Developer uses Claude Code to reverse engineer a scanner and a laptop MIPI camera driver from Windows USB traces

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Developer uses Claude Code to reverse engineer a scanner and a laptop MIPI camera driver from Windows USB traces

The author used Claude Code to write a SANE backend for the Plustek OpticFilm 8200i, whose Genesys GL128 chipset (USB 07b3:1825) had no Linux support
The method ran the vendor's Windows driver in a KVM virtual machine with the device passed through, then captured the USB traffic on the Linux host with usbmon and diffed it against the Linux driver's traces
The same workflow produced kernel and libcamera patches for a laptop's MIPI camera in one day, according to the author
The author released hw-harness, a generic version of the scripts, but says the projects were built with bespoke code before that tool existed
The scanner driver arrived just after SANE had already gained upstream support for the same scanner, so the work duplicated an existing commit

Hacker News opinions

How timely, I just pointed Claude at my work laptop's MIPI driver and told it to figure it out.

I did something similar with an old Onn-x5 mp3 player. Got custom firmware running just by connecting it to my computer and poking around.

Older hardware is simpler and has way more documentation out there. Going after Apple or Nvidia is harder, and the real barrier is first-party support, not the technical part. Nobody bothers with a driver for one watch version that gets obsoleted by the next.

Someone please do smart TVs. Removing ads and residential proxy botnets from millions of devices would be worth it.

Encrypted hardware and signed software make TVs a pain. LG is fairly easy to root, Samsung is way harder.

Running a small pro audio company, I had a rough week after seeing Claude decompile competitor firmware in a few hours. If anyone can copy the algorithms that fast, I guess the physical design, knobs and usability have to carry the product.

One fix is encrypting firmware with keys kept in tamper resistant hardware. It makes decompiling much harder but updates become a pain.

I guess patents are going to matter more now.