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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Next try writing a printer driver for your iPhone.

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

"HP" "obscure"

Cool nonetheless.