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

**Maddie Reese** (0:00)
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.

**Claire Vo** (0:14)
Can you pull up your print me a message?

**Maddie Reese** (0:17)
Here is the web page where people can send me a message. You just go to maddiederease.com/message, and you fill in your name, you fill in whatever you want to send, and then print the ticket, and it prints out on my desk.

**Claire Vo** (0:30)
I love it. So we're going to test it. I have your message Maddie website up. I'm going to click Print Ticket.

**Maddie Reese** (0:39)
There you go.

**Claire Vo** (0:39)
Oh my God. It's so fast. So walk us through how we might build something like this.
Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, 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.
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Use code howiai to get 10,000 free credits today. Maddie, welcome to How I AI. 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?

**Maddie Reese** (2:30)
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, 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, and it kind of snowballed from there into a bunch of weird things.

**Claire Vo** (2:56)
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.

**Maddie Reese** (3:09)
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 is possible now? And I was like, no, I had no idea. Oh my God, what do you mean?
I spent days just on Lovable, 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? Why, what, how can I expand kind of my knowledge in this? And it's been my whole life ever since.
I love it.

**Claire Vo** (3:49)
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?

**Maddie Reese** (4:04)
It's just a little mini thermal printer, a thermal receipt printer. It's really tiny, it fits in my hand.

**Claire Vo** (4:10)
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?

**Maddie Reese** (4:18)
Here is kind of the web page where people can send me a message. You just go to maddieneerease.com/message and you fill in your name, you fill in whatever you want to send, do a little caption here and then print the ticket and it prints 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.