I've officially given up on these damn SD memory chips for now. I don't have the skill, patience, or the steady hands to work with them. I couldn't get the adapter board unsoldered from the prototype HAT, and just broke the board and threw it away. I'm so sick of every little thing being such a massive struggle. I hate soldering and don't want to deal with it anymore. I can't justify or afford a desoldering gun right now and my crappy little pump is nearly useless. I'm out around $50 worth of hardware and multiple frustrating hours of work so far. I'm going to order new prototype HAT boards, SD cards, and SD card breakout boards so I don't have to deal with these tiny SD memory chips anymore. I wish there was a breakout board for them already. They're new enough that no one seems to have bothered. I can't physically manage those tiny chips anymore, so I'm giving up on prototyping with them until I can order a custom PCB with them on it. This makes me very sad and frustrated. It all comes down to the loss of my steady hands. I'm turning 29 soon, but I feel far older. Physically overworking my body since I was 14 is taking it's toll on me. Everything is catching up. I've traded most of my youth so far just to survive. I want to get into software and hardware development so I can do something more fulfilling and easier on my body. I'm driving a tow truck to fund my journey into better work, but it's not easy. It makes me so very sad to look back on my life and realize how much of it was wasted. I refuse to waste much more of it though. I will finish this project, even if it means working with SD cards instead of the cheaper and far more interesting SD memory chips during the prototyping phase. 

I won't have any hardware to work with when my Pi 400 arrives tomorrow, but I still have plenty more work to do. I could just solder jumper wires to an SD card adapter and plug that into the GPIO pins directly for testing if I want. I've got all the parts for that laying around. I think my shaky worn out hands can manage that bit of soldering. I'll still order more hardware for prototyping though. 

Just got a call and need to go tow a car. Annoying interruption, but at least I'm at a decent stopping point. Let the stupid begin...