 Computers keep changing the world, but their power and safety is limited by their rigid design. The T2TILE project works for bigger and safer computing using living systems principles. Follow our progress here on T Tuesday Updates. This is the 21st T Tuesday Update. Let's get into it. This period of time is dedicated to working on the scientific paper, the research, the writing of the paper for the 2019 official life conference, which is coming up this summer. So most of the hours of this week, the working hours were spent on that, and that's also going to be true for the next couple of weeks, probably depending on whether the A-Life program committee does extend the deadline, if you're watching. So I'm going to talk mostly about updates on the bill of material stuff and the 3D printing stuff, which we kind of left hanging last time, and also hopefully it'll be time to talk a little bit about some software improvements that I've developed because there's nothing like actually eating your own dog food to decide maybe you want to cook the dog food a little bit more. So let's try to get into it. In the bill of materials that we looked at this last week, the greed lines are stuff that we have at least enough parts to build 150 tiles, the second column is green, do you have enough to build 200? I've added four more rows, 14 through 17, which have a lot of red in them. However, those are H1 through H16, which are nuts and bolts and screws and standouts and spacers and all that sort of thing that we do not need in order to send the boards off to ETS, to electronics technical services, to have them manufactured. So we will need the parts eventually, and we'll talk about the trials and tribulations trying to acquire some of them right now. So, I put two orders in on AliExpress on February 14th on Valentine's Day, both in the same 12 o'clock hour, one for 800 nuts to screw these things onto the bottom and one for 800 of these brass spacers, 12 millimeter brass spacers because that's a pretty good height to set the Beaglebone green above the circuit board. Now, we don't really need these spacers and screws and nuts for mechanical strength because the Beaglebone has 96 pins that are friction fit into the female headers and really that's not going anywhere. But at least if we believe some people on the internet who are talking about the grounding system of the Beaglebones not being that great through the pins and we're saying that if you did use the mounting holes which are connected to ground and you use metal mounts, then you can improve the ground. So we're doing it on that basis, at least officially. So, the nuts that we got, we ordered and the spacers, we still have to order the screws that will go on the other end, haven't done that yet. They were ordered from two different places on AliExpress, both on, like I said in the same hour, watch what happens. So the first one, the nuts, I get a confirmation the very next day, February 15th. The screws, the standoffs, I do not get a confirmation for four more days, February 19th. So that sounds bad for the screws. On the other hand, after February 19th, it's February 20th and February 21, that's last Wednesday and Thursday, coming across the date line, get to have Wednesday twice. And two days later, here they are, they arrived on Thursday and here they are. 800 of these M3 12mm standoffs to work with. Now, this was the one that supposedly shipped four days after the first one. So where are the nuts? Well, that's a question. In fact, even though the vendor claimed they were shipped on the 15th, DHL tracking did not pick them up until February 21, last Thursday. In fact, the same day that the ones that were ordered at the same time arrived. Where are they? They're getting picked up in Hong Kong? Apparently, no. Apparently, they're getting picked up in Dubai. And actually, they haven't even been picked up. It's just the shipment information received last Thursday. And so, in fact, they don't actually get picked up until this past Saturday and they still appear to be in Dubai. I mean, I don't know whether this is messed up or whether, you know, there were just a whole lot of extra nuts in Dubai. So the guy is just selling them from there or what. I hope I get the bag of nuts for this. And so they sat around Dubai on Saturday. And on Sunday, they went to Bahrain. And on Monday, they went from there to Leipzig. And also, they went from Leipzig to Brussels. And now, as far as I know, today, Tuesday, they are in Cincinnati. And in fact, they're taking a little scenic tour around Cincinnati. I don't know if it had been any kind of normal DHL experience. Once they hit America, I get them the next day. So we'll see if this package, whatever it is, arrives tomorrow. But I am not impressed. On the other hand, the guys that sent me the brass standoffs, they're great. I already went and ordered them another order with them. But in particular, I found out that they have... So the cases that I've been making, I've been countersinking the corner holes because all I could really come up with was 25 millimeter socket cap screws. But the cases really need 28 millimeters. So I made a countersink of 3 millimeters. But that's kind of hard to print because it's upside down and so forth. And the same place that I got the brass standoffs that did such a nice job have 28 millimeter M3 socket cap screws. So I've made an order for those and I'm going to revise the Modulo 3D printing. The case, once again, to not have the countersink and just let the screws sit up on top of the case in a, again, you know, a little bit more of an industrial look. So that's good. So right. So there that is. And in fact, this is OST hardware. We like them. Kevin's screw store, not so much. We'll see how it goes. So that's the bill of materials stuff that will fill in H1 through 4 and H5 through 8 once they come in. And H13 to 16 once the 28 millimeter socket caps come in. So making progress. But there's a whole nother problem, which is I'm going to save you the blow by blow. But the short bottom line is, is that I'm still negotiating with 4Ucon with the person, my account executive or something. I don't know what it is about the lead time for these parts for the for the intertile connector parts, the six that go around it. And then in particular for the two female headers that the Beagle Bones themselves go into that Adafruit really can't provide enough and it's a very high price. 4Ucon is saying 35 business days lead time to get these things delivered to me. That is the middle of April. And these things are needed for the ETS build. So if that number holds, if we end up having to go that way, that means we cannot go to assembling the circuit boards until the middle of April, which I really do not like. And I'm hoping to see if there were some questions. If I didn't buy a certain part that this take longer and if I ship it a different way it might go faster. So that's still in progress. We'll see more information about that tomorrow. All right. So 3D printing. We ended last week with the 3D printing printer down completely clogged, unable to extrude any filament. Last week we had had some problems with first layer stuff, which I had mostly fixed by increasing the temperature on the first layer seemed to help. And then we had had the, and then we got better looking first layers. And then we had had this problem where we got to the bottom of the first spool. And I'm like, ooh, I have an i3 Mark III. It can handle this. It has a filament out sensor. It'll all be fine. It was not fine. Here it is. The end of the spool going into the, into the printhead. And the thing telling me to press the knob to unload the filament, which I did and then pull the filament out, which of course I can't do because it went into the printhead. And so the vented pretended to be loading it and so forth. The whole thing was completely clogged. So I got a little bit out the first time and then it just wedged up solid. So that was terrible. And, you know, I really do not know that much about 3D printers. I bought them assembled. I tried to be ignorant. I tried to be hands off. And really the state of the art in 3D printing still, it's made a tremendous amount of progress since a couple of years when I first started trying to do this. But still, it's, you know, as soon as anything goes wrong, all of this, you know, easy, you know, it's, it's like if your car broke down a lot more often than it did, and you were supposed to fix it yourself. So, so, you know, time to start looking at the instructions about the different possible fixes. Andrew Walpole, a clogged nozzle cliffhanger. Love it. Yeah. Love it. I've never gotten a cold pull to work. He says, I always manage the clog with a piece of high E guitar string. Try going up through the nozzle opening. And it's like, well, you know, hey, a high E guitar string. I can get a high E guitar string. So I went to the Guitar Center and I'm always a little scared of these kind of places because, you know, like musicians are always like so cool and I'm like such a loser. But here I am getting ready to go in and, you know, I want to buy a high E string. And, you know, I walk in. There's a guy there who, you know, says hi as if I'm somebody. But then it turns out like he's like the repair guy. He's not actually the friendly guy that'll help me. So when I ask for some help from him, that doesn't work and so forth. And I'm all completely cat. I was going to take pictures inside and then I was like completely. And by the end of it, you know, I really felt like, like the repair guy was like Jack Black from High Fidelity, the movie if you've ever seen it. And I was like the fuddy duddy dad going into their record store. And at any minute, you know, he was going to say, go to the mall. I'm not cool enough to buy stuff there. But instead what actually happened is I went in for a high E string and I came out with a complete set of strings, a complete set of strings, a complete set of the next to the most expensive strings, because that's what the guy helped me to buy, which is fine, whatever. They weren't that much. They were, you know, 15, 14 bucks. I don't remember. But the more that I looked at them with this treated strings and I was reading the instructions and like they actually have a coating on them like that. It's really super thin. It's not even clear whether it's kind of a homeopathic coating. But I was like, maybe I don't really want to be sticking this coating up in the hot, hot plastic and say, well, you know, I actually have a guitar. I have an old guitar, an old Takamine. And when I say old, I mean really old. That's a July 1978 old Takamine that has strings that are not that old, but they're not treated with any kind of whatever. I'll take the high E string off of my Takamine. I'll put the one that I just got on there. The Takamine will get a new set of strings and I'll get something that wasn't coated. And it still works. And so coated versus treated. So there it is. So there's the new string. So in fact, that's what I did. I took the high E off my guitar. This is a piece of it. This is from, you know, unwrapping from the stem and I took another piece and so forth. And I raised the print head up. I preheated it for PLA because that's what they told me to do in the instructions when it got there. I went fishing. I got the thing up there and I kind of probed around and wiggled it and whatever. It kind of twisted, but, you know, it bent a little bit, but I could still kind of feed stuff up. And then I tried to load it again. Nothing. No movement at all. There was one more thing to try. And in the Prusa suggestions, you need a thick wire, not one that'll fit inside the nozzle, but a 1.5 millimeter wire that you can go down from the top and try to push the stuff down through rather than pull it up from the bottom. To do that, you need to actually disassemble partway, the thing which I knew was going to be horrible. Oh, yeah. And I discovered it had a cool down mode in the preheat section. I never knew that before. It's one of the fails. Here's the things to work on it in order to try the wire, the stiff 1.5 millimeter wire. You've got to remove the extruder cover and remove the filament sensor with all these instructions, which, of course, I skipped because I got it assembled. But here I go. The Mark III apparently uses pretty much the same screws that I'm using, the M3 socket cap. My cool little ball head driver works for these things too very nicely. I got the filament sensor off. I wasn't sure that this little tube was supposed to come with it, but it did. I opened up the extruder covers. Sorry for the bad pictures. And there it is. And indeed, I opened this up. I'd never seen the inside of this thing before. It's got all kinds of shredded PLA because it was trying to drive the plastic down, and it couldn't because the damn thing was jammed up. These are my new wires. So this is funny. So when you're going up the bottom, you use the high E. If you want to go down from the top, you need a 1.5 millimeter string. That's very close to the low E. So I just took the low E off my guitar since I was going to change them all anyway. And I took some pieces of that to go working from the top down. They say heated up to 250. That's 250 degrees centigrade. That's pretty hot. And there it is. You can see me got the wire coming down here. It's going through and into the hole. And I was pushing it pretty hard. No, it's not moving at all. There's a thing. So now what? Just in desperation now that I had the whole thing open, I figured I'd fit the high E string up the bottom and see if I could do anything. And in fact, there's my high E string coming up through the hole and going out through the next thing. And in fact, I don't know if you can see it. There's my high E string that's threaded all the way through the extruder now like a piece of floss. And so I flossed the thing. And oh my, I don't know if you can see it, but there's a little piece of something that's starting to protrude from the top of the hole that you can get when you open up the extruder. I got it with the needle nose pliers and here it is. This is the end of the spool that went down and disappeared and got jammed. I pulled it out. I reassembled stuff. I put it back together and lo and behold, I have extrusion. I calibrated the thing. I tried to, first I tried the 7% solution blank. It worked well. I tried a case. It did not work well. I tried cleaning harder. The second attempt at a case worked pretty good. And in fact, it basically, there's a beauty shot of a newly printed post clog case. In fact, you can see it doesn't have the countersunk holes anymore. This is designed for the 28 millimeter socket caps. We survived the, my first extruder clog. And then I finished changing the strings and I noodled around on the guitar for the first time in the 21st century. I'm not sure. All right. One last point. There's only got a minute or two left. Let me just talk about it quickly. I'm just going to let it, because it's really a super-nerdly thing anyway. One of the things you do with your programming and splat is you would like to be able to declare type defs, names of other types. Here, count is a shorthand for unsigned three and then use them elsewhere. But when you do this, it doesn't actually work. And you get this weird error from the ULAM compiler. And the reason is, is that the way splat works, all these different sections, the different rules and so forth are actually different classes. So the class where this type def was declared is not the same class where this rule is being compiled and that's why it can't refer to count. But we have a new feature. Where is it? Here. In the metadata section, in the top section under element or quark, you can now say local and then provide ULAM declarations, constants and declarations and then refer to them all through the subsequent file. This is taking advantage of the ULAM local file scope feature. So this actually does compile. Very nice. There's also a feature. I don't have time to go through it called Scratch. If you're interested in what it is, it allows you to, well, get in touch. In fact, if you're programming in Splatterall or trying to program in Splatterall, get in touch anyway, please. I would love to know you're out there and both local and Scratch have already been pushed to my developed branch. Okay, that's it. It's still all about the writing. I still need you to keep me on the internet. Undefined and Micon and a couple of people, Louis D. Thank you for reminding me, asking me the question why am I writing. That's it for now. The next episode will be one week from today. Thanks for watching.