One pleasant upside of such systems is that the protocols are usually so simple you can reverse engineer them in a couple evenings. I can't count the times I ended up deriving the serial protocol from some undocumented, baroque source code (or sniffer dumps) and writing a quick & dirty implementation in a few dozen lines of Python.
That's exactly what I've done :) The checksum algorithm that suffixes each msg with a 2 byte check took a little bit of figuring out. I'm using tornado.tcpserver.TCPServer and tornado.iostream. Another plus is generating logs of the msg flow; useful for diagnostics, and the after the fact specs you often need with crufty old systems.
