The wifi stability seems to have been restored with the new wifi dongle.  I've reattached all the external circuits to the PI and all seems well. No other hardware changes have happened since the wifi flakyness popped up. On the software side, I've been cleaning up the scripts and organizing them and making the script names more accurate to their current purpose as the scripts have morphed a fair amount since I started thid project. I'm also working out a start-up script so the monitor starts with the init system on start-up. I need to test the low battery detector and shutdown script.