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I relate to this a lot. As part of my job, I'm regularly given IoT devices that do similar tasks, but from different manufacturers and with varying age ranges (new last year with a raspberry pi 4 inside, to something over a decade old with custom firmware on an ancient microcontroller).

I have to figure out how they work, and somehow coerce their data into a standard format before sending it to our server.

Often, they'll have a built-in mechanism for retrieving data programmatically, but it's usually too slow and sends data in large batches, so I end up needing to reverse engineer their socket IO + handlebars web UI for closer to real-time data streaming. It's a janky nightmare, but it's so satisfying once you make it work.



Have you/employer considered sharing some of this reverse engineering work via github, indexed by IoT device model number?




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