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.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 projectsFirecrawl—Power AI agents with clean web dataCustomer.io—Build customer engagement campaigns from a single prompt(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• 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/Website: https://maddiedreese.comMessage her directly: https://maddiedreese.com/messageX: https://x.com/maddiedreeseChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/Website: https://clairevo.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/X: https://x.com/clairevoProduction and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
From zero coding background to hardware hacker: How Cursor + a Raspberry Pi makes AI fun
Watch now | 🎙️ Maddie Reese built a thermal printer anyone can message, a working Twitter pager, and a personal API using Cursor, a Raspberry Pi, and the radical idea that fun beats practical






