Disable IR Camera on Lenovo ThinkPad

The T580 ThinkPad I use comes with an infrared camera, which, on my Arch installation, is also the default camera, which is kind of annoying, since I always have to switch to the standard camera before starting any video conference. A small, but annoying step.

Today I came across the following post, which explains how to disable any USB device, including the IR camera.

First I had to determine vendorId and deviceId of the IR camera:

qonos:~$ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0bda:0316 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. USB3.0-CRW
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 5986:2113 Acer, Inc Integrated Camera
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 8087:0a2b Intel Corp. 
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 2cb7:0210 FIBOCOM L830-EB-00
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 5986:1141 Acer, Inc Integrated IR Camera
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

As it can be seen from the output, the infrared camera (Acer, Inc Integrated IR Camera) has a vendorId of 5986 and a deviceId of 1141.

Now that we can disable it by adding the following file in /etc/udev/rules.d:

qonos:/etc/udev/rules.d$ cat 80-lenovo-ir-camera.rules
# blacklist Lenovo IR camera
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="5986", ATTRS{idProduct}=="1141", ATTR{authorized}="0"

That’s it: next time you boot the camera will be disabled.