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.
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 off the internet (because what device doesn't have firmware updates these days), installed Ghidra and an MCP server for it, and told Sol to look for how I can expose these extra buttons to a PC host. Maybe we could write a firmware patch?
Turns out the controller already has a special mode to expose those buttons, possibly as a hardware test. But it was enough to write a Linux driver to put the controller into that mode, and a little bit of extra driver code to map the paddles to a Linux controller button, and voila. Paddles working in Steam.
And it only took a few hours to do, too. I spent more time making an open source repository out of the concept than I spent making it work.
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.
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.
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.
sliiiiightly obscure in that it seems to use the ULD drivers (or a variant of); HP's "unified linux driver" that talks Samsung's printing language. it's weird.
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.
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 off the internet (because what device doesn't have firmware updates these days), installed Ghidra and an MCP server for it, and told Sol to look for how I can expose these extra buttons to a PC host. Maybe we could write a firmware patch?
Turns out the controller already has a special mode to expose those buttons, possibly as a hardware test. But it was enough to write a Linux driver to put the controller into that mode, and a little bit of extra driver code to map the paddles to a Linux controller button, and voila. Paddles working in Steam.
And it only took a few hours to do, too. I spent more time making an open source repository out of the concept than I spent making it work.
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.
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://xcancel.com/kuberwastaken/status/2089377982536388964
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.
Obscure? Sir, the printer is sold on Amazon. It is not obscure.
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.
if you shoehorn it into CUPS you might as well just expose CUPS on your home network and use AirPrint via IPD at that point ;)
"HP" "obscure"
Cool nonetheless.
sliiiiightly obscure in that it seems to use the ULD drivers (or a variant of); HP's "unified linux driver" that talks Samsung's printing language. it's weird.
https://wiki.debian.org/CUPSPrintQueues#hpuld
claude seems to have realized it was one of the samsung printer variants and just shoehorned in a samsung MFP driver to the OS.