Your lab manager goes "hey, can you generate these proprietary binary files (currently made with a horrible gui) to control this robot programmatically".
Uh, vim doesn't open binary files very well, and the initial goal is to just display them to figure out how they work not to edit them.
Afterwards you will probably want to run experiments with a hex editor, but I found that xxd + vim was better for reading then doing so directly in a hex editor at the time. If I did it again I'd likely start with this because of the color.
