Right now I'm trying to reverse engineer the firmware for a USB dongle, and although there's very little documentation for the chip, the code is unencrypted, uncompressed, and it's actually uploaded by the PC to the device on every boot, so very little chance of bricking. And it's cheap.
That got me thinking, what other devices have firmware that can be easily modified to do useful things?
Some I know of:
>s1mp3 can run arbitrary code on chinese mp3 players
>canon camera hack can get you more options for your camera
>there's at least one oscilloscope that can be hacked to increase bandwidth
>some handies can be modified to get more frequencies
>DD-WRT
>calypso based phones can be made to run OsmocomBB, a libre GSM stack
>sdcards and USB drives have modifiable firmware
Any more that I'm missing?