Developer uses Claude to reverse engineer Linux drivers for a film scanner and laptop camera
Overview
ErenayDev says he used Claude to build Linux drivers for a Plustek OpticFilm 8200i film scanner and a MIPI camera in a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14.
The method records the Windows driver running in a KVM virtual machine, captures the USB traffic on the Linux host with usbmon, and compares the two traces to infer the device protocol.
The author reports a working SANE backend for the scanner, a GNOME negative-scanning app called Negative Vibes, and kernel and libcamera patches for the camera. He also publishes hw-harness, a generic tool for this capture-and-diff workflow.
Written by AI from the articles below · updated Oct 16, 1:15 AM ET
Check the sources:
Article timeline
The articles in this story. Times are ET.
- Hacker News · AI (150+ points)BlogUsing AI to reverse engineer hardware drivers for a film scanner and laptop camera
AIErenayDev describes using Claude to build Linux drivers for a Plustek OpticFilm 8200i negative scanner and a MIPI camera on a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14. The method records a reference session of the Windows driver in a KVM virtual machine, captures USB traffic on the Linux host with usbmon, and diffs the two traces. The author reports a working SANE backend, a GNOME negative-scanning app called Negative Vibes, and kernel and libcamera patches for the camera, and publishes the generic hw-harness tool.
Heat trend
Not enough continuous observations to show a trend yet.