So I set the firmware's bitrate down to 115200 and re-uploaded it.

Now pronterface can at least connect with the printer, however; it sucks.

The communications is so error prone and glitchy that it can't even ping the printer for status at a low rate w/o a constant stream of errors. Attempts to print fail miserably, however, that looks like it MAY be pronterface's problem, since it complains about not being able to find some character encoding related something or another. Will look at that one more tomorrow.

XYZ slew operations generally work OK..., setting temps works OK,

Still..., it would appear that getting this hardware/software combo talking is gonna be a long slog.

It IS usable enough for debugging/fiddling and manual leveling operations, but not much else.

Boo.