Feels like a lot of current hacks are about how to overcome the limit of a totally optional software prison rather than be creative with what can be done with the unexpected combination of software and hardware.
That's not actually progress but a regression due to walled gardens.
Thanks for opening up ... but also why even get to such a bad spot in the first place?
It's not that hard to write a webcam kernel extension now, apple iirc provide a sample (but I think I based mine off someone else's implementation for passing buffers around to the sink)
Here's mine, turning a kinect1's depth stream into a camera device
I’ve always thought it would be fun to get three old monochrome cameras, then use and red green or blue filter on each one and stack the images in software.
Get a full color image with crazy artifacts and a vintage look.
> I clipped it onto my LEGO RC car base to make a spy car, and drove it around as far as the USB cable reached from my little Sony VAIO laptop.
Neat. A few years ago I made a wireless version with more modern LEGO car and RPi camera. Great fun to drive around until the latency gets you stuck and you have to pry it from behind the sofa :)
Not the first time I've seen this, but this one really hit me for some reason.
I genuinely don't understand why someone would want to work like this. There's obviously no practical use in having a 26-year-old novelty webcam work at 5fps. What made it interesting was the process of figuring it out and writing it up, which others could then read and learn from.
Instead it looks like this 'author' just watched an LLM code it and write up for them, and published it unedited. What is anyone getting out of this completely soulless process?
I think it's a good thing, because using a LLM like this is the first time most people have used a computer as a computer. It's the first time people have actually made something via an intermediary that executes on their computer as opposed to installing an application built by a developer.
In so many ways, LLMs are the computer revolution realized. A lot of people just don't know how to write a driver, what it is, or how to investigate this. I certainly wouldn't. Nor would a lot of trained mathematicians and scientists. It's not immediately obvious how you'd tackle a problem like this to them and it creates this feeling of learned helplessness.
Now, thanks to the age of magical machines. This person wanted a piece of their chidlhood back and voila, they did and now can share it with the world if they so choose.
I do think that people should get better about attributing the machines though. I wouldn't be comfortable claiming ownership or authorship over code written by a machine entity so I do my best to mark machine-authored code as machine authored code.
An example, I know about snell's law and a little bit about optics. Nothing beyond the standard undergrad stuff (right now). I've tried Apple's liquid glass and I didn't like it. I think a part of it is that it's not translating the physics well and most implementations fall flat. It sort of either exaggerates or doesn't. Two nights ago as a passing fancy, I decided to work with codex and gpt to make it into a library that I can use for a larger research project. https://github.com/areoformed/daphnis-glasshttps://as-we-may-think.halfdrop.workers.dev/examples/as-we-...
It made me happy to watch a machine go off and do checks + validate the equations I gave it and to watch it write,
> The numerical checks agree with the central magnification limit and your rainbow equation. An important consequence for the UI is already clear: the distance between the drop and the page can change both magnification and orientation. “Refraction strength” alone won’t describe the effect.
But as I did nothing more than write up a bit of insight, prod the machine, and make a detail request, I made sure that the machine entity got attribution for it, "Developed by Codex in collaboration with areoform. MIT licensed."
I wouldn't have been capable of turning that insight / thought process into code before, but thanks to the machines now I can, and I can even share it under a permissive license so that other people can find some small joy in it?
Is it soulless? Perhaps. But consider this, I found joy in turning a passing thought about physics into something that tangible that I can use for myself. That wouldn't have been a possibility for me in November 2020.
While I'd never let an LLM write a blog post for me, I do "get" having the LLM write the code for a project like this, especially for automated debug cycles.
It's the kind of thing I'd do, and enjoy doing, even as someone who'd previously do it by hand. It's fun to make something work, even if Claude is doing the heavy lifting.
But I find myself in a weird spot now. I've completed a ton of cool projects recently, and I want to write them up in a compelling way but... "Claude did x, then Claude did y" does not make an interesting writeup, and I don't want to pretend it was all me.
I think the effort of understanding a project to the extent that I can write about it well is almost equivalent to just doing it myself in the first place.
I put a lot of work into this. It decidedly was not one-shot, and it would definitely be way more bloated and buggier without my work - but my work was obviously way less than it would’ve been a couple of years ago, and most of it was prompting (“Please time ‘x’ and try ‘y’ method for improving efficiency”; “Could we use ‘z’ data structure here?” etc). At the same I probably wouldn’t have even done it a couple of years ago, and if I had it certainly wouldn’t have been as well tested or arcade-accurate.
How much is it ‘mine’? How worthwhile is it? Do I understand it as much as I think I do? The blog post is really about that - not the project.
> I think the effort of understanding a project to the extent that I can write about it well is almost equivalent to just doing it myself in the first place.
I’m not so sure this is true. At the same time, I have learned things from projects I’ve used LLMs to work on - and not just about how the LLMs work or how to use them (though I’ve learned a lot about that too).
I enjoyed reading about this project, FWIW. It’s ‘cool’ to see the hardware being used, and I liked reading the write-up and the code to learn how it worked.
> I genuinely don't understand why someone would want to work like this. There's obviously no practical use in having a 26-year-old novelty webcam work at 5fps.
So? Why does everything have to be practical? It can be fun to get something working like this, even if you use an LLM to do it.
I genuinely don't understand why you would spend time complaining about how someone else uses their free time. What are you getting out of this soulless process?
Thanks to Linux, but also thanks to OBS's virtual webcam for being signed and allowing any arbitrary applications to push frames to it?
That kind of makes Apple's signed camera extension requirement a bit useless, since any application that wants to be a camera, or wants to support some odball USB camera, could just ship the OBS one?
Smells a bit insecure to me, but also helpful as a tinkerer...
> That kind of makes Apple's signed camera extension requirement a bit useless
It also makes me question of how much in good faith that requirement was made in the first place, or if it's just there to make more money for Apple & Friends.
Fair point. The OBS camera extension exposes a sink stream, so any local process can feed it frames. That's how obscam works without its own signed extension. I think the bigger protection is the system extension approval and the camera permission prompts in each app, but it does make the signing requirement feel thin. Without it, I couldn't have shipped this with a free developer account.
It came with the LEGO & Steven Spielberg MovieMaker set, so stop motion was the idea. As a kid, I clipped it onto a LEGO RC car and drove it round the house as a spy car, as far as the USB cable reached. :)
Feels like a lot of current hacks are about how to overcome the limit of a totally optional software prison rather than be creative with what can be done with the unexpected combination of software and hardware.
That's not actually progress but a regression due to walled gardens.
Thanks for opening up ... but also why even get to such a bad spot in the first place?
It's not that hard to write a webcam kernel extension now, apple iirc provide a sample (but I think I based mine off someone else's implementation for passing buffers around to the sink)
Here's mine, turning a kinect1's depth stream into a camera device
https://github.com/NewChromantics/PopKinectMacWebcam
So in this case, the hack is unneccessary, there is no limit of which you speak
The article says “On macOS, a new camera has to be a signed camera extension, and a free Apple developer account can't sign one.“
It's a 20 year old camera. If you want to use 20 year old hardware use Linux not macos
Incredible happenstance! I just bought the same exact cam + a few other “vintage” USB ones on ebay to film a rave happening at my place in a month.
I’m excited to try the IBM webcams, and am very tempted by an original connectix (which doesn’t have usb)
Do folks here have other recommendations for unique usb cameras?
A flir (heat) cam is tempting ofc. Anything else that’s unique and forgotten?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EyeToy
Has it been 20 years???
I’ve always thought it would be fun to get three old monochrome cameras, then use and red green or blue filter on each one and stack the images in software.
Get a full color image with crazy artifacts and a vintage look.
> I clipped it onto my LEGO RC car base to make a spy car, and drove it around as far as the USB cable reached from my little Sony VAIO laptop.
Neat. A few years ago I made a wireless version with more modern LEGO car and RPi camera. Great fun to drive around until the latency gets you stuck and you have to pry it from behind the sofa :)
https://www.printables.com/model/343226-lego-42099-raspberry...
Well done! It's crazy that Apple forces you to pay to sign your own software. Another reason to never buy any of their products.
A nominal fee keeps out most of the Linux users.
>LEGO & Steven Spielberg MovieMaker Set
Oh man, I wanted that Lego set so badly as a kid. Maybe I should try and pick up a secondhand Lego camera for nostalgia.
So this is how it is going to be? AI written everywhere?
> I read that driver and copied the protocol: which registers to write, in which order, to wake the sensor up and start streaming.
> legocam is GPL-2.0, like the driver it learned from.
Please write yourself.
I agree. For basically two or three short paragraphs too...
When I scroll through someone's personal blog and every single post is AI written I get that AI nausea/fatigue feeling.
> It runs at about 5 frames per second. That's the limit of USB 1.1 and the sensor clock, not the code.
Well, it makes sense that the author of the driver should write about it.
Not the first time I've seen this, but this one really hit me for some reason.
I genuinely don't understand why someone would want to work like this. There's obviously no practical use in having a 26-year-old novelty webcam work at 5fps. What made it interesting was the process of figuring it out and writing it up, which others could then read and learn from.
Instead it looks like this 'author' just watched an LLM code it and write up for them, and published it unedited. What is anyone getting out of this completely soulless process?
I think it's a good thing, because using a LLM like this is the first time most people have used a computer as a computer. It's the first time people have actually made something via an intermediary that executes on their computer as opposed to installing an application built by a developer.
In so many ways, LLMs are the computer revolution realized. A lot of people just don't know how to write a driver, what it is, or how to investigate this. I certainly wouldn't. Nor would a lot of trained mathematicians and scientists. It's not immediately obvious how you'd tackle a problem like this to them and it creates this feeling of learned helplessness.
Now, thanks to the age of magical machines. This person wanted a piece of their chidlhood back and voila, they did and now can share it with the world if they so choose.
I do think that people should get better about attributing the machines though. I wouldn't be comfortable claiming ownership or authorship over code written by a machine entity so I do my best to mark machine-authored code as machine authored code.
An example, I know about snell's law and a little bit about optics. Nothing beyond the standard undergrad stuff (right now). I've tried Apple's liquid glass and I didn't like it. I think a part of it is that it's not translating the physics well and most implementations fall flat. It sort of either exaggerates or doesn't. Two nights ago as a passing fancy, I decided to work with codex and gpt to make it into a library that I can use for a larger research project. https://github.com/areoformed/daphnis-glass https://as-we-may-think.halfdrop.workers.dev/examples/as-we-...
It made me happy to watch a machine go off and do checks + validate the equations I gave it and to watch it write,
But as I did nothing more than write up a bit of insight, prod the machine, and make a detail request, I made sure that the machine entity got attribution for it, "Developed by Codex in collaboration with areoform. MIT licensed."
I wouldn't have been capable of turning that insight / thought process into code before, but thanks to the machines now I can, and I can even share it under a permissive license so that other people can find some small joy in it?
Is it soulless? Perhaps. But consider this, I found joy in turning a passing thought about physics into something that tangible that I can use for myself. That wouldn't have been a possibility for me in November 2020.
>What is anyone getting out of this completely soulless process?
A blog post, which is content. Most bloggers are wannabe "influencers" and "thought leaders."
While I'd never let an LLM write a blog post for me, I do "get" having the LLM write the code for a project like this, especially for automated debug cycles.
It's the kind of thing I'd do, and enjoy doing, even as someone who'd previously do it by hand. It's fun to make something work, even if Claude is doing the heavy lifting.
But I find myself in a weird spot now. I've completed a ton of cool projects recently, and I want to write them up in a compelling way but... "Claude did x, then Claude did y" does not make an interesting writeup, and I don't want to pretend it was all me.
I think the effort of understanding a project to the extent that I can write about it well is almost equivalent to just doing it myself in the first place.
I’m in the same place!
An example: https://www.blog.montgomerie.net/posts/2026-11-03-sh-invader...
I put a lot of work into this. It decidedly was not one-shot, and it would definitely be way more bloated and buggier without my work - but my work was obviously way less than it would’ve been a couple of years ago, and most of it was prompting (“Please time ‘x’ and try ‘y’ method for improving efficiency”; “Could we use ‘z’ data structure here?” etc). At the same I probably wouldn’t have even done it a couple of years ago, and if I had it certainly wouldn’t have been as well tested or arcade-accurate.
How much is it ‘mine’? How worthwhile is it? Do I understand it as much as I think I do? The blog post is really about that - not the project.
> I think the effort of understanding a project to the extent that I can write about it well is almost equivalent to just doing it myself in the first place.
I’m not so sure this is true. At the same time, I have learned things from projects I’ve used LLMs to work on - and not just about how the LLMs work or how to use them (though I’ve learned a lot about that too).
I enjoyed reading about this project, FWIW. It’s ‘cool’ to see the hardware being used, and I liked reading the write-up and the code to learn how it worked.
> I genuinely don't understand why someone would want to work like this. There's obviously no practical use in having a 26-year-old novelty webcam work at 5fps.
So? Why does everything have to be practical? It can be fun to get something working like this, even if you use an LLM to do it.
I genuinely don't understand why you would spend time complaining about how someone else uses their free time. What are you getting out of this soulless process?
Thanks to Linux, but also thanks to OBS's virtual webcam for being signed and allowing any arbitrary applications to push frames to it?
That kind of makes Apple's signed camera extension requirement a bit useless, since any application that wants to be a camera, or wants to support some odball USB camera, could just ship the OBS one?
Smells a bit insecure to me, but also helpful as a tinkerer...
> That kind of makes Apple's signed camera extension requirement a bit useless
It also makes me question of how much in good faith that requirement was made in the first place, or if it's just there to make more money for Apple & Friends.
Unless you don't use OBS :P
Fair point. The OBS camera extension exposes a sink stream, so any local process can feed it frames. That's how obscam works without its own signed extension. I think the bigger protection is the system extension approval and the camera permission prompts in each app, but it does make the signing requirement feel thin. Without it, I couldn't have shipped this with a free developer account.
Why did people flag benkelly’s reply? I don’t understand.
Next project: Use Game Boy Camera as a Webcam
This has already been done:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Gameboy/comments/ikpzs0/game_boy_ca...
Nice! Can you record some video with it?
This person is still running macOS 15?
Guilty! It's an Intel MacBook Pro, and I haven't got round to upgrading it yet.
What's the typical usage of a Lego's webcam?
Stop motion animation of your little lego adventures.
It came with the LEGO & Steven Spielberg MovieMaker set, so stop motion was the idea. As a kid, I clipped it onto a LEGO RC car and drove it round the house as a spy car, as far as the USB cable reached. :)
Cool!
Oh that's awesome. I made some stop motion films as a kid, using a webcam and some freeware on Windows.
I had a bunch of play-doh, but no art skills, so it ended up being 100% blob monsters.