I have happily used Wireshark during my physics PhD to deal with poor vendor software for various equipment. Example: while Montana Instruments (https://www.mon

I have happily used Wireshark during my physics PhD to deal with poor vendor software for various equipment. Example: while Montana Instruments (https://www.montanainstruments.com/ https://www.montanainstruments.com/) now has a python library for interacting with their cryostats (refrigerators), they didn't always have one, and I just couldn't get their dll's to work. Instead, I sniffed the packets that were being sent back and forth between their provided GUI software and the cryostat, and got things working fairly easily in python thereafter. Good times.