Hi, I'm very new to this forum, and to saber-building in general, and have come across an issue with mu build.

After about half a year of working on it in my spare time, I have all the electronics assembled (but not stuffed into the hilt yet) for my first saber. It has a CFX board, momentary switches for both main and aux., a single 18650 3.3v rechargeable battery, recharge-port with kill key, speaker, and a lightly modified led module from ultrasabers (sunriders destiny). However, when trying to start it up, there are issues. With the battery connected and sd card in, removing the kill key causes the little red light on the board (I think its called the diagnostic led?) to rapidly flash.

So real quick, here's what I've attempted so far:
-reboot, held the switches down while taking out kill key, led was red for about 5sec before going off (just as manual said), but as soon as switches were released, it went back to flashing
-voltage checks, everything reads as the volt-map says, save for the switches, no reading from either. Odd seeing as they seemed to trigger the reboot just fine. Maybe I have the meter's prongs in the wrong spot
-format sd card, used a sd card reader, formatted, downloaded up-to-date files, including the fw.dat (as a note, I have not added/modified any fonts)
-tried a usb connection to RICE on my pc. Rice, upon selecting the proper (and only) port, only rapidly flashes a message saying "sd failed, card not detected" (or something along those lines). (As a side, the RICE UI was really off from where the buttons actually are, had to randomly click around till I would see something respond)

I have seen some posts mention drivers, but I can't seem to find and up-to-date link to what they're referring to. I have also not tried recharging the battery yet, as I don't have a standalone charger for it, and I'm worried about using the saber's recharge port, given the issues its displayed.

At this point, I'm not so much looking for a definitive/immediate solution, I'd just be happy figuring out what the problem it. I'd assume it's the sd card/the board's ability to read it, but for all I know, one of you will tell me its actually a wiring issue or something else that I never would have thought of. Again, I'm new to a lot of this, and I've searched as much as I could for posts regarding similar issues, but to little avail.

Here are some simple pics of my board, not sure how much help they'll be:
20220724_181446.2.jpg 20220724_181514.2.jpg 20220724_181731.2.jpg

Any information or help is greatly appreciated, even if it's just pointing me in a rough direction as to where I should start troubleshooting.

P.S. Apologies if this is the incorrect place to post this. If there is a more ideal location, I can delete this and repost accordingly.