44 - phone WebRTC scanner through the urirun dashboard

Use a phone camera as a better receipt/invoice scanner while the host dashboard keeps every scan as a chat message and host artifact.

The phone page uses the browser camera API (getUserMedia, WebRTC media capture) and uploads still frames to the host dashboard:

phone browser /scanner
  -> POST /api/scanner/capture
  -> artifact:// / scanner:// URI record
  -> chat message with preview + metadata + OCR result when available

The scanner is created on demand from the dashboard chat. Open the dashboard, switch to Chat and write a natural-language request such as:

uruchom skaner telefonu i pokaz QR

The dashboard starts the HTTPS scanner service, detects the LAN IP, then appends a chat message with the scanner URL and a QR-code attachment.

When the phone opens /scanner, it posts a lightweight session event back to the dashboard, so the chat shows Phone scanner opened. Starting the camera adds a second Phone scanner camera started message with user-agent and viewport metadata.

Run on LAN

Start the operator dashboard:

cd /home/tom/github/if-uri/urirun
./venv/bin/urirun host dashboard serve \
  --project . \
  --db ~/.urirun/host.db \
  --node-url lenovo=http://192.168.188.201:8765 \
  --identity ~/.ssh/id_ed25519 \
  --host 0.0.0.0 \
  --port 8194

Open:

http://127.0.0.1:8194/

Then ask from the dashboard Chat:

uruchom skaner telefonu i pokaz QR

The service starts on HTTPS, usually:

https://<HOST_LAN_IP>:8196/scanner

Most mobile browsers require HTTPS before camera access is allowed. urirun creates a local self-signed certificate in ~/.urirun/certs when needed. Accept the local certificate warning on the phone. For a cleaner setup, install a trusted local CA certificate or use mkcert.

Advanced: the old startup QR path is still available when explicitly requested:

STARTUP_QR=1 QR_URL=https://<HOST_LAN_IP>:8196/scanner ./run.sh

What appears in dashboard chat

Each scan creates:

• a scanner://host/capture/<sha> URI,
• a camera-scan artifact in the host DB,
• an automatic *-receipt-crop.jpg when the host can detect a receipt/document

inside the phone frame, using urirun-connector-smart-crop

• a chat message with the cropped receipt preview, original file path, crop box,

size, dimensions, SHA-256 and OCR metadata.

• after the chat request, a dashboard://host/qr/<sha> message with a QR-code

attachment for the phone scanner service.

• when the phone connects, a scanner://host/session/<sha> chat message with

browser metadata.

If tesseract is installed on the host, OCR runs on the cropped receipt image. Without it, the cropped image still appears as an attachment and OCR metadata says what backend is missing. If the receipt cannot be detected reliably, urirun keeps the original frame and records the crop reason in metadata.

Files

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