Tech success! I figured out why PuTTY wasn’t reading serial data from the ancient data measuring device I had to use (some setting in device manager buried under 5 layers)… and despite massive internal blockage in my head from actually sitting down and learning basic R, I managed to troubleshoot why my supervisor’s R script for cleaning the output data kept not working. Something something dataframe object column number mismatch something. Good old google making me feel smarter than I am