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The AI helped me build a Linux driver for my family film negatives

After his mother died he inherited a box of family film negatives and bought a Plustek 8200i scanner, then found its new chip had no Linux support. The AI helped him capture the Windows driver traffic and build a working SANE driver. Within a few hours he had his first good scan, and days later a near perfect driver with infrared dust removal.

How it works

  1. Sets up a Windows virtual machine with the real scanner passed through, following another user's write up
  2. USB traffic is captured on the Linux host
  3. The AI compares the working Windows trace with his driver and lists the differences
  4. A working scan lands within hours and a near perfect driver follows days later

Why it’s worth knowing

Writing a driver for undocumented hardware takes weeks of staring at hex dumps. The AI read thousands of lines of USB capture, spotted the repeating patterns and wrote the tests, and he had a working scan the same day.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on blogs.gnome.org. See the original ↗

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