I used zmq to build our application used for testing new hardware. Everything comes in via serial every second so I made a basic front end for that serial bus that sends telemetry out over zmq and waits for any commands coming in using pub/sub. The front end piece can sit forever sending out telemetry no one ever hears or I can hook up a logger, debug terminal, data plotter, or a factory test GUI that runs scripts or all at once. Dealing with com ports on windows is a huge hassle so zmq lets me abstract those annoyances away as a network socket. Other engineers can develop their own applications custom to their needs and they have. Our old application tried to shove all of this functionality into one massive python script along with trying to update a complicated Tk GUI every second with new telem. The thing was buckling under its own weight and would actually screw up the serial data coming in if you were running a heavy script in another thread. I know there are ways to turn a serial port into a network socket but I wanted something that didn't require a server or client to be online for the other to function.