Pull up a stool

Hey. Welcome. Mind the mess.

This is unclemattmakes, which is a dumb name I love because it finishes a sentence. Uncle Matt makes whatever I couldn’t stop thinking about that month. Games, electronics that probably shouldn’t be plugged in, a camera pointed at my backyard, a paper lantern full of LEDs. Some of it leans on AI, some of it is a soldering iron and an idea. What it has in common is that I made it without really knowing how, and did it anyway.

I have shipped things my whole career and I am good at it when other people are involved. It is my own stuff I have been bad about showing anybody. So this site is me knocking that off.

What you will get here is the actual version. The part where it broke six times, the component I killed by plugging a battery in backwards, the week I spent debugging something that was, in the end, one wire. I leave the mistakes in, mostly because they are the part I learned something from, and nobody else seems to post them.

If you have ever wanted to make something and figured you weren’t trained enough for it: I hadn’t done any of this either. It looks like rocket science and magic, and it isn’t. The worst you can do is wreck a component that costs a dollar. Every attempt is a practice session. It is fine to go slow, measure as you go, ask your AI buddy a hundred questions, and watch people on YouTube who know more than you do. That is genuinely the whole method.

New post about once a week. Pull up a stool.