I've made some mistakes here and there in this project, but generally they have been either learning opportunities or correctable. 

Latest mistake was not removing the circuit board from enclosure for Ori when drilling out the side to make an entrance for the USB cable. The drill bit grabbed onto the plastic and pulled - crashing right into the microUSB connector on the ESP8266 module. The problem is that in order to reduce the Z axis size of the assembly, I soldered the ESP8266 to headers soldered to the protoboard - no connector. This means removing the ESP8266 with just solder sucker and solder wick is almost certain to destroy it. The issue isn't so much the cost of the ESP8266, it's that rework is likely to ruin everything I've done on Ori to date - it seems like it's likely simpler and faster to just start over on Ori rather than try to fix this. 

I wired up to Vin & Ground and I am able to power Ori and it runs the existing script without a problem - the issue is how to get any changed firmware into place. If I had already loaded the OTA firmware update code, this wouldn't be a problem. 

Lessons for the day:

• Rushing produces bad results
• Load OTA firmware updates into the module first - before even soldering headers on