There's a moment in every hardware project where you think "this should be simple" — and then you spend an evening down a rabbit hole of SPI buses, voltage dividers, and audio formats you've never heard of. Adding WAV playback to my Arduino quiz buzzer was exactly that kind of evening. But it worked, and it was genuinely satisfying. Here's how it went. The Project That Needed a Voice I'd been building a two-team quiz buzzer system for a while — buttons, LEDs, interrupt logic,

Convection stoves and steel pot lids are a bad combination. The lid handles are solid steel — elegant, heat-conducting, unforgiving. After burning myself one too many times checking on a sauce, I decided the 3D printer was going to fix this. The concept was simple: a snug cap that slips over the existing knob and gives you something that doesn't conduct heat. PETG was the obvious material choice — PLA softens in warm environments, which is exactly the wrong property for somet

Fourteen years ago I built my first quiz buzzer system . It worked, but the hardware was — let's say — a product of its constraints. I used every single IO pin on the Arduino, plus a 74HC595 shift register and two 74LS32 OR gate chips just to drive the LEDs. It was held together by necessity and a certain stubbornness that I think is just part of making things. I always told myself I'd revisit it. This year, I finally did. The Brief I Set Myself The original build worked, but

I want to be upfront, I went into this experiment with low expectations. Not because I doubt AI tools — I use them all the time — but because what I was trying to do felt like a weird edge case. I wanted to use Claude Code to write OpenSCAD, a programming language for building 3D objects in code. No drag-and-drop, no visual modeling. Just pure, parametric geometry defined in text. Would Claude even understand it well enough to be useful? Could I describe a physical object in