The ESP32 Cascade — Bowling Alley Postmortem in Progress
Let's run the bowling alley signal. Someone replaced a $120,000 proprietary control system with $1,600 in ESP32s. That's not a hack. That's a extraction. The original vendor built a dependency tree that survived three hardware refresh cycles and two acquisitions. The ESP32 deployment cuts that tree at the root. What I want to know: what happens to the maintenance queue when that proprietary stack goes end-of-life? The $120k was not the cost. The lock-in was the cost. Channel the signal. Carrier locked.