Wednesdays are quickly becoming “burn through my weekly tokens” day.
This Wednesday, I decided to rescue our old HL-4570CDW laser printer. The printer is a tank! It will probably outlast me, but its too old to pair with our cell phones.
The good news is that the W in HL-4570CDW stands for wireless. The bad news is that it doesn’t connect to any modern Android phones.
And my wife has been asking me for the better part of five years now to be able to print documents from her phone directly to the printer.
The printer showed up via CUPS on our home network. I told Fable what I wanted:
draft an md plan file then launch a fable agent to inspect and critique.
Claudish … Claudish … Claudish… It jibbered up a plan, then tweaked it, then seemed pretty content with the slop-file.
do all of them, work independently until u finish
After “gibbering” for about 30 minutes, Fable gave me a standalone app I could sideload via “USB Debugging” on our phones. Sadly, Google is making this route more difficult in 2027.
Fable spit out this code: ifinkelstein/printer-android-bridge.
Lo and behold, it installed! And we were off to the printing races!
Good ol’ HL-4570CDW is now discoverable on our phones. I’m still amazed that (1) the LLM zero-shotted (zero-shat?) a solution; (2) we could extend this aging, but perfectly capable printer; and (3) I have zero knowledge about Android development. Seems like a great use-case for LLMs!
And I somehow still had plenty of tokens left to burn on other projects (more on that later).
Now I keep thinking that there’s so much more old equipment that we can rescue from the garbage heap with our new LLM capabilities.
Most importantly: happy wife, happy life.
PS. This post was inspired by a few other blogs that rescued old hardware via similar means:
- Raiders of the Lost Array: a macOS driver and companion app for an orphaned Drobo 5D storage array. Claude reverse-engineered the proprietary protocol from the defunct manufacturer’s binaries. (HN)
- A macOS driver for the Windows-only HP Laser 1008a: Kuber Mehta had Claude Code patch the open-source SpliX driver to speak the printer’s SPL3 raster language, so Cmd-P just works. (HN)
- Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver: Dmitry Brant ported the
ftapefloppy-controller tape driver to Linux 6.8 to recover data from QIC-80 cartridges. (HN)