After many a long battles, the yeast has been defeated.
[the power had been pulled from the inside door. the rubber-foreskin that holds the cables had gone loose, and as a consequence the cable had released from its conncetion under strain. we reconnected it, retaped it. and put the doormat over the rubber-foreskin.]
We might have won the battle, but the access-war is ongoing. Ian and yours truly are regularly putting some hours into improving the spaghetti outside & and inside the Py. We could use more people with energy and/or expertise in microcontrollers on the hardware and software side.