This is very very cool. But now it has me worried about device driver coders being out of work. Why pay for months of low level coding. Grumble.
Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
41–50 of 241 posts
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 of…
What's the repository link? I think it would be fascinating to have a corpus of "hacked" solutions like this. Can't tell you how many times a couch co-op game night got sabotaged by some piece of hardware failing to communicate with another.
The creatively-named https://github.com/Netruk44/wolverine-v3-pro-linux
The "linux" support is pretty narrow (because I made this for myself). It's restricted to SteamOS. But I'm sure it could be ported easily, the repository contains documentation about the important parts from reverse engineering the firmware.
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#43I wasn’t so lucky with my attempt for a Windows 11 driver for an old emaguc MT4 MIDI interface. It works on Macs, but no longer on PCs.
Claude worked for a while and then spun itself into a loop of making a mistake, correcting it, then making it again.
That was 9 months ago so perhaps I should try again.
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#44Performing Stallman's stunt. Cool story bro, but unverified. Guy is marketing AI on X with an "attention is all you need" picture etc.
I'm all for being skeptical, but it doesn't take too much digging to find the proof (it's in the original tweet thread): https://github.com/Kuberwastaken/hp-laser-1008a-macos
That runs the original HP driver in a Docker container, using two minuscule Python scripts.
Bro is marketing it as a (native) MacOS driver.
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#45On 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 bundl…
> 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 suppose you can still be proud you did it during pre AI times and the gained knowledge by doing it yourself.
I don't expect Claude and other hosted AI's to be available so freely and thats when it'll get harder for me to do stuff like that.
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#46Next try writing a printer driver for your iPhone.
As kotaKat said, it's possible to use CUPS to talk to non-AirPrint printers with AirPrint.
This is what I do with two 4" USB-only thermal printers. They are connected to a Raspberry Pi running CUPS, so I can print labels to them from within my home network. I never need to print labels from my phone, but do sometimes need to print photos to one of the printers. Avahi on the Pi enables AirPrint, and iOS sees that and lets me do so.
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#47I'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.
from the screenshot, i believe it took the linux driver and transcribed to the mac kernel.
But the dominant print daemon on Linux, CUPS, was literally acquired by apple to form the basis of their printer architecture.
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#48The slightly sad part is that most of these LLM-assisted fixes probably never make it upstream, so life for non-technical Linux users does not improve...
If you do AI fixes, for the greater good, at least publish them (or even better, try to submit upstream, although expect to be ignored if the upstream does not like slop...)! :)
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
#49If I understand correctly, it just wraps an existing Linux driver in a container. You can hardly call that writing a driver.
Re: Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
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