Very nice writeup. I once had to do something similar for RFID readers used by the Dutch police to scan 'anti theft' RFID tags for bikes/scooters. The scanner manufacturer went bankrupt, and we had a bunch of scanners with old firmware which needed to be updated to a newer version. I spent a couple of weeks building the required hardware and software tools to extract firmware from the newer scanners and load them into the old scanners. Fun times =)
Unfortunately not, since I was doing this for an employer I'd highly doubt thew would have appreciated me telling the world on how we'd go about reverse engineering and extracting IP from the scanners.
