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

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. You just go to maddiedeereese.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.

I love it. So we're going to test it. I have your MessageMaddie 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 I AI. I'm Clara 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 Matty Riess, 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, structured 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 HOWIAI to get 10,000 free credits today. Matty, 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 6 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. Um, and then when I finally was able to kind of join that world, I just started thinking, oh, well, well, what else was inaccessible to me that's completely accessible now? And hardware was one of those things. Uh, so I just got really, really into it. It started with my printer and it kind of snowballed from there into a bunch of weird things.

Well, I, I wanna 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 like how you got from being jealous to hacking hardware projects personally.

Honestly, through my dad. Um, 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? What, how can I expand kind of my knowledge in this? And it's been my whole life ever since. I love it.

Ever since the magical last, last year, you have completely changed your whole life. Well, show us the printer because I want one of these things and I, we got to show it on camera for people that can't see. Can you describe it?

It's just a little mini thermal printer, a thermal receipt printer. It's really tiny. It fits in my hand.

And can you, 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, the webpage where people can send me a message. Um, you just go to maddieneereese.com/message and you fill in your name, you fill in whatever you wanna send, do a little CAPTCHA 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 would've 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 use printers all the time. That's how printers work is you send something from your computer to print out, right? So I knew it couldn't be too difficult.

I love it. So we're gonna test it. I have your MessageMaddie website up. I'm gonna click print ticket. Oh my God, it's so fast.

It's so fast. I know.

Front door.

There we go.

It says, hey, come on in.

Thank you very much. And you're welcome for joining How AI. Thanks for having me.

That is so adorable. I went to the Code with Claude event and they gave these little like card pewters and my 9-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. It 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 like 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. Uh, like, and 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, um, 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, how the system kind of flows?

Well, I have a Raspberry Pi on my desk over here and then it's connected to this, to the printer via Bluetooth. And there it has the website here. And then there's also a Convex database. I have it set up so every time someone presses this print ticket button, even if it doesn't go through to the printer, it still goes to my database so that I still have a log of like what people tried to send me, which has been helpful because actually the printer, um, 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, how I kind of started with the, um, 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, I'd love to. But really what I just kind of did, it 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. Um, typically I have it ask 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. Um, 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, um, my Enoch G3. I just bought that off of Facebook Marketplace and I decided I'll figure out something to do with it later. Um, cause I just wanted it so badly. But in this case, I had the project first and then I bought the printer. So it just kind of depends on the workflow.

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 proxying all this through just a Raspberry Pi that's sitting on your desk.

Yep. When I'm buying pieces of hardware, um, I make sure to double or triple check. Like I'll say like, okay, well what if, what if this happens? What if this happens? Like, are you sure this is still the, the correct piece, um, thing to buy? And sometimes it isn't. So, but when you're making, making kind of physical purchases, I don't wanna 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, I actually will be able to use this thing that I've bought.

So have you, have you been led astray? Buy 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, um, through the, the triple-checking process, which is, 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 like look and I'll be like, I don't, I don't think that's correct.

So, um, so you're a, you're a real trust but verify.

Exactly. Kind of girl.

I love that.

Exactly.

So you have 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 OpenClaw. So I get my OpenClaw, my husband gets my OpenClaw 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 AI. And they all want this receipt printer on their desk so they can get their agenda for the day, like printed 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 able to get the like non-digital form factors so accessible using, using AI. Exactly.

And so, you know, sometimes it takes, it takes a little bit of, um, kind of like that tedium 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 on, in my, in my age bracket are trying to give their kids what we're calling like '90s childhoods, um, where they're like not on the laptop and they have just a little more analog life. And when I was a kid, I had a pager and you have built a MessageMaddie pager. Um, and so can you walk us through, 'cause 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 like radio transmission through 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 it set up with this network. But they don't sell like the pagers themselves. You have to go through like authorized resellers. Um, and that's what I did for this. So I bought it through a, an authorized reseller who typically sells to, um, hospitals, hospitals and doctors and things like that. Um, so they, they weren't quite, um, 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, um, was something to behold. Their email address, I believe, was pagers123@gmail. Um, 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, um, 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. Uh, because it's, it's, it's It's very outdated. It's usasomething.net is the domain for the email address they gave me. They're a very restrictive email, but the Twitter pager, I'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 Cloudflare worker. The worker does some things, sends it through Resend as an email, Resend sends the email from a custom domain to a Gmail address, and then the Gmail address sends it to my pager 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, um, The PagerDuty network is just not, not super big, but we'll see. We'll see if it pulls up.

This episode is brought to you by Customer.io. You're here because you'd rather use AI than talk about it. With Customer.io, 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.io to turn the data they already have into messages customers remember. Visit customer.io/howiai to try it today. Customer.io. 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 like 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 not 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 like idea of just throw out the idea that this has to be like 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 beeps. Does it beep? Like, does it literally go like beep 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, like your jeans?

So it has, it has, you know, the little, the little thing, the little clip. But, um, I have been discovering a lot of my pants don't have belt loops. What's the deal? So like, that was my plan. Um, 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.

Oh, that's a problem I never anticipated us girls would have in 2026 is where to clip my pager. Walk me through why you use this like agent view, because I am like in opposite cursor. I am in terminals open, code's 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 view 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, um, I don't wanna 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, uh, or a browser or anything like that. Um, 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, 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, um, more 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 where I'm at 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, enough to do some damage is what we want.

Exactly. Exactly.

Well, we'll wait and see if you can like, you know, wave the pager by the window and see if it gets, 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 Maddy API because I think it is adorable.

Yeah.

And such a good idea.

Thank you. Okay, so kind of how I, 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, you want to do something nice for them, a coffee, or buy them like their— 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 wanna do something nice, you don't wanna bug them about it. Um, so I was like, well, what if there was a way where you could just hit an 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, too weird. But then I was like, well, no, this is, this is a way to kind of reduce that friction of like, Oh, I wanna do something nice, but I don't wanna bother them, so I just won't do anything at all. In this case, you would just be like, oh, I wanna do something nice. I'll hit the API, I'll get their coffee order, and then we can meet up. Right?

I mean, you're speaking to the one person in the, or 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 cuz I don't know when I'll be back. My pet info. This is very important. So it has my pets. Oh, we have Mabel, uh, Lola, and Moon. Very important if you know me. Let's do favorite snacks. This is very important. My, uh, Orville Redenbacher's Simply Salted popcorn coated in specifically Bragg's nutritional yeast. Delicious. Time zone. This one's kind of just a, a nice to know kind of thing for when people are scheduling meetings.

Oh, what's your favorite restaurant in San Francisco? I gotta see.

Oh yes. Okay. I have 2. 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, um, the most delicious, I think it's called hiyako. So it's to— it's cold tofu with, um, some kind of, uh, some sort of like cold broth. Depends what it is, but yeah, it's delicious.

Interesting.

And then Cybelle's Front Room, which is like an Italian 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 gonna hit this API. But if I'm playing like futurist, I think the reality is, is agents are gonna be doing a lot of this like kind of work for us. Like I can imagine my OpenClaw 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, the agent can do it. And then if you combine that with some of the like commerce stuff, the agentic commerce stuff people are doing, 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 CLI, everything's an API. So like, why not, why not yourself? You know what you need?

Exactly.

You need to add a POST to your API where we can post to your pager and post to your, to your printer.

You're right.

You're right.

That'd be awesome.

It doesn't have to be read-only, not only GETs. We need, we need some POSTs. Um, I love this so much. This is super cool, Matty. 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 sent you a pager. Like, I'm gonna 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 2 lightning round questions and I will get you back to your projects. Um, 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 will send me banners, but, um, no. So I'm gonna have to come up with something, with something else, um, to do with it. But I know I want one. So one of these days I'm gonna get it.

The sound is so, so, so enjoyable.

Yeah.

So you're like really into these like retro hardware pieces where you just wanna like surround yourself with like kind of fun retro pieces, but then intersect them in, in a new way. I know that, um, the Anthropic team, there was a 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 gonna, we're gonna have to brainstorm something for your dot matrix printer. Um, you know what you should, you should have Cursor print out an explanation of the code it wrote for you so you can look at it and 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.

That's hilarious. All right.

Second question I ask everybody. Um, 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.

Um, like, I need you to, I need you to double-check. And then if that, if that doesn't quite, quite get there, um, well, first I do a lot of like, uh, troubleshooting. I, 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, it's the AI. Um, 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, 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. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know how this is going. Um, but I do get kind of like, okay, like, come on, come on. So, but that's typically worrying. where it kind of plateaus. I'm not a very angry person, so. Yeah.

Okay. So you just kind of get like minorly frustrated.

Yeah.

You seem very chill. You're gonna, you're gonna be fine in the, in the inevitable AI uprising. They're not gonna come for you.

Thank 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 am @MaddieDReese, uh, pretty much everywhere. My website is maddiedreese.com. On Twitter, I'm Maddie D Reese. Um, I'm Maddie D Reese pretty much everywhere I can get it. it. Please don't steal it if I haven't gotten it somewhere yet. That's all I ask. And then, um, yeah, I'm really just exploring kind of everything right now. I mean, I— we didn't get into it, but I have a startup, um, but I'm kind of in an advisory position. Um, 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, any opportunities for like Exploring stuff, I would love to chat.

Amazing. I love it. Well, Maddie, thank you for joining How I AI. This has been really fun.

Thank you. I appreciate it. This was great.

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