Last week I head pleasure to present at two conferences in two different cities: DORS/CLUC 2016 and Osijek Mini Maker Faire on topic of cheap hardware from China which can be improved with little bit of software or hardware hacking. It was well received, and I hope thet you will find tool or two in it which will fill your need.
I hope to see more hacks of STM8 based devices since we have sdcc compiler with support for stm8, cheap SWIM programmer in form of ST-Link v2 (Chinese clones, which are also useful as ARM SWD programmers) and STM8 has comparable features to 8-bit AVR micro-controllers but cheaper.