title: Reverse engineering a network interface
body: <p>not sure if this is the right place to ask such a question - if not, perhaps you can direct me to the right place?</p>
  
  <p>I've recently purchased a walking treadmill for my standing desk. It has a standalone control panel, connected to the base via an exposed LAN port. The panel has a few drawbacks (it's huge, has awkward and noisy buttons, no pause/return) and I wonder if I could write something very simple to control the treadmill from my PC instead. I imagine I'd need an ethernet splitter and something for network snooping to see the payload from button clicks? I've never done anything like this, so any pointers would be much appreciated. Thanks all!</p>