Using AI to reverse engineer hardware

A developer used Claude AI to reverse engineer and create Linux drivers for unsupported hardware, including a photo scanner and laptop camera, by setting up a Windows virtual machine to capture USB traffic and analyze it. The AI-assisted approach dramatically accelerated what traditionally takes weeks of manual work, allowing the developer to create functional drivers in hours and subsequently release a generic harness to help others do the same. This demonstrates how AI excels at tedious but conceptually straightforward tasks like analyzing hex dumps and testing hypotheses about undocumented hardware registers.