the midi definitely works, the firmware updates was the mystery. worst case I have a shitbook laptop in the closet with windows for doing such updates

edit: I remember what i thought might not work. the original board and the minis of the same time period can connect over bluetooth but it sounded like it worked fine on mac os but windows was nearly unusable, and no linux users even knew about the thing. No idea if the seaboard 2 or the current minis have that fucntionality.