The 3-Second Brick (And How an AI Saved My Evening)

During the development of my Sourdough sensor project, I managed to flash some bad firmware to my devboard.

The code didn’t crash, but it went into a deep sleep after just three seconds. Because of that, the serial port wouldn’t stay active long enough for me to flash a newer firmware version.

It wasn’t a fatal issue, but it was going to be a hassle to fix—and not what I wanted to deal with during an evening hobby session. So, I just picked up another Wemos D1 mini I had lying around, flashed it, and moved on.

Fast forward to today.

I got back to the project because I needed a second devboard to test my home-brewed OTA system.

I remembered the semi-bricked board and, without expecting much, asked an LLM to write a quick script to watch the specific /dev/... port and attempt to flash a basic Arduino LED blink code the moment the board responded.

It worked on the second attempt. I didn’t even have to adjust the prompting, check the firmware code, or look up flasher arguments.

By the time I finished typing this post, it had also completed flashing the actual OTA firmware I wanted to test.

What a time to live in—both good and scary.

27 June 2026 Add Comment

Some projects from the past months

In this time weeks feel like months in terms of tech-related news and the new technologies.

I have been fiddling a lot with AI-driven development at work, namely using Cursor and claude all the time. Instead I started code-reviewing even more than ever – not only the code of my human teammates, but not also the code produced by AI.

Everything moves so fast that I just wanted to note a few thing. I’m pretty sure even few months from now it would feel “ugh, so much May 2026”, but still it’s important for me.

In no particular order:

Sourdough IoT sensor

I managed to build and run a sourdough IoT sensor. Okay, this have been in the works for quite a long time (at least since last summer), but I’ve got to admit using LLM sped up iterations unbelievably. Troubleshooting unknown issues now takes minutes – instead of going a long cycle the forum and waiting for a person respond. Bad news for forums, for sure, on the other hand there should be some real communication and sharing happening now instead of newbies asking the same questions over and over again. Was especially surprising and valuable to find it out in the Arduino context.

So what I built? A system is of 4 main components – IoT sensor, IoT message broker, the web-server storing the reading into a database and a mobile application sending push-notifications on important events (like sourdough starting to fall down).

I’m pretty happy with the sensor – based on ESP8266 (Wemos D1 mini) it fulfils the requirements of being ultra-low power (by going into deep sleep between transmissions, which are done using ESP-NOW), uses time-of-light for the measurements, rechargeable, transmits data through the fridge door and can sit on a battery for weeks (estimated).

(more…)

1 June 2026 Add Comment

AI game experiment (init)

Inspired by some things that my direct manager is doing with ChatGPT I tried to do another experiment.

This time I asked it to develop a sea ships game, with a network connection where multiple players can take turns.

Overall for this version I spent about two hours and several iterations to create front-end and backend.

Obviously, this is just a prototype, but overall it’s a start!

14 August 2024 Add Comment