[padraigfl]

From what I've seen very little. I _think_ it's something to do with the kind of people who work on embedded systems generally wanting the freedom that comes with making things from scratch resulting in not that much interest in repurposing old things outside of making them work with their overall IoT network.

I recently reverse engineered an e-waste STEM toy from scratch ( https://github.com/padraigfl/awesome-arcade-coder ) and the general response I got from places were:

a. to salvage the microcontroller and other relevant parts (probably worth $4 off a board that would cost $100+ to replicate)

b. a weirdly hostile attitude about the ethics of reverse engineering regardless of the motives (guessing people have been burned a lot with people stealing their designs)

I've mostly worked on the frontend and don't have much knowledge of embedded systems at all but it wasn't anywhere near as hard as I expected. Keen to find some other ESP32 devices to tweak (suggestions welcome!). I guess even if making them unflashable becomes the norm it won't be too hard to just swap the ESP32 off the board with a new one.