 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 30th T Tuesday Update. Let's get into it. Last week it was about ETS or Albuquerque Board Manufacturer manufacturing T2TiLEs for us. That was great. Since then, and actually also going back to the prior week that I didn't deal with it then, there is a huge long sorry saga of intertile connectors, which I will tell you about today. Looking forward, it's preparation for this Pioneer's Festival that will be heading out for a week. Well, part of this sort of busy period, this Rapids that I mentioned last week. I did want to mention that in the chat room, the Gitter chat room, folks have recently started talking about how to pitch this sort of ideas to new folks and what's the sort of best way to make it understandable, make it interesting, draw people in. I want to participate in that after I get past all the other stuff that is now currently running behind because it's traveling last week through the weekend. But also, the new folks that are joining in, the people that have come and found it interesting for one reason that, for example, just because of the novelty of the computational approach, whatever it may be, if folks would be willing to contribute to that, to drop in the chat room if you're already there, speak up, that feels incredibly valuable to me since, as I've mentioned times before, I'm so deep in this stuff, it's hard to remember where the beginnings can be. And with luck, maybe I'll be able to steal some of the stuff folks are thinking up and use it at this Pioneer's things coming up. So if you can manage, if you think you might be able to contribute, if you'd be willing to give it a try, to try the chat room, I'll put the link again down at the bottom once more in case for new folks. Okay, so today. Well, so it's the manufacturing. I have the first tile in hand actually. Here it is. It's probably can't see it very well, but it is running. And it's doing its little display thing. It used to be talking to itself all three directions so that I could test the intertile communications, but that passed that test, so I had unhooked it so that it could connect up with some of the other guys. And, you know, so when I got this thing, you know, I was at ETS a week ago Friday, and that got as far as putting surface mount parts on, still had to add the through-hole parts, the intertile connectors, and so forth. So I went over on, I guess, last Monday. I'm not sure, last Tuesday, last Tuesday, I guess, and picked up the first finished tile. This one's called, I couldn't really see it here. This one's called E10. It's going to be the series as ETS, and this is the first one in that series. It looks like there may be more than 100 tiles in the E series, we shall see. Got the first one home, got it under the microscope, took a look at it. You know, everything was really beautiful. Oops, I'm going crazy here. Also going very slow, and I'm not quite sure why that is. The light sensor, it's such trouble placing when I was hand-building these things. Look good. The joints look good. The switches, they were a little dirty, but that was because they were added on afterwards, again, to avoid getting water inside the switch when the boards were washed using the water-soluble flux. So the switches got added on afterwards. The whole thing heated up nicely. It booted up in the dark. You can see the red grid power and the green tile power lights working. And I created the whole thing up in one of our brand new, fresh off 3D printer, more or less, cases. And that did reveal a little bit of an issue that when this screw here, which is closest to the power switch, if I screw this thing all the way down, it interferes with the operation of the switch. It turns out the switch will still open and close, but it doesn't click. It doesn't have its proper tackle action because it's just a little bit too tight, and once again. And so taking a look at it, it's really just that the solder, I think because the solder paste was on those pads and so that when it got soldered on later, it was just up a little higher. And I, you know, I reported that back to Robert Evans, and it was like, you know, boom, we will take care of it. Great. So I'm hoping tomorrow or the next day, maybe depending on how the timing works, that I'll get over to ETS again and maybe get some more of the finished tiles. And we'll see if we could, you know, perhaps, well, it's going to be a little tough on the connectors. But to build a rink, get seven of these guys all going hooked up together. That would be cool for next week, we'll see. All right, the very next day, I guess a week from tomorrow, the boards were all done. And Robert wanted to know, you know, if they're going to be building more, if so, they can keep the machine set up. And I had to say, well, no, it's time to tear it down. We're going to have to be working on this for a long time. So that's just done. We have something like, I'm not exactly sure, he ran all the boards. That would be 200 boards if they were all good. Now there's going to be issues there always are with some of them, but so far so good. All right, so that's the board situation. And yes, so on the 3D printer, that we had been doing cases, we got 180 cases. So I switched over to doing the PD, the power and data intertile connectors, they're called DPs here in this picture. But it's the same thing. It's the ones that are going to connect all of the things within a power zone. And we need a ton of them. So we need 41 per zone, which comes out to 2.16 per tile when you work it all out. So for 133, which was the original build, we needed about 300. But with a larger build, we need more than 400 of these things. So I've been printing them up as best I can. For a while, I had run out of the black, the Prusament Galaxy blacks filament. So I was using some gray to do the interzone connectors, not the DPs, but the PDs, but the DOs, the data only they're going to go in between separately powered zones of the grid. So I did some of those eventually. Oh, yes. And this is the point of all of this that as I mentioned at the end of the update last week, when I came back from ETS, I had this wonderful thing watching all the boards get manufactured. There was a collapse on the printing the PD connectors on the 3D printer. What I didn't mention in the video was that that was not the first one. And in fact, there was this weird thing that it was usually seemed to be failing in a specific spot in the layout. There's 18 PD connectors on each print run. And it was, you know, sort of two over and two in from one of the corners that usually seemed to be the one that was failing. Moreover, it's the thing, the bearings, the Y axis bearing, the thing that goes in and out towards you. Z goes up and down, X goes left and right. Whenever the Y axis was coming toward me, it was kind of making a little sound when it went the other direction. It was quieter. It makes a little noise, but this was a thing. And this says, you know, the bearings are failing, something like that. Just what I need. Now, of course, you know, I've been putting a lot of stuff on it around the clock for months. So I, you know, I probably deserve what I get. I had tried a bunch of things to fix this. And so one thing I did try finally was actually that this golden sheet that you see is actually double sided. And it's got this, this coating on it that's supposed to be good for the things to stick to and then release on both sides. So I flipped the thing over and I tried it again. And actually for some reason, somewhere in that attempted print run, the bearing got quiet. I don't know exactly why. And I'm sure this is something that's going to come back and bite me later. But all right, so these were a couple of other little failures we had, you know, when I was messing around with it, but hadn't dealt with it. And this is the run that I had at the end of last week. You can't really tell, but this gold build plate is the flip side of the one that we had before. And so some combination of having a nice fresh plate that had never been printed on before, plus whatever magic caused the y-axis bearings to stop being loud, which, you know, and I did a little YouTube thing to read about linear bearings and yes, you know, they're almost surely wearing out or the grease is running low or something like that. So this is going to come back and bite us again, but so far so good. All right, so that's the 3D printer. Now, the ITC parts. So trying to build 450 of the circuit boards, these things. We're printing the tops, the tabs for the PDs ourselves, but we want to get the board plus the two connectors that each one joins two T2 tiles together. I had started to set up an order at Seed Studios and was pricing it out. At first I was using the sullen super-expensive, domestically sourced connectors that were costing 68 cents a piece. And the bottom long and short of it was that Seed's quote for the thing, right, and here's the thing from Digi-Key, the component distributor, 956 available. So we'd need 900 because each connector takes two if we're making 450 connectors. Seed's quote came in really expensive, 1,400 or plus for the 450 connectors. That's like more than three bucks each. More than three bucks each. More than three bucks each cost for these things. I mean, we wonder why, you know, connectors are always so expensive. Well, I still wonder actually. So this again led into the whole thing that you've heard about if you've watched any of these videos in the last few months about trying to find alternate parts instead of the sullen's connector. And 4Ucon had one in Taiwan. It had the same thing, the same 8.5 inch body height, the same angled polarized rib in the middle and so forth. Also, this YXcon company and the people's recovery China had the same thing, same height and so forth. Had this very confusing ordering part number to come up with what I wasn't really sure. I thought it was F185-1216 because my best guess was from Googling around and finding other places like here, here's an F185-1236 right there. And it claims that that's two by 18 positions. So it kind of implies that it was giving you that the number that you stuck in there was the total number of positions, even though the circle broke off and said, you know, the number per row. After last week's update, Andrew did some additional research and dug into this. Thank you, Andrew. And reported into the chat room that my suggestion of thinking I wanted to say 16 for 16 pins total was probably wrong. And I wanted to say 08, meaning the number of positions per row. And he found a bunch of examples and so forth. Some of which I'd found, but some of which I hadn't. And perhaps one of the most compelling things. I'm not sure where there it is. There was one that had an 03 in the part in that corresponding position. And if it was 03, then for the entire position, the entire number of positions, having an odd number of positions makes no sense. So the Seed Studio order seems way expensive. So I went back to PCB way, which I was going to try them in any case. But I made the order and I went with the F185-1208. The positions per row rather than total number of positions. And so they accepted the order. It had two parts. The top part was making the 450 boards and the bottom part was assembling them. And the first part passed was ready to go because that was relatively straightforward. The second one was being reviewed. But then not that long later, three, four hours later, it was approved for $517 with $297 in parts cost, which was a lot better than what I was getting when I was trying to use the Sullen's part. And they quoted back with the fact that it needed a minimum order quantity of 2,000 pieces and so forth. And so the $297 was for buying 2,000 pieces even though I only needed 900. And off we were going, right? So the orders and process and we're paying for it. They had some pushback like, you know, where is the pick-and-place file? Which I responded, you know, there's no pick-and-place file because there's no surface mount parts to pick and place, right? And in fact, that was it. And this is one thing that makes me think that even if, you know, Yolanda Chen is actually a real individual, which, you know, maybe so, maybe not. I don't know. It also seems to me that, you know, several people at PCBway behind the scenes may speak as Yolanda Chen because people sound very different in different circumstances and so forth. And, you know, it's funny because in a way, I don't care. I still am happy to have a single point of contact that is supposed to have sort of a customer relationship to me rather than just nothing or things coming from all different directions. So there is no pick-and-file. That's okay. They'll fix it and so forth. But that was not the end of it. Oh, the circuit boards, they went through the process. They're all done. They've been done for a long time now. But we checked the parts and they say we checked the link again. It's two by eight pins, two rows, eight pins per row. But there's only 12 pins where there's 16 holes on the board. And this was the other point I had worried about that these connectors have two sets of plug pins on the end and unlike the 4U con data sheet where the 1, 2, 3, 4 pin count started inside the plug pins, apparently the XY con data sheet started on the plug pins. Yes, indeed, that's what it was. So we didn't want 1208 at all. We would actually need 1210 to have 10 across with two plugs leaving eight pins piece. Could we change that? Could we requote it and so forth? I went and did some more Googling saying I think it probably needs to be F185, 1210, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Can we switch to that? They did the same research. They said yes, indeed, 1210. Is that actually okay? Should we go for it? And I was like, you know, oh yes. And then there was an additional pushback, which is yes, that's the same part that they had found. But part of the part would extend beyond the silkscreen, the actual part on the circuit board, you know, the equivalent of this little box drawn here except for the inner tile connector, not for the tile. Is it okay that it goes beyond the silkscreen? And so my answer was, it's okay if the part goes beyond the silkscreen because in fact all these do as long as it doesn't go beyond the edge of the board itself. And at this point, I was really starting to freak out about, you know, what are the actual measurements on these things? I thought they were sort of standard to get the thing with the thing and the rib. They'd all be the same. So I went and I got the calipers and then I started measuring my parts. So the one that I have, I don't know if this is a solens or not, but it's something equivalent to it. 25.33 millimeters. So 25.4 is an inch, which corresponds to 10 positions of a .1 inch. Those are .1 inch headers. So that should be all right. So my connectors are 25.33 millimeters. And I went and measured the shroud of the shrouded header that they have to fit into. That's 25.55. So in these things which fit fine, there's two tenths of a millimeter spread between the two sides. And when I went and looked at the datasheet for the 12.10.1, it looked bigger than that. In particular, it was at 25.4 plus a half a millimeter. So I sent the measurement off to them. I said, you know, if you haven't bought it, please wait. It's all messed up. And they were checking as well. They were saying, yes, the part size is 2.54 millimeters a tenth of an inch times 10 plus five half a millimeter. And the board is only and they sent me pictures. It was really great. So, you know, here's the picture of my PD board, which in fact, I can see how they've panelized it up to make a bunch of them all at once, which I hadn't seen before. That was cool. They take a measurement. The board is 25.44 millimeters long. And the part is, you know, 10 times 2.54 plus a half won't fit. And so, you know, yes, again, we crossed on the mail talking about this, what to do. And at this point, I was like, you know, you know, this is the crazy thing I had plugged in. See, look at these. These things are the plugged pins and yet the part I have 25.34 millimeter. These things work fine in the shrouds, but if it's 25.4 or up, it's not going to fit. So I broke down at a time. So I'm going to skip this part. They also said, you know, forget about, you know, maybe don't use the plug pins. No, how about let's use the let's go with the expensive part. Let's go with solids. However, they don't have enough anymore while I dithered around and tried to save money. It went from over 900 to under 900. So the long and short of it is, is we are doing a reduced order. They're going to do 725 panels, which is 600, I believe. Oh, no, 750 parts instead of the 950. And we're going to have to wait for the stock to come in to do the rest. So I paid the extra difference for the why pay less for it's all ends connector, which I could have had ages ago. And in fact, they went and bought them immediately. So I went back to digikey time is up. And the digikey says they get them end of May. I checked back again today. Now they're saying in June we shall see at a time. The next update will be out a week from today. Join in the chat room if you can. That would be great in any event. I'm happy that you're here. I'll see you next week.