Christian Schaller bought a film scanner to digitize family negatives, then discovered its changed chipset lacked the Linux support he expected.

The breakthrough was giving Claude a working reference: run the Windows driver in a virtual machine, capture the real USB traffic, and compare it with Linux. His account describes usable scans and later improvements to a laptop camera.

He released hw-harness to generalize the approach. It is a starting point based on the bespoke tools he used; hardware testing still decides whether a proposed fix works. He also discovered that upstream scanner support had arrived while his project was paused.

Tools and documentation