Unless you’re going to build it an impressive DC-battery backup PSU, you’ll lose all your progress at the first power outage, just to be a red team for a moment.
But I’ve had similar successes. The idea I have been playing with, but haven’t found a way to test, is that the fault lies with the Asus Tinker board. I’m starting to think that something about the boot-up stops the Tinker board from finding and/or connecting to the network. So the blink we see on L2 after a reboot is just the CORE2 looking for a network connection and waiting until it finds one before doing anything else. This is just a hunch, and is really only a hunch because I haven’t been able to eliminate it.
I’ve been swamped lately, and likely won’t get the kind of time I need to really deep-dive into this problem until mid-late December. But I’ll update my thread if I get lucky and have an epiphany.