Hi there. Thanks again for the directions, very clear for me 
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get it to work. I reverted to using a NodeMCU chip to try to test with an officially supported board. That didn’t seem to work out of the gate, throwing an “Error: unable to open ftdi device with vid 0403, pid 6010, description '', serial ‘’ at bus location '’*”.
I found your post on a very similar topic, but the best I got was this:
adapter speed: 5000 kHz
Info : tcl server disabled
Info : telnet server disabled
Error: no device found
Error: unable to open ftdi device with vid 0403, pid 6010, description ‘', serial '’ at bus >location ‘*’
Error: no device found
Error: unable to open ftdi device with vid 0403, pid 6014, description ‘', serial '’ at bus >location ‘*’
Assertion failed!
At this point, it’s not quite as plug and play as I was hoping, and while I appreciate any help you’re able to provide, this is now pretty far out of my expertise. Thanks for the clear explanations in both posts.