prompt

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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