Super useful. I have a no-name USB microscope that only supported iOS and Android (just look up "USB microscope" on Amazon, there's like 500 versions of the same device). The device doesn't work like a normal webcam so you can't just plug it into a PC, and their mobile software is shady and low quality so I would only ever connected it to a GrapheneOS phone where I could prohibit their app having network access entirely because it gave me a bad feeling. As a result I underused the device since it was annoying.
I recently took their .apk and dropped it in a new empty project folder, instructed Claude Code w/ GLM 5 to reverse engineer the app, assess it for security and privacy concerns out of curiosity and then to probe the USB device to figure out why it doesn't work like a normal UVC webcam. After the investigation and planning I then instructed it to write a new app to use it on my desktop. I pretty much yolo'd it from that point and let AI drive the bus (I did the visual checks of the video stream in the app to provide feedback... while I watching a movie). I wound up with a working Electron app using libusb two hours later. With a Typescipt/C POC in hand as reference in another hour I had functioning Rust + egui application. Visually, both apps are rough around the edges but have complete functional parity with the mobile apps. It took 68 million tokens.
Comments
Super useful. I have a no-name USB microscope that only supported iOS and Android (just look up "USB microscope" on Amazon, there's like 500 versions of the same device). The device doesn't work like a normal webcam so you can't just plug it into a PC, and their mobile software is shady and low quality so I would only ever connected it to a GrapheneOS phone where I could prohibit their app having network access entirely because it gave me a bad feeling. As a result I underused the device since it was annoying.
I recently took their .apk and dropped it in a new empty project folder, instructed Claude Code w/ GLM 5 to reverse engineer the app, assess it for security and privacy concerns out of curiosity and then to probe the USB device to figure out why it doesn't work like a normal UVC webcam. After the investigation and planning I then instructed it to write a new app to use it on my desktop. I pretty much yolo'd it from that point and let AI drive the bus (I did the visual checks of the video stream in the app to provide feedback... while I watching a movie). I wound up with a working Electron app using libusb two hours later. With a Typescipt/C POC in hand as reference in another hour I had functioning Rust + egui application. Visually, both apps are rough around the edges but have complete functional parity with the mobile apps. It took 68 million tokens.