Microscope Viewer
Electron desktop viewer that streams a non-UVC USB microscope by driving the Geek Szitman supercamera protocol over a small Python USB bridge, since the device never exposes a /dev/video node.
- Streams a USB microscope that refuses to enumerate as a standard UVC webcam
- Pairs an Electron UI with a Python
supercameraUSB bridge that emits JPEG frames - Ships device refresh, start/stop, live FPS/frame counters, snapshots, and a bridge log
This is a companion to the ESP32-S3 USB Webcam project, but from the opposite direction: instead of making hardware behave like a clean UVC camera, this app makes the host usable when the hardware refuses to.
The microscope shows up on the USB bus as 0329:2022 Geek szitman supercamera, but it reports a Vendor Specific Class rather than USB Video Class. Linux attaches no kernel driver, so no /dev/video* node ever appears. That single fact rules out the easy path — browser getUserMedia() and any normal V4L2 capture only enumerate standard camera devices, so they simply cannot see this device.
The architecture splits cleanly across that constraint. A small Python bridge talks directly to the USB interface through a reverse-engineered supercamera driver, reads the camera's JPEG frames at 640x480, and streams them out as newline-delimited JSON. The Electron main process spawns that bridge, parses its event stream, and forwards frames to the renderer, which paints them as a live feed and tracks FPS, frame count, and serial. Snapshots are just the last decoded JPEG written to disk.
The honest details are in the failure modes. Direct USB access needs a udev permission rule or the bridge has to run as root, so the repo ships an installer for a plugdev rule. When a device is detected but streaming still fails, it is almost always USB permissions, a busy or stale interface, or a protocol variant the driver does not handle yet — and the app surfaces exactly that in its right-side bridge log instead of failing silently.