Part three of a series on designing an Arduino Giga R1 level-shifter shield with Claude Code and open-source EDA tools. Covers the v0.4 respin: what Claude Code actually helped with, what it didn't, and what six hours of Freerouting clearance debugging revealed about the limits of LLM-assisted hardware design.
A subtle pin numbering convention mismatch in a Python-generated PCB turned a working design into a board where every signal on the dual-row headers was at the wrong physical position. How we found it, why it passed every automated check, and what the fix looks like.
A Z80 DIP-40 weighs 5.7 grams. Run Zork on it, or run Zork in a browser emulator. The bytes execute the same way. One of these is a thing in Heidegger's specific sense. The other isn't. This essay works out what's different, why the home lab and retro computing communities feel it, and why cloud abstraction is designed to erase the gathering.
Part two of the dual Z80 RetroShield series. The boards came back from PCBWay, got assembled, and nothing worked. Every address and data bus line was shorted to ground. This post covers the diagnostic process, the root cause (incomplete ground plane clearances in pcb-rnd's Gerber export), and the design fix.
Lattice is a programming language I designed. It does not exist in any LLM's training data. Claude writes it fluently, including a 5,000-line self-hosted compiler. This article examines why, what works, what breaks, and what it tells us about how language models understand programming languages they've never seen.
Running a 27B reasoning model distilled from Claude 4.6 Opus on an AMD Strix Halo APU. The model exposes its chain-of-thought via think tags, runs locally at 10 tokens per second in 4-bit quantization, and reveals both the promise and the limits of reasoning distillation from frontier models.
