About

About DeviceXray

One person, one idea: the moment before a call when you are not sure your mic works should take five seconds to resolve, not five minutes of clicking through cluttered pages.

Who

I am Radek. I work as a conversion optimisation consultant, which means I spend my days watching where people get stuck on websites, and I make videos about building things on the web as VelvetShark. DeviceXray is a side project I wanted for myself first. You can reach me on X at @velvet_shark.

Why

Every existing "test your mic" page I tried did the job eventually, but buried the tool under adverts, took a few seconds to load, and gave a shrug when the test failed. Nobody offered a single view of the whole machine. Yet the browser can already tell you your mic level, your camera's real frame rate, whether a key registers, your display's refresh rate and which GPU you have. So DeviceXray does three things I could not find in one place:

• Runs each test instantly, in your browser, with nothing uploaded and no account.
• Explains a failure honestly, with the actual steps for your browser and operating system, instead of a paragraph of filler.
• Puts everything on one report card you can save or share, so "is it me or them?" has an answer.

How it is built

The site is a set of static pages generated with Astro and served from a CDN. There is no backend and no database. Each tool is a few kilobytes of plain TypeScript talking to the browser's own APIs: getUserMedia and Web Audio for the microphone, getUserMedia and video frame callbacks for the camera, keyboard events for the keyboard, WebGL for the GPU string, frame timing for the refresh rate. The report image is drawn on a canvas in your browser. Pages are built to load in well under a second on an ordinary connection because a diagnostic tool that makes you wait is not much of a diagnostic tool.

How it pays for itself

At launch, it does not. The only commercial element is a short list of replacement products, with affiliate links, shown when a test finds a device that is genuinely broken. If the site grows, it may carry a modest amount of advertising in places that never push a tool below the fold or shift the layout. What it will not do: sell data, add cookie walls, nag you for permissions, or pretend a working device is broken to sell you a new one.

What is next

More instruments in the same style: frame-rate and refresh-rate tests, touch-screen and dead-pixel checks, a speaker test, a mouse test, and a GPU and resolution page. Each will follow the same rules as the first three: one page, one job, instant start, honest failure states, nothing leaves your device.

Found a bug, or a device the tests get wrong? Tell me on X and include your browser and OS. That is exactly the information the tools try to surface, so it is a fair test of them too.