Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows

leecommamichael

"HP" "obscure" Cool nonetheless.

amelius

Next try writing a printer driver for your iPhone.

jwr

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.

nullify88

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.

qarl2

Yeah. I have a Stratasys J55 3D printer. Industrial and closed. And now I can print to it via my Mac. It's a fun time to be alive.

foodandart

Nice! I've an ML-1710 that is sitting in a closet that I'd love to get properly working on macOS. I've tried with SPLIX and followed the directions to the letter to install the drivers, but it just doesn't stick, in that I can only manage to get one print queue through the device for each time the computer is turned on. I gave up and repaired a junked Epson and put that into service, but I really prefer the formar printer for making line tenplates.

JKCalhoun

https://xcancel.com/kuberwastaken/status/2089377982536388964

1970-01-01

Obscure? Sir, the printer is sold on Amazon. It is not obscure.

jorl17

Recently, I had bizarre situation: I wanted to play a game from my childhood on Windows 11, but, without changing two booleans in the settings, I could not reliably move my in-game cursor. The catch is that to change those values in the settings, I needed to move my in-game cursor. So I was stuck. After digging around, I found a file that looked like it could be the settings file, but it was not plaintext. Naturally, I told Claude all the options I knew existed in the settings and told it what I needed it to change. After about 10 minutes poking around my system and the file, it correctly identified the bits (not bytes!) that corresponded to the two settings, and flipped them on. It. Just. Worked! (Well, then I found out I actually needed to do quite a lot more than flipping those bits, but I still found it worth sharing). I have many more experiences similar to these. LLMs are an amazing superpower.

joshmarinacci

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.

2dahg

Performing Stallman's stunt. Cool story bro, but unverified. Guy is marketing AI on X with an "attention is all you need" picture etc.

cushychicken

I love seeing things like this. Is it not kind of a magical thing to see AI make stuff like this reality? This was always possible but not worth a human’s time. Now this guy has a working printer again. That’s pretty doggone neat.

finchisko

I would like to see driver for my samsung printer. Drivers for mac was only for some very old macOS

gmac

https://printervention.app (also co-written by Claude) may be useful in similar cases.

Razengan

If you see articles from old computing magazines or TV shows in the 1980s (there’s some good rabbit holes on YouTube), the prevailing optimism was that everyone would have a computer in their kitchen and write their own programs for whatever they need to do.. But programming languages and operating system fragmentation didn’t let that really take off Maybe now that original promise of personal computers can be realized :) Imagine instead of going to the App Store, just telling ChatGPT etc to make a custom app and run it right away on your phone

kuberwastaken

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 !

swerner

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.

pwython

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.

m4rtink

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.

seiferteric

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.