I started down a similar path for a Lorex NVR, amusingly it brings out its serial port to a physical DB9 on the back. Trivial to get it into the uBoot prompt an

I started down a similar path for a Lorex NVR, amusingly it brings out its serial port to a physical DB9 on the back. Trivial to get it into the uBoot prompt and start dumping its flash. Annoyingly it has a hardware watchdog that reset the machine every minute or so unless it's in the OS. I didn't feel like figuring it out so I wrote a quick script that dumped a few hundred K, waited for machine reset, re-entered u-boot, and kept dumping. Ultimately I decided to work on something else as I have plenty of more interesting hardware hacking projects to work on, but it was fun practice to overcome the watchdog.