Math Keeps Showing Up Whether I Like It or Not
In school, I was the kid asking “when will I ever use this?” about quadratic equations. Turns out the answer is “every time you build literally anything.”
Want to calculate what resistor to use with an LED? Ohm’s law. Want to tune a synth oscillator to a specific note? Logarithms. Want to figure out if a gear ratio will give you enough torque? Ratios and proportions. Want to aim a projectile in a game? Trigonometry. Want to train a neural net? Linear algebra and calculus.
Why I Love Computers That Are Worse in Every Way
My daily driver has 32GB of RAM and a processor that can run a billion operations per second. My favorite computer to tinker with has 64KB of RAM and runs BASIC. It’s worse in every measurable way, and I love it.
Here’s why: when you have 64KB, every byte matters. There are no layers of abstraction hiding what’s actually happening. No operating system doing a hundred things in the background. No framework of a framework of a framework. It’s just you, the hardware, and whatever you can fit in memory. You type something, and the machine does it. You can understand the entire thing, top to bottom. When’s the last time you could say that about any modern computer?
Designing Games Is Harder Than Playing Them
I’ve played games my whole life and thought I understood them. Then I tried to make one — a simple card game, nothing digital, just index cards and rules scribbled on a napkin — and immediately learned how wrong I was.
Games feel obvious when you’re playing them. The rules fade into the background and you just play. But from the designer’s side, every tiny rule is a decision. Does the player draw one card or two? Can they play on someone else’s turn? What happens when the deck runs out? Each answer creates a different game, and most of those games are bad.
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.
