AI Feels Like Magic (Until You Look Inside)
Everyone talks about AI like it’s this unknowable alien intelligence. But then you open a tutorial, build a tiny neural network that recognizes handwritten numbers, and realize: it’s just math. A lot of math, layered in a specific way, but still math. Multiplications and additions, run millions of times until the outputs start matching reality.
That demystification is what hooked me. The gap between “AI is magic” and “oh, it’s multiplying matrices and adjusting weights” is one afternoon of focused reading. The gap between that and actually building something useful, that’s the longer journey, and that’s what I’m here to document.
I've Been Collecting Data Without Realizing It
I keep a spreadsheet of every electronics component I’ve bought. Date, price, what project it was for, whether the project actually worked. I started it to track spending, but the other day I realized: that’s a dataset. A messy, human one, but a dataset.
Same with my synth patches — I’ve got notes on what settings produced what sound. Same with game scores, reading lists, even which soldering tips I reach for most. All of it is data I already have, just sitting there being boring in a spreadsheet.
I Want to Build a Robot
I’ve wanted to build a robot since I was ten years old watching battlebots after school. Not a fancy one — just something with wheels that can avoid running into walls. Maybe it blinks when you get close to it. That’s the bar.
The thing is, I never started because it always felt like you needed an engineering degree and a workshop full of expensive tools. But then I spent $12 on an Arduino and realized you can make a motor spin with three lines of code. The gap between “I have no idea how robots work” and “I made a thing that moves” is smaller than I thought.
Hello World — First Post on imadestuff
Welcome to imadestuff
This is the first post on imadestuff.com — a place where I document the things I build, break, and learn along the way.
To kick things off, here’s the classic “Hello World” of electronics: a blinking LED on an Arduino.
The Circuit
Wire up an LED to pin 13 on your Arduino Uno with a 220Ω resistor. That’s it. Simple as it gets.
About
Hi, I’m the person behind this site
I make stuff. Circuits, code, half-finished projects, the occasional small fire. This is where I write about it.
The short version
I’ve got a math degree from The Evergreen State College — a school with no grades, where they write you a paragraph instead of a GPA, which tells you something about how I like to learn. Then I spent years trying to break into actuarial science. Passed the P/1 exam. Passed FM/2. Kept knocking on a door that never quite opened.