I just got a 5 figure check for two weeks of work reverse engineering proprietary protocols for a super high end centrifuge.
Geeze, scientists! How hard is it to rip apart the hardware, hook up a JTAG debugger, attach an oscilloscope to various PCB traces, capture the data (praying to Linus that it’s a switched protocol), find what might be some documentation from a sketchy Slavic website, call an ex who speaks Russian and have them translate, then reimplement the drivers in a modern operating system with modern realtime kernel modules.