Hi comrades! I'm β¨relocatedβ¨! I just unpacked my project stuff a bit ago and powered up the boards and tested them out to see that I haven't forgotten everything! we're back! 
Instead of jumping right back in with what I was doing (partly because I had some process issues and partly because I'm still kind of reeling from the moving/new job stress), I'm going to take the rest of this week to regroup a little bit and figure out my strategy on how to make the best progress on this moving forward. Since I'm a dirty labor aristocrat now, I need to do a little bit of shopping to identify what I was kinda scraping by with that could be done faster with better consumables and tools like actually buying a real set of breadboard wires and scope clips and stuff instead of dealing with the few bent up old ones I'd found laying around. I'm also gonna rework the boards into something a little more functional for test, I'm missing labels and spots for jumpers and I learned newer and better design practices through this and I'm just all around ready to do better than I have been before (shoutout to test points, you know who you are, i appreciate you more than you know for bullying me about this)
here's a pic of my current test setup:
as you can see, I'm working on a folding camping table with slats - not great but fuck it we ball. I do have a 4 channel scope now though! In the fifteen minutes of fucking around I did with the scope, I learned more than I did in several hours of banging my head against the problem with a multimeter, and that's probably like the best thing that's happened for this project yet. No conclusions yet but it's only a matter of time.
I'm not back in full force yet but I'm getting back the momentum I lost and then some. Hopefully I didn't lose y'all and hopefully I catch some new folks now that it's been some time and new comrades have trickled in. To everyone who has been eager to provide time for the project, I appreciate each and every one of you more than you could know and while I do feel a little bad at times for not having clear and concise ways to get your labor into the project, I'm happy you're here. 
One thing I'm going to do differently is to make sure if I'm asking for help I'm more clear about exactly what I'm looking for, how it fits into the project, and what my plan is to incorporate your work into the whole. Including everything everyone has already done, retroactively.
ily comrades. Talk to you soon 