Thanks for the help gentlemen. I have now tried Photon firmware versions 0.4.2, 0.4.3, and 0.4.4 (found this minor change on the GitHub repo, https://github.com/spark/firmware/releases). I tried loading the development branch as @HardWater mentioned but I keep running into a “Page at 0x08005000 is not writeable” error during flashing.
It seems like there are 1000 reasons why I would see an SOS, hard fault but is there any hint as to why a hard fault happens? What’s really happening there? Maybe if I understood hard faults better, it might give me a hint.
UPDATE: Found this post about the Hard Fault, What does "hard fault" mean?