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Hacker Public Radio
HPR4689: Cheap Yellow Display Project Part 8: Writing the code
1 seconds Posted Jul 23, 2026 at 12:00 am.
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Hello, again. This is Trey.
Welcome to part 8 in my Cheap Yellow Display (CYD) Project series.
If you wish to catch up on earlier episodes, you can find them on my
HPR profile page
https://www.hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents/0394.html
It is hard to believe that I started this project and the HPR series to document it more than a year ago. Time flies. Life happens. I spent the last 8 months so focused on work related activities that I had to set the project aside. And once I set it aside, it was difficult to get back to again. The one time I tried, I found that my son's old Windows laptop, which I had commandeered to use for the project, was once and truly dead.
We live in a different world now than we did when I began this project. Today, everything is about AI – how it is changing our world, increasing efficiencies, and even displacing certain types of jobs. "Vibe coding" is transforming the way we make software, and now everyone is a developer.
Within my organization, we are all being strongly encouraged to learn more about AI and apply it in our daily work. We are blessed to have access to a wide range of training and to powerful tools which support the process. Several colleagues within my organization and outside my organization have recommended Claude Code -- for development, for organization, for brainstorming, and for much more. My role is not that of a developer, and I have had no need for Claude Code at work. There are plenty of other tools for me to use.
But at home, I thought... I could install Claude Code at home to experiment with and to learn. And then it hit me. I wonder if I could use Claude Code to help me with my stalled CYD project.
"Hello, my name is Trey, and I am a fraud."
OK. I don't think I am a fraud, but having never used such a powerful tool to help me code, I feel a little bit like a fraud, with Claude doing the work for me. Let's talk through what we did.
As I mentioned, I was unable to use the laptop on which I created the original GUI code. But no worries, because It was all on GitHub, right?
So, I began by trying to install Claude Code on one of my Ubuntu machines. That failed miserably, and all the instructions I found online recommended running it on Windows. So I transitioned to installing Claude Code on a freshly built Windows 10 system using some old hardware which will not support Windows 11. Surprisingly, It seems that Claude wants to run within Ubuntu on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).
Once I went through all the hoops for installing and setting up my basic subscription, I got to work. I created a new directory to use for all my project files, and another one for Claude to write all its output files to.
Everything I have read and heard about using Claude Code for a project like this recommended beginning by using Claude to create the project plan. So my first prompt was as follows:
"I am building a project using an ESP32 cheap yellow display. The final goal is to have a device with a graphical user interface which will allow me store several text messages, each assigned to their own specific button. Then, when one of the buttons is pressed, the message will be converted into morse code, and the message will