 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. I'm Dave Ackley. This is the 17th T Tuesday Update. Let's get going. There's three weeks to the episode 20 deadline. I'm not exactly sure at this point what we will have to show for the episode 20 deadline, but it's possible that we will have all of the inventory either in flight or arrived, and it's possible we will have the manufacturing order out and going. We will not have the actual grid in hand because there's a lot of dependencies that I'm pretty sure will not be satisfied by then, but the manufacturing will be either going or close, I hope. Last week we were deciding which circuit board, which PCB version to make the golden board. We ordered 200 of them. I expected them to be in before this episode today, and I was looking at software stuff. This week I've been kind of procrastinating a little bit, but mostly I've been playing with 3D printing, which is a wonderful way to procrastinate. What I want to make sure and do is put myself on the record that next Tuesday, the next T Tuesday Update 17, I will demonstrate software moving from one tile to another tile through the intertile connectors. I feel like I've been kind of shying away from that because sometimes there's a lot of design that needs to happen in order to get something done, and there's a lot of choices. I sort of push on it a little bit. I don't like anything, and I've been in this stage of development before, and at some point you just have to say, okay well I'm just going to implement something and figure out why it's bad when you go, because it's always a matter of trade-offs, and really unless you've done it very small, you've done it before, or it's a very simple project, you really can't figure out all the trade-offs ahead of time without actually trying it. Software will move next week, or you need to be ragging on me. So I was expecting the circuit boards to ship. In fact, they shipped on Wednesday right after last T Tuesday Update, and I started as, whoops, I started watching as I always do, watching the DHL shipment go. It was, you know, Wednesday they announced it, Wednesday it was picked up, well Thursday it was picked up, Thursday it went to Hong Kong, from Hong Kong it went around and around, it was still Thursday, on Friday it went to LA, which is where it typically goes, and then step 13 I had not seen before shipment on hold. What did that mean? I don't know. Actually, I don't know, but that was Friday, which by the way was officially the delivery date by any day, and that did not happen, and in fact it just kind of went around one place to the other, and sort of hung around LA all weekend long, Saturday, Sunday, and Sunday finally it headed out again. Normally these packages go to Phoenix, and they get from LA to Phoenix to Albuquerque to me in one day, which has always amazed me, but shipment on hold did not amaze me. And in fact, Monday, a shipment arrived at incorrect facility in Phoenix. Okay, and so it's processed at Phoenix, so I figure, you know, I don't have the tiles, I don't have the circuit boards yet, I thought I would have the circuit boards, every other interaction I've had with DHL Express I would have had it, something's gone wrong here, get this, there's been one more update since then. Yes, they've gone from Phoenix apparently back to LA. We'll see if they show up tomorrow or not. Alright, so we do not have the circuit boards to look at. I don't know whether I owe tariffs or taxes, or if it's just luck of the draw or what, I don't know, we shall find out. Alright, but what I really did a lot of this past week is 3D printing stuff, and 3D printing for me is just wonderful, because you can tweak it a little bit, you can tweak it a little bit, you can just make it better and better and better and better, you can sink essentially infinite amount of time in 3D object design. I showed the rendering a few weeks ago of the current tile, this was the one that was meant to use the old, with the notches in the corners, the mounting holes, and it had this whole web work of plastic thing that snapped on the back. We had to redesign that to have to go with the actual mounting holes that were put into the board. At the time of this, there was a comment from Der Streber too, saying, you know, get rid of the North, South, East, West things, they're going to not look good. Now part of that was that in that rendering, they really stand out because they look like they're a different color, whereas in fact when it actually 3D prints, they're all just going to be black or whatever it is, and they don't stand out nearly as much. But I do take the question, I mean, they're going to be North, South, East, West, and on every one of these tiles, it's going to be all over the place. And my response to Der Streber too was, yeah, there's lots of things that we want to get better. And that in particular, I felt like the case was sort of just making people under-appreciate sort of the difference, the stuff that's going on in this thing that is not normal. It just looks like, I said, a toy tablet, a little Lego phony baloney tablet, but I wanted to read as some sort of cool unit that goes into construction that makes a bigger thing. So that was all the stuff that I wanted to take on this week. And so here is my new i3 Mark III printer. I've been hanging around for a while, I didn't get it set up until this week. Starting out to print essentially the current design from before, just minimally changed to support the mounting holes. And when it was all printed, it looked like this. Oh, I have a new thing. I can go like that. So if you can see any of that. Now, there's a couple of key changes in this thing. Now, one of the things that you might have been able to see, well, who knows, back in the rendering, but I'll talk about it in a minute. So that looked okay. Now, one of the problems is that these are regular Phillips head screws and the screw heads are really quite large. And in particular in the south, the northeast, where is it? No, the southwest corner. There's really not a lot of clearance for the screw head. And I was looking for other options. There's things called a cheesehead that's a little bit smaller and a little taller because I guess it looks like a wheel of cheese if anybody actually knows what entire wheels of cheese look like. And then there are the socket caps that you have to use with a little Allen wrench, but those are also narrower. So I did the original one and then I started messing with it. So, right, filling in. Again, it looks like it's going to be really dramatic, but then once you see it all done, it's like where the letters go. You have to get the reflection just right even to see them. I did a version where I made a little cross-action, a little 45-degree squares all over the front of the thing to try to get the sort of scaffolding effect, which turned out to be this, which is kind of cool a little bit. And notice, the Dirstreeber II, the, these guys again, the, in this case, the north, south, east, west lettering is gone. And I was happy to go with that. I thought that that made sense. And then the very first time I tried to mount this, I tried to mount a tile with this next to it. I did screw the thing down, upside down, and I was trying to match up the, something like this, the west header on one of these things, I guess, with the debug header on the other side, which it just doesn't go. Which said to me, well, you know, I don't know, maybe the lettering, we don't want to lose it quite so much yet. And, but I did realize that I didn't have to be using the gigantic wide font that I had used originally here for the lettering. I could use a narrower font and maybe get away with both. And so here's a version where I've now tried to go with a much larger hole framework, looking more like struts in a scaffolding. And that one, oh, that one's actually currently in use over here. Well, we'll look at it in a second. And I also did something white because white is a lot easier to see what's going on in it. And, you know, it's a funny thing because, you know, you spend time with this and you think, oh, well, it would be cool if you made the cases look like X or the cases look like Y. But the thing that I really have to keep thinking to myself is, you know, this is the picture frame. The actual picture is what's going on, you know, inside the frame in the movable feast. And we don't want to make the frame pull attention from the picture. So these things want to be functional and cool and invisible, if that's not a contradiction in terms. So, but this is one where we got the lettering and the struts in the thing. And it came out pretty good. And now this is one of my absolute favorite things. This is the typical thing. Now, I don't know if we really saw it before, but when these things printed up, it prints two little buttons because there are two buttons on the thing. There's a button down here, which is programmable, just a user button for whatever you want. I'm not even sure what all it'll do. And then there's a button over here, which is actually a power button. So you can turn it on with this and you can hold it four seconds to power, you know, force a power off and so on, just like a typical computer works. And so inside these cases, there are these little 3D printed sleeves that these pins that are these buttons go into. And it used to drive me crazy because every time you turn a case over or try to lift it up, the buttons would the button shafts would fall out of the holes and I'd lose them. So I was always printing extra ones and so on. So this is one of the things that makes me very happy. I went back this week and I redesigned the button shaft so that it has a little stick out bump in it. And I redesigned the button sleeve, the shaft hole that it goes into so that it's open at one end and has a little slot. And now when the thing comes off the 3D printer, you just take the little button shafts and you bop them in. And now, yeah, now they'll rattle around but they don't fall out. Very nice. In addition, right here, this is another thing and it sort of makes sense actually because there are two LEDs on the board as well. Well, there's several, but there's two. One for the grid power is, you know, the 12 volt power going amongst all the grids within a power zone and then there's the, is this particular tile powered up. And so there are little LEDs, but the LEDs are way down on the circuit board and so one of the things you can do is you make a light pipe, you know, a piece of acrylic in this case that is sort of just lands on top of the LED and then goes up to the top and that's what we have here. Let's get rid of this stuff again. So, you know, once again, here's my two test tiles. Here it is with the scaffolding and the lettering. Here it is just with the scaffolding in black and so you see, you know, it does drop out as we want it to do. But you can see the, I don't know how much with this amount of light you can see the LEDs and so forth. And again, it's all in the end about the intertile connectors that are going to allow us to put all of this stuff tile after tile after tile. So, the trapped buttons. I love the light pipes. That's just a 1 eighth inch plastic rod that I just chop off pieces. You can get official ones that are all rounded and they have better light properties and this and that, but you know, whatever, they do the job anyway. So, that's the case. Oh, yeah, I got a few beauty shots. It looks good, doesn't it? I mean, this is now vinyl one. Now, I mean, one of the things that I don't know if I've really dwelled on but that it's important is that, you know, so here, this intertile connector, which in fact is, which one here? It's East. The East intertile connector has this slot in it. The Northeast one also has this little slot in it and the Southeast one does, but the Southwest, West and Northwest ones do not. And that's because there's two different types of connectors here that I call Fred and Ginger and that's because all of the transmission lines that go out of a Fred need to become reception lines going in on a Ginger and all the transmission lines coming out of a Ginger need to become reception lines coming in on a Fred. But what we want to do for the intertile connectors is we want the intertile connectors to just be straight through not to actually have wires turning over and rerouting pins in the connector. So instead, we have two different sockets. We have Fred's and Ginger's and the constraint is, is that you always have to connect a Fred to a Ginger. So one side that has the key on it and one side that doesn't and our intertile connectors are all designed to support that. That there's the polarizing key that that would go into a Ginger there and this side, you can't see the polarizing key but in fact it's on the inside there and that goes to a Fred. So in order to make that all work, we need... Oh, okay, and here I am. So now in fact these, what I just showed you are using the socket, Allen wrench socket things are a little narrower. I got a bunch of them in black. They look pretty cool. And I think with the scaffolding on a black case, I think it's going to look good enough. It won't draw attention to itself but it'll be there. Tightening it up. Oh, yeah. And can you see it? Right there. We got the light sensor. So this cut out here in the case which was designed for the debug header has now been extended. So in fact you do have to be careful when you put the debug header in that you don't put it in one registration off, you got to pull it down toward the corner. Just have to be careful. But again, the debug header is expert only business so it doesn't have to be quite as robust as the rest of the design. And there they are just running which we just saw. Okay, now, and here is the close up from the other day of what the keyed header looks like. Here's the thing. I was setting up an order with AliExpress with China for these keyed headers. There are not a lot of them out there. And they have kind of gone out of stock now. I think that may just be because we're now into the Chinese New Year, the Spring Festival, and a lot of the, it seems a lot of the AliExpress stores are refreshing themselves and they've lost all of their content and so forth, which I think will hopefully come back soon. But at the moment, I can't order these. And there's going to be this gap. There's going to be this gap in, I mean, some things, I mean, as far as I can tell, I don't know where to get these in the United States. I don't know where to get these domestically. I would have to make some kind of custom order for way more than I need. Now, again, it isn't 100% strictly necessary to be used unkeyed ones here. It would be all right. This is just an additional level of protection. As long as you always match up a fret and a ginger between tiles when you're connecting them up, you could do it with unkeyed headers and it would be all right. But I'd really rather not. I mean, this is the whole point of trying to make things robust. All right. In the same, in that spirit though, where is it here? There's now a repo on GitHub that shows the 3D printing tiles for the intertile connectors. This is the one that goes in the middle with data and power called the PD. This is one called the DO for data only. The power injector one is this thing up here that we were just looking at. This is a power injector one. It's also an intertile connector because there's no other place to go in with it. And so there it is. The designs are up there. They're draft, but the connectors anyway are close to done. These is Andy Walpole. Andrew Walpole uses 3D printer and printed up some PDs and got them to work. This was all happening in the chat room and I'm out of time. So the next... The next episode will be out in a week. We will have intertile software. You come and check. Thanks for watching.