 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 23rd T Tuesday Update. Let's get into it. This is the third and I guess final wall of science week that I've been focusing on working on this artificial life research paper to be sending off to the conference that will be happening in the UK this summer. And so I haven't been talking about the stuff that I've been working on mostly, which I don't like because I've been trying to be really as transparent as I possibly can, even sort of beyond what's comfortable sometimes, just so to share the process. I mean, whatever it is of trying to build this thing to demonstrate a way to compute and to maybe change the world a little bit a lot, however it works out. So hopefully next week we'll get we'll get back to more normal forms and we'll see how it goes. 23rd T Tuesday Updates. That means three more weeks. That will be the 26th episode. That's half a year just since I've been talking to y'all and it's been quite a ride so far. I would really like it. It wouldn't it be nice if by half a year since the T2 tile project has been in existence we could say the tiles are being manufactured. Wouldn't that be great? I think it's more possible than any previous goal that I've set and failed at, whether it could actually have an I don't know we'll see. Today I'm going to talk more about 3D printing stuff because that's been going on one way or another both the plot and the printing continuously in the background. In fact, it's going on continuously in the background. Now you may hear it singing there were you so often and a little bit about the bill of material stuff and then this will probably be another short one. We'll see how it goes. I got some feedback that the bill of materials is big old boring. On the one hand, it is like it's not like we have a showrunner. It's not like we have a writing room that says what's going to be the interesting bit and what isn't. This is the plot. This is what we've got. Try to go through it as quick as I can. This is a kind of weird, they talk about police procedure roles and legal procedure roles and TV shows and stuff. So this is some kind of weird research engineering activism procedural. So it's kind of like whatever the plot is is what's the plot. But of course the point of the writing is to actually make it be interesting. All right, well anyway, so in the bill of materials we had been working on getting rid of the last bits of red from the spreadsheet. The hex nuts, these were the nuts from Dubai that we actually got in. So those are set and what's remaining is just regular screws, little M3 screws to connect to the standoffs, to attach boards to things and so forth. I ordered a bunch of a sample set of those, a pack of 100. We'll talk about that in a minute. Then J7, which is the header for the displays to connect the displays to the thing. J9, which is for the debug connection, which is not that important until you need it and they're really important. And then P8 and P9, which are these forever aggravating connectors for the Beaglebone itself. So as of now, oh yeah, and so I'd finally pulled the trigger last week on trying to get the P8s and the P9s. Instead of going to Digi-Key, I put an order for Digi-Key for J7 and J9, but for P8 and P9, I just tried to go back to AliExpress to pay $86 instead of $280 in change. We'll see how that went today as well. All right, so I ordered some of these screws from this company Granger that I found that has a store in Albuquerque, a warehouse in Albuquerque, I'd never heard of these guys. They're industrial supply mostly, but they have all kinds of stuff. And I got the socket cap screws from Sample Socket Cap Screws from a while ago. I ordered some little of these M3 screws. They came in, so I went to get them. This is what the place looks like, and this is what I look like at Granger. Whoops, this is what I look at at Granger. Here we are. And once again, I didn't take any pictures inside, although I wasn't actually as threatened by the guys, the repairmen and the workers and stuff. There's always people there who are buying parts or trying to get replacement parts for some incredibly crazy gizmo. And they're generally guys, they're generally pretty grizzled and been seen a lot of that outdoors. And I don't know if they really know what to make of me, but no one's been disrespectful and it's always been fine. And in fact, I even had some chit-chat about what the heck is the part that you're trying to do. And he's like, oh, it's a pneumatic hammer, shifter, connector, inverter, or something whatever. So that was fine. And I got these M3 5mm screws. They are cheesehead screws, which I think is because if you look at them, you can see that they actually have a little bit of... Well, I got it on the next picture. So here's one of the screws again. Sorry about the focus on the actual board screwing down into a standoff as a test. By comparison, though, here is one of the screws that I had just gotten from a kit of standoffs and so forth. And I actually think I like the littler one bigger. I mean, this one you can still see a little bit of the grounding ring around this thing, which is in the cheesehead thing. It's actually the head is bigger, not just thicker, but even bigger around than I kind of was expecting. So I got the cheesehead ones because that's all that Granger had in the M3 and the 5mm, rather than the Panhead, which is lower. And looking at it end on, you can see the difference. There's the cheesehead. And I think it's called a cheesehead because it looks like an entire wheel of cheese that you're looking at it through a very large magnifying glass, back when people knew what wheels of cheese looked like, versus the Panhead, which is quite a bit lower. And I think I need the Panhead ones because this thing is going on the Beagle bone and the display is going to be right on top of it. There's not a lot of clearance there. So I think probably these cheesehead screws are not going to work, but that was six bucks or whatever. So I'm not quite solved there. Once again, these screws are not necessary to pull the trigger for ETS. So these are not on the absolute critical path anyway. All right. On the other hand, the J7 and J9, which I ordered from Digikey, they are on the critical path. They were scheduled to show up on Friday. And sure enough, they did. Here's our Digikey package. And here they are. And I've marked them so that we can tell what their inner packs really kind of need to be marked as well. These are the 2x13 connectors for the display. These are the 1x6 connectors for the debug UART. Somebody, I'm sorry, I don't remember the handle, was commenting on the YouTube channel that you can make these yourself. You buy big long strips and clip them off to whatever length you need. And I do know that. And in fact, if one looks at the video where I was assembling a board by hand, a long time ago it seems you can actually see me cutting some of them by hand. The thing is that if I'm going to be asking the ETS guys to do it, they're going to be cutting them by hand at $15 an hour. And they just look better if you get them stamped out actually at whatever length they're supposed to be. So I kind of wanted to get the official ones rather than telling the ETS guys, hey, just chop off however much you need. So we got them. And here's the 1x6 in the J9 thing. They're all nice and gleaming. These pins are bronze, just sort of mix of metals, but they actually have actual gold flash and incredibly thin layer of gold over the entire thing, which is why they're so gleaming and makes them conduct electricity very nicely. Is it super overkill? The general idea is if you're going to be having a connection that you're making and breaking a lot, you want to have something that's like gold. It could even be thicker gold rather than gold flash, but it's a lot more expensive so that you don't get corrosion. And so, you know, we got the good stuff. So there's the 1x6. Here's the 2x13 for the display. Same thing, gold flash over the whole thing. We are done. J7, J9, check. On the other hand, I ordered the... So the lot at AliExpress was a single lot for $43. $43 was $200 of these things. Of the PAP9, we need two of them. So $200 would do 100 tiles. So I ordered two lots to have enough for 200 tiles. That's the $85. And the order went nowhere. It didn't ship on the first day. It didn't ship on the second day. It didn't ship on the fifth day. So, you know, of course, I was, you know, rechecking. And, you know, if they don't ship within something like 7 business days or whatever it is, the order automatically cancels. And I'm like, well, geez, you know, these guys had pretty good scores as far as what people were saying about their shipping speed, what's going on? So I reloaded the next day. And, you know, all right, now it's two days and it still isn't going. So yesterday, I, you know... Is this order going to ship today? So I can cancel it and so forth, you know, just a little nudge. At that point, I thought I actually could just cancel it unilaterally, but it turns out since I've put the money into escrow or paid them or whatever it is, actually apparently I can't cancel it unless the seller agrees. So I'm not exactly sure what my rights were. I thought I could just... Because there's a button that says cancel, but actually it's a button that says request cancellation. So I went ahead and did that. Five hours later. Now it's shipped. And now we've gone from a waiting shipment to a waiting delivery. Your order will be closed in 38 days. No, that's just the outside limit for when AliExpress says the thing is blown. You know, the order was 23 days is what the order said, so we shall see. I'm very afraid because I didn't spring for the super expensive DHL shipping and everything. We'll see what happens. So that's it for the bill of materials. Let's talk about 3D printing. You will recall that when last we were talking about this, I had finally managed to figure out that my problem was not down in the nozzle of the extruder, but way up at the top because I'd gotten the end piece of the thing that hadn't gotten backed out by the filament sensor, which didn't seem to sense, and so on. I got this thing out and so forth. For a while after that, things were good. Not so great since then. Who's Prusaari now? All right. So here it is. So we got the thing fixed and then we were printing these great four cases at a time. It took like 10 hours. Start one before you go to bed that's there around noon the next day, whatever it is. But this didn't last too long. I started getting this. It was an error min temp bed that spoiled the print. This is my output. My little trash recycle. Ha, ha. PLA doesn't really recycle very well. So I just sort of collect it up and say, I don't know what we're doing with it. Lots of things that look like case tops. Why? Because they were failed prints and most, well, many of these anyway were for this error which apparently means that the bed of the printer, the stuff that you print on looked to be zero temperature or too low. And I started to realize that when the min temp bed error would occur, typically it was in the back left corner of the print bed. And it did seem to be a pattern there. It wasn't all the same number of layers in. This is, I don't know, maybe 20 layers in or 10, something like that. That would vary, but it was pretty much in that corner. And I thought that was a clue. I thought the cable bundle coming off the extruder and the cable bundle coming off of the bed in fact kind of run into each other and push each other back and forth, especially when the extruder is back in that corner. And it seemed likely that there's a flaky connection, a flaky wire from the temperature sensor in the bed to the logic inside the printer and it's triggering this min temp error. Google it. Other folks have seen it. Nothing really all that slam dunk description like what I had. Although similar stuff. I was sort of surprised at first and then kind of relieved that min temp bed errors aren't unique to the Prusa printer because it's using this Marlin based, a code base for driving the printer that other 3D printers use as well. So other folks, the Creality people, they can get min temp errors to min temp bed errors. So Prusa 3D says want to ask something? You can ask us anything. They have a thing. So I contacted them and I got absolutely nothing. I sort of expected to get an email from CCC of the message that I typed into their web browser so I didn't actually catch a copy of the thing. So I was asking them, what did I do about this error min temp bed error? I bought the thing preassembled. I bought it through UNM and so on and so forth. Nothing, day after day after day and nothing. Eventually I sent a follow up. I contacted you last week about error min temp bed. Do you need details on the printer and so forth? And still, nothing. So, you know, I admit that my first message was a little bit snarky because I was like, you know, this is an assembled printer. I bought it as an assembled printer. I really don't want to have to learn how to disassemble the whole thing in order to fix it. What should I do? I sort of did expect to hear something so far, nothing at all. And so I'd given them some more information about when I got it. In particular, I rechecked and it was shipped in May. And we're supposed to have a one year warranty for the rest of the world when you purchase a fully assembled printer. So this thing is like, covered. You know, our support team is ready to assist you with any issues that may appear. Not so much, not so much. At this point, the fact that I can't actually hear from Prusa is kind of bugging me a little bit more than, okay, the thing is sort of falling apart. I mean, I've been using it quite a bit. But I expected that there would be actual support. So that's kind of a bummer. But we'll see what's going on. So in the meantime, since it seemed like it was the back left corner that was sensitive to getting these min temp bed errors, I took the, you know, Dr. Hertz when I do this approach to dealing with it. And I did this. I made a version that only has three up and avoids the back left corner. And this actually has been working quite well. And I've been printing threes. And I got far enough, in fact, that I was getting to the bottom of the next real of Prusament Galaxy Black. I'm not using crap filament here. I'm using official company store stuff. I was way too terrified to go ahead and see if it was going to work automatically. But I went and I got my next roll of the Galaxy Black PLA and pulled it out, got it ready, the thing got lower, and then I just did it by hand. I paused the print, unloaded the filament, pressed the knob, pulled the roll off, put the new roll on with its whole special laser printed stuff so that you can track its vintage, just like a championship horse. It does look nice. It wasn't as perfectly flat of wind as my first real was. Load the filament, got extrusion going. Yes, it's correct. And back in business. So I've been collecting up these things in boxes. And that would have been fine, but no, that was just the next issue. Then I started, well, okay, yeah, every so often I would get a bad first layer, but okay, it seems like the calibration shifts or whatever, but I've gotten used to that to check it, but this was not the same old thing. Now I got print fan error. Like that. Go Google that. Well, you know, the print is, the fan is blocked. No, it wasn't blocked. It might be if you used a completely not working note, appears to be working and so forth. If you replace the fan with something that doesn't support RPM sensing, you can turn off the monitoring and blah, and if it stops working, and again, this looks like another flaky connection. So once again, it's damn the torpedoes. Went into the settings mode. Check fans on. No, I turned it off. And now we're back in business and the fan is still working. So bottom line, we're generating these things. This is 36 cases. That's almost two power zones right there. We've got another one like that. Pretty well going. We'll see if the thing holds together long enough to get there. All right. So we're out of time. The paper is going to ship this week. Thanks everybody for asking me why aren't I writing when I was out at that there. We did get the the one week extension, which I've been counting on. That's this week and it's until the end of this week. Now there might be a couple of secret extra days to work on it a little more over the weekend. We'll see if there is. I will be doing so. And that's that. The next update will be out a week from today. Happy birthday to my sister. And thanks for watching. See you next time.