Red Hat engineer used Claude to write Linux drivers for scanner and ThinkPad camera

Christian Schaller, a Red Hat engineering director, got his Plustek OpticFilm 8200i scanner working on Linux by having Claude Code compare USB traffic against the manufacturer's Windows driver. He released the approach as an MIT-licensed open-source project called hw-harness and also fixed the camera on his ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14.

• The 8200i uses a Genesys GL128 chip instead of the SANE-supported GL845
• Schaller's driver scans a frame in 34.6 s versus 54.4 s for the upstream version
• Camera patches raised frame brightness from 31.1 to 90.9
• hw-harness is published on GitHub under the MIT license