I just liberated my Haier AC units. The WIFI modules it came with but that I never used turned out to be ESP32's, with solder pads for rx/tx etc. I soldered on some wires, plugged into a USB ot UART dongle and Claude had ESPHome running in no time. I now can not only control the AC units, but I have a lot more visibility into wat it is doing: coil temps, gas temp, valve positions: all is available and all is logged now. I also liberated my air purifier long ago by soldering a wire to the various buttons, so i can trigger a press the physical buttons from an esp32. And I soldered a wire to the PWM of the fan, so I can bypass whatever the onboard logic is doing. Liberating your own electronics is fun, and now with AI easier than ever. I also ditched the WIFI unit of my solar inverter and hooked up the tiniest ESP32 nanoC6 and now I get all the data at 1Hz. Still working on taking over the EcoFlow batteries and their charging/unloading logic.