 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 eleventh episode of T Tuesday Updates. Let's get into it. If you're just joining us, we're working on building a new kind of computer that you can just plug together as much of it as you need, rather than starting with a single box and saying that's your computer. You have more of a computing fabric that you can grow and all of the software and everything on it has to be incredibly robust to handle that. And that's a lot of work, but once we have that robust first software, then we can build things much, much larger and much, much safer than we have been able to before. Right now, last week in episode 10, I, like an incredible idiot, made a declaration that by episode 20, which is nine weeks from now, we will actually have manufactured some of these things. And I've been prototyping these things for a while now, and here's a prototype which we've seen a couple of times before, but now we're going to actually get a manufacturer and build a bunch of them. We were looking last week for what is a name of 133 tiles. I asked the folks that are here to take cracks at it. We got a bunch of suggestions. Anesis, I don't read Greek from Christopher Nahanov on Twitter. B120 is a thing I made up on a suggestion from Hey Andy on slash R slash T2 tile on Reddit or R slash T2 tile. I'm not sure how one says it. Chunk, Episone, Hive, Honeycomb, Mosaic, Robus came in the YouTube comments as well as a suggestion that maybe doesn't need a name because once the grid gets bigger than this, and in some sense it doesn't need a name, but I kind of wanted to have a name. It's like Chunk or something like that, but I don't know, something that's either a little bit cool or at least it has a little bit of flavor to it. I'm not entirely happy with any of the thoughts we have now or any of the thoughts I have on my own, so I'm going to keep thinking about that as we go. From last week, the main event, of course, was the declaration that we're going to have 100 tiles plus 130 tiles. Anesis, a B120. That I can say B120 I think is going to survive as a technical description of what we're going to be able to build. Episode 20 is going to be on February 19th. That's two months away, and our goal for this week, as if we're pretending this whole thing is going to be possible, is to get scheduling, and then also we had some debugging left over from last time. Next week is Christmas Day on T Tuesday Update. I will have a brief message of some kind, probably put in the can a little bit earlier. It'll be short, but it'll exist. And possibly we may have picked a manufacturer, or at least we'll have some progress on that. And also we're trying to build one more prototype. Let's hope it's one more prototype. Okay, so as far as scheduling, I don't know enough to be able to actually put serious dates on these things, and they all seem so short, and you'll see why they seem so short in a minute, but just to run down what we have to deal with. So we've got to actually build the circuit boards. We have to build cases for these things. This is a 3D printed case that needs to be revised, at least in the corners, if nothing else, because we're changing the board over to having these brass standoffs or actual screw-down fittings of some sort. But that's not even it. In addition to the tile cases, we have the intertile connectors that plug these things that allow the tiles to plug into each other, power supplies, tons of stuff. So if you're into 3D printing, certainly use help here. This is the current case. This is flipped over, so it would print this way. So you can see what it is. These things are two buttons, one that goes in each of these holes pointing out, so that you end up just having a little nib popping out of these holes, I'm sorry, out of here and here. The two little holes that are push buttons, the one under west is the power supply, is the power button, the one next to south is the user activity button that we saw actually last week is connected to an analog channel now. And this is the spider web that I was using to clamp it on the back, which is kind of cool, but it's just not very strong, and that's why I want to go back to screws and good old-fashioned technology. But this is just the case. There's also the intertile connectors. This is... Man, I have to say, I never really got into 3D printing before, and it really is fun. Incredible time sink. So here, basically, this is the actual electronics of it. The intertile connector is really just two 16-pin keyed headers, you can see the little key there, that are joined by a tiny little circuit board that just connects the pins straight through. This is the standard intertile connector, or this is the board for it, and the idea is that this strap piece, this U-shaped piece here, goes underneath in between the two things and comes up, and then the top thing goes down on it, and then you plug this piece into the top and it locks it all together. It was great fun making these things. Okay, they're not pro, but they're sort of cool. But that's just the... And we're going to need a ton of these connectors. Each tile is going to need three to go together, so that's 133 times three, that's 400 of one kind of connector or the other. This is the basic kind. We also have this one, which has a flat top on it. Do I have an example of that here? Maybe I'm not sure that I do. That's the one that goes at the edge of a power zone, and it uses a different circuit board. We're going to use a different color plastic to print these or something, because we need to not confuse them. That's why one has a knobby head and the other one has a flared out head. These do not connect power through, so you put them all the way around the edge of a power zone so that only data and ground goes through, but not power. And then finally we have the power tab itself, which is, we have one of these right here. Actually, you can see it. So this is a power tab with one of the appropriate circuit boards on it, and it's the same as the other ones, except it has a snake to provide stress relief where the wires come out and connect up into the thing. And again, this thing all locks together just by jam-fitting or friction-fit, whatever. So we're going to have to make a lot of these and the box, the case itself, has to be redesigned at some point. So that's all coming up. All of this stuff. The main thing that I'm focusing on now that seems most pressing to me is how am I going to decide how to get these things built. I have two possibilities I'm going to talk about in a minute to lay down a bunch of money and work with them. One is all modern and on the internet. One's all old-fashioned and it's local. All of these tasks need to happen. Oh yeah, and oh by the way, we need a ton of new software as well. I did a fair bit of work on software. This week it's trying to, in the process of trying to debug this thing, spoiler alert, I still didn't get it completely working. But let's talk about the manufacturer event since that's really what's going on. Okay, so the first possibility is this online company Circuit Hub based in Massachusetts that has an extremely slick, at least when it works, and it works mostly, or considering how sophisticated the stuff they're doing, it's amazing it works as well as it does, that you upload your files. Well, I did it. I uploaded my files or I tried to and I got this importing. This might take a minute or two and in fact it was taking like 20 minutes. It was taking like an hour. Eventually I started Googling it and yeah, this has happened to other people and it says send mail, so I sent mail. And I can certainly say that the guys at the folk at Circuit Hub responded quickly and they looked into it and they got it working. And I think I suspect in my mind that they've got this unbelievable mass of Pearl scripts or something behind the scenes that are trying to rip through Kaikad files, Altium files, all of these different electronic design suites to figure out what they need to know to get all the parts out and the references and so forth and the thing locks up and then they get an email and some engineer looks at it and says, oh yeah, here's another case and they get it fixed. I mean, I have no idea. The problem is, is once the import gets done then you have to actually start assigning parts to the thing. Now I have a bill of materials. I have the parts that I've been putting on these things. Parts that I had available before are now no longer available. Some random capacitor, availability zero, minimum order quantity, MOQ 2000. Don't actually need 2000. In this case it wasn't that bad because there's a zillion other essentially equivalent capacitors. So it's just a matter of not noticing that one is a different rating or a different voltage or a different X5R is the capacitance dielectric material or something. I don't even know. And 1206 is the size and so forth. So it's mostly just a matter of trying not to make a mistake rather than it being any sort of conceptually difficult thing. And eventually I managed to sort it out and also some of the parts that were being proposed. These MOX connectors are the intertile headers. These things here that the intertile connectors plug into and they're incredibly expensive. These from MOX are, you know, between $0.53 and $0.75 depending on how you're getting. Every board needs six of them like that. So that's $3 plus up to like $9 depending on how much you're doing just for the connectors. The thing is, I got a big bag of them from Aliexpress a while ago that I've been using for these things that were more like 25 cents a piece or 20 cents a piece or something and they're fine. And Circuit Hub does provide a consign part option that you can buy the stuff and send it to them or they can buy it themselves through their distributors and so on. So that was kind of a lot of money. But nonetheless, eventually I got to where I could actually get a quote. And here's my quote for one board. $1,150 for one board. And this was the main shocker for me. I was doing this last week and if I did it last week like last Wednesday, it would ship on January 18th. Now remember, episode 20 is in February 19th. So this is half the time gone assuming I could have made the order a week ago. And I'm not ready to make the order. I haven't tested out, finalized anything. So I'm really scared that I'm going to disappoint everybody and I'm not going to be able to get it done by episode 20. But I'm going to try. I'm really going to try. And I'm going to make decisions. Now one thing I can do, of course, is you can slide this lead time slider to the left and the shipping date gets earlier and the price goes up even higher like that. I'd rather not go that route if I could avoid it. But getting one board is the most ridiculous case because they're expecting to do it. If we move it up to 150 boards, which is a whatever we're calling this thing, plus some spares. Now the prices, the price before was 1,000 each. Yeah, that's right. When you buy one, now the price is down to 46 bucks each, which is a lot better. And it sounds good. But don't forget that that's just the board. That doesn't include the Beaglebone Green, which is another 44 bucks. It doesn't include the display, which is about another 10 bucks. It doesn't include the case, the entire connectors, and on and on and on and on. But there's a worse problem. Once we get to 150 boards, all of a sudden switch one and switch two didn't have enough stock. And so here it is. As far as they knew, there was 120 of them that they could possibly buy. Each tile needs two of them, so 150 tiles needs 300 of these things and they didn't have that many. Now this is not like a capacitor. The switches and stuff are much more unique. I really don't want to have to go start testing out other ones and changing the board and so on. I want to get these. So I started looking around. Digikey, one of them, you know, big, big distributors of components. They don't even know this component, this particular switch from a company called Alps, which is a Japanese company. Mauser does know about it, and they have none available. And they've ordered 30,000 that aren't going to come until the future. Factory lead time, 26 weeks. I went back a couple of days later and it was this. The factory lead time is now over a year. If you don't have these things locked in, you're pretty well screwed. Well, but Arrow, another distributor, kind of a sort of up and coming one, it seems to me that they're trying hard. Free overnight shipping, all kinds of nice stuff. They had some, so I just put it in. I got 560. There was a price break at 500. 560 is essentially enough to make two chunks, whatever this thing is, with a little bit of attrition. They said it was going to ship by this Friday and it would be delivered Christmas Eve, if you believe that. But in fact, it has already shipped and in fact it's before you're going to see this tomorrow. At the time I saw this, it was in Hong Kong at the airport, but supposedly it's going to be here in just a few hours. The global logistics network that us humans, I mean, you know, not bad for a bunch of monkeys. I mean, we're doing these amazing things. I mean, there's a downside to moving stuff around. The big space is this fast, but there's upsides too. So similarly, I've been starting to make purchases. I haven't bought these yet. This is another one of the big ticket items. The power supply I'm using, a pre-made module, which is more expensive, but it allows me to get away with not having to deal with high frequency scary stuff that I just don't have the electronics engineering experience to deal with. So that is enough, you know, 700 bucks right there and so on. So this is the circuit hub breakdown for this thing. The parts, the PC board, this is at 150. I mean, you know, this is really outrageous. You know, if I went to a PCB way or whatever, I'd be paying, you know, $2 of board tops and they've been pretty good quantity and so and 23 bucks for assembly and so forth. So this really seemed kind of a lot, but it's also a turnkey. They do all the work. There is the alternative. ETS, electronic technical services in Albuquerque. The reason I know about it is that they manufactured the board that's used in the NASA Swarmathon robots, which is the sort of competition for swarm robotics and so I knew people at UNM who recommended this guy, Robert Evans and so forth. So I've spoken to them and they do stuff and he's basically quoting me $10 a board if I bring him the boards and all the parts. He'll solder them, stuff them, get them going like that. So that's versus $23 a board for assembly from circuit hub, but then they do all the extra purchasing and all the screwing around. So it's kind of a sort of a modern hands-off versus old school and you go to the ETS website. It's a little old school. So that's what it's coming down to. Do I pick circuit hub? Do I pick ETS? ETS I have to do a lot more of the work or cells. I mean I've started to collect up. So for example, you can't just buy the components. You need to get the components mounted on reels like this. This is the R16 resistor. It's one of the resistors. There's 250 resistors on this thing. We've got to stop at a time. Won't be able to talk about the debugging this time, but I'm kind of leaning towards ETS. What do you think? The next update will be out in a week. That's Christmas Day. Happy holidays, whether it's your holiday or not. Like I said, we'll have something here quick when we get back. Thanks for watching.