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- Hacker News
- https://printervention.app (also co-written by Claude) may be useful in similar cases.by gmac
- I was able to get Claude to write an embedded Rust driver for an unsupported epaper screen in a couple of hours by providing it with the spec and some existing C drivers. It’s still not as fast as the arduino versions, but it let me make progress in a project that I’d been stuck on for months.
Reverse engineering seems like an AI sweet spot.
- In general I've been really happy to leverage Claude to quickly build software that only I use. It fits my needs exactly and I don't have to worry so much about how others will use it, if it is generalized enough, if the documentation is up to date, etc.
It's kind of nice.
by ramijames - Thanks for sharing :)
linking this here for those who don't wanna read the threads https://github.com/Kuberwastaken/hp-laser-1008a-macos
genuinely very interesting case to learn from for me because this was one of the HP branded Samsung printers which doesn't have native non-windows support !
- I tried to get Copilot to port the Linux drivers for my HP CP1025 to macOS, but it failed. Even modern Linux can’t print to it any more, I had to put an older distribution on a RasPi and now I’m printing at reduced quality.
It was crazy how the LLM held on to outdated information. It suggested so many things that might have worked on an older macOS but very obviously wouldn’t nowadays. It also tried to port from Linux for a while until it eventually discovered that cups on Linux didn’t support that printer either.
by swerner - Obscure? Sir, the printer is sold on Amazon. It is not obscure.by 1970-01-01
- I've seen this explained as LLMs being well - language models. Driver binaries are just a language understood by the machine executing the binary. While its basically unreadable for normal humans, it is just another language for LLMs & they are able to operate on it, changing the result & translating it (e.g. correlating with specs, logs, docs, etc.).
Given the positive results from what I've heard, this might be actually one are where LLMs could prove useful for once.
by m4rtink - I'm pretty sure I've used that exact printer on Linux without issue. Long ago, deep into the pre ai era.
Edit: no, I was thinking of the older p1008.
by asveikau - from the screenshot, i believe it took the linux driver and transcribed to the mac kernel.by aniceperson
- by JKCalhoun
- I have actual obscure RGB corner floor lamps with BLE in my office. I had Claude find the BLE protocol and use my Office 365 calendar feed to change their color to red when I'm in a scheduled meeting (event), and back to warm white when the meeting is over, so co-workers know I'm busy without doing "are you busy" sign language through my window. The script is polled every 60 seconds. Tinkering with stuff like this is a lot of fun.by pwython
- I just fix a long standing bug on my Linux desktop I have had for years and kept meaning to look into to see if I could fix. The issue was I have a sound blaster katana sound bar and it works okay but the volume on the device is not in sync with the volume in Linux. In Windows it stays in sync. I can work around it by each time I boot, I press the button to go to max volume, then lower the volume in Linux to the desired level but it's been an annoyance. I described the issue to codex and within a few minutes it had it fixed by updating the pipewire device profiles to use the volume control it exposes. Honestly amazing since I doubt I would have ever gotten around to figuring this out since I didn't even know what level of the stack the issue was, I thought maybe it was in the driver itself.by seiferteric
- You just gave me an idea to fix lots of little annoyances in my old Linux laptop that had been retired because of those! Maybe the old little laptop can still give me a few more years of fun.by brabel
- Freedom -- that's what it is. There are now more and more cases where we don't have to ask for permission.
Unfortunately, as I look around, I see most of the hardware vendors around me as gatekeepers. They prevent me from writing custom code in various ways. Apple restricts access to NFC or their UWB positioning, Supernote Manta does not let me access a bluetooth microphone, the list goes on. Denon at least has an API in their amps/receivers: buggy, but it's there.
by jwr - I think, from a business perspective, they just don't see us at all. We're such a small, inconsequential part of the market that building open, free hardware with code that we can update, change, or alter for our needs is just.. not part of their business use-case.by ramijames
- On a similar experience, I use moonlight on my Android TV to stream video games from my computer in another room. I use my own fork from an unmerged PR which enables me to use an Xbox One Wireless adapter so I can play with my pad wirelessly. These pads have a 3.5mm jack on them which on Windows and Linux enables me to route audio from the game to headphones connected to the pad. Moonlight and the xow driver it bundled, was nowhere near being able to provide this as a feature.
After about 5 hours, feeding it the GIP spec, an export of sniffed usb traffic from Windows, prior art (xone driver for linux), and giving Claude connectivity to my Shield via adb, I had it working. This continuously blows my mind that I dont have to beg a developer on Github to do it for me.
Claude could do it for me for $20.
by nullify88 - > spec, an export of sniffed usb traffic from Windows, prior art
I used to feel proud of the fact I reverse engineered some of my laptop's features using stuff just like this. I suppose that's over.
- I have another controller-related anecdote.
I have a Razer Wolverine Xbox controller that has extra back paddle buttons. The controller doesn't expose the paddles directly to PC's over USB. You have to use button remapping on the controller to map them to 'real' Xbox buttons for the PC to see them. But I wanted to use the back paddle buttons on Steam as separate controls.
So I downloaded the latest firmware update off the internet (because what device doesn't have firmware updates these days), installed Ghidra and an MCP server for it, and told Sol to look for how I can expose these extra buttons to a PC host. Maybe we could write a firmware patch?
Turns out the controller already has a special mode to expose those buttons, possibly as a hardware test. But it was enough to write a Linux driver to put the controller into that mode, and a little bit of extra driver code to map the paddles to a Linux controller button, and voila. Paddles working in Steam.
And it only took a few hours to do, too. I spent more time making an open source repository out of the concept than I spent making it work.
by netruk44