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…
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 —…
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.…
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…
Here is an awesome story from England involving my Fibonacci Clock project. A few days ago I received a message from Mr. Elliot Malkin, a mathematics teacher at Churchill Academy Sixth Form in Bristol UK . He decided to offer his 13 years old students some questions regarding the clock. They had to watch the videos, read about it on Kickstarter and then pick one of the proposed questions: He…
I just finished building a CNC kit from Shapeoko and started cutting stuff. I needed a simple project that would be a bit more challenging than engraving my name on a piece of scrap wood. I decided to give a try to the Wobbly Circle presented by Matt Parker on the Numberphile Youtube channel. In this video, Matt Parker explains the mathematics required to assemble two disks perpendicular one to…
Last Christmas I built a Quiz Buzzer System for my mother. She is a big fan of television quizzes and love to organize some with her friends and family. The particularity of this project is that you can choose your team buzzer sound from a list of more than 30 digital sounds. The system is composed of a main console, 8 buttons, a power supply and a set of telephone cables. The core of the console,…