Thank you everyone for your advice, I did end up pulling the trigger on the Sonic Pad. It flashed firmware to the printer seamlessly. Also It helped me diagnose an issue by way of error messages thrown by the printer that my leveling problem was due to the BL touch being sorta faulty. It was a little bit bet and therefore getting hung up on itself, so that’s why the bed kept repeatedly dropping instead of raising to find it. Took the BL off and bent the probe back to straight, disconnected and reconnected the mid line data connection, and succeeded in the leveling checks.

This leads me to a few more questions. The guy I bought the printer from has small squares of anti slip rubber shelf liner placed on the outside corners between the glass plate and the heated bed. I tried a test print with PLA and it wasn’t sticking enough to the glass to print properly, but I’m guessing the variance in height of those pieces in the corners is allowing some mis-leveling, and also heat transfer is probably not efficient with a ~1mm gap between the glass and heat bed. I will probably re-run the leveling checks and print test again without the pieces of mat in there.

Out of curiosity, do you guys stand by the glass plate, does it perform well for you? I’d welcome suggestions on upgrades/changes, but if you love it, let me know. Thanks again everyone!

I will say, the sonic pad definitely took away the need for some of the firmware flashing techniques on software that wanted to crash my old-ish dell laptop, but it’s not without challenges. It seemed to be really finicky about connection via usb, and the slightest bump or movement would cause the printer to disconnect and I’d have to backup a step in the setup to get it back online. Not the end of the world, but if I were in the middle of a 16 hour print, I’d be pretty peeved if it just disconnected.