@User it seems like from a hardware perspective it should be possible to talk uart to the board over the FTDI chip once it has been used to configure SPI. Is there some script to do that? I dont see anything in the repo.

This would be easier if somebody had actually listened to me when I made the specs for the board. One of my original test boards had jumpers between Rx and SCK and Tx and SDO (or some pair, whatever the right pins are on the FTDI) so that the FTDI could be run in tty mode and talk to the chip. On the current development board, one of those connections was made with a zero-ohm resistor, which was a problem because the power-on state of the Rx line is now an output, not an input, so the Rx line interferes with SCK on the housekeeping SPI, forcing the zero-ohm resistor to be removed. There's some kind of driver chip on the Tx line. I'm not sure how it works (there's a jumper for that. Please check with @User about how to configure the board for UART communication with the FTDI.