I finally got the firmware flashed to an SD card. Had to keep using smaller and smaller cards until one would work. Inserted in pi and conncected to control board and powered up via USB. Ive tried my existing 4GB pi as well and the 2GB that shipped with the kit but neither created a hotspot that i could find. I have Spectrum as an ISP and getting into the router is done via there web app so I haven't found a way to directly access the router by entering the IP address so any router changes might be a problem with my current setup.