Converting a bitcoin miner for other use
A bit of googleing landed me here: https://rya.nc/asic-cracking.html

Basically he says there are two main differences between mining and cracking. 


knowing when your done 
moving onto the next try 


If just one of these things are implemented in the hardware, then there wont be much of a performance gain. But if they're both implemented in the firmware, you could potentially re-write it to suit your needs. So you'd really have to ask the manufacturer of the hardware.