The decision was made to go back to the wide enclosure with 8 buttons.  The preset button would be M to match the OEM panel.  A new F button would enable a fine precision mode to work around the latency.  Latency is definitely a combination of starting the transmitter radio & the network hops.  It was also a pain to make fine adjustments with the OEM button panel.

The presets would have numbers like the OEM panel. Lions actually have never read the lettering on the buttons.  It's purely based on a childhood memory of wondering how cartoon characters knew what all the buttons did without any labels.

Manely, the buttons would be smaller buttons, spaced out to match the vintage layouts.  The current buttons are as narrow as possible while having enough layer adhesion.

Those vintage interfaces had tiny buttons, but anyone with a remote controlled TV was special in those days.  Going narrower would entail some kind of annealing or a much deeper enclosure where the buttons don't overlap the caps.  It's already a hassle to tweak the caps to grip the buttons.

Decided to keep the original nano mister battery since it wasn't completely dead after a certain time with a lot of button presses.  The dial parts also got reused to skip realigning the hall effect sensor.

Right away, RA0 on the micro was dead.  It wouldn't pull up or read, the hazards of scavenging chips.  Fortunately, there was a debug pin suitable for the job.

The seal of quality. That's how you know it's something special, almost japanese-like.

For high precision, the ESP8266 was configured with a 20Hz tick.  The desk responds to button presses down to 1/20 sec at which point it moves 1/8", not a useful amount.  The movement is proportional to the press time.  At 1/2 sec, it moves 1/2" - 3/4".  At 1/4 sec, it moves 1/4 - 3/8".  The movement is very imprecise.  Presets seem to max out at 1/4"-3/8" precision so it simulates a 1/4 sec button press for now.  Most of the time, a 1/4 sec press is enough to get it to move back to a preset.  Shorter button presses don't make it return to the preset.

This introduced a new problem of the desk not picking up sequential button presses in fine mode.  It needs a recycle time after a button press, after which it responds to the next button press.  Normally, rapid button presses are immune to the recycle time because the buttons stay down but with the button presses timed, successive button presses don't get picked up at all without waiting for the recycle time.  It would take knowledge of when the desk has begun moving to press the button for exactly the recycle time + the fine press time.  

Another way is to read the height reports & time the button presses based on that, but this seems much less precise than the 1/4 sec movement.  Desks 1,2,4 got a firmware update.