 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 24th T Tuesday Update. Let's get into it. For the last several weeks, it's been all about writing this paper to send off to the Artificial Life Conference that's happening in the UK this summer that paper has now shipped. What I would like to do, I believe it's doable, by next week we should be build ready in the sense that all of the parts that need to be soldered together from the circuit board to the through-hole parts to the surface mounts parts we should have them all in hand. I need to get with the UNM folks to make sure we've set up the proper pipeline to get ETS paid for building them. But one week from today, I think we have a very good chance, I'm putting myself on the hook to say we should be at scheduling with ETS when these tiles are going to get built. Now that doesn't mean we're done with the hardware. We still have to get cases. We still have to get some more beagle bones and displays possibly down the road depending on how many tiles we actually end up assembling with ETS. We'll talk about that next week. And we still have to make all the intertile connectors. I mean these things, this is a tiny little circuit board plus parts and assembly and 3D printing all has to be done as well. So that we have plenty to do. But if we can get the tiles and manufacture, yay. Alright, today I'll have an update on 3D printing and update on the bill of materials. Let's get into it. Alright, so if we remember where we were. For a while, and this is several revs into the case. I had managed to be printing them four at a time, but then I started getting these failures. In particular, when we were in the back left corner, we started getting, yes. Urmintemp bed. And after going through all kinds of issues about dealing with that, the fix was, well, if the problem is occurring in the back corner, don't use the back corner. And I started doing three up and just skipping this thing and that worked pretty well. I got a bunch more done through it. Also had this print fan error, another apparently completely separate problem. The wires go in a whole different place that was fixed by saying, okay, don't check the fans if they're working because they were still working. The fan check error means that it thinks the fan isn't spinning. The fan definitely was spinning. So that got us working again. And then here we are. All was nice until it wasn't. Now, there it is. Urmintemp bed is back and it's no longer in the corner, it's in the middle. This was the first one I got. It was very close to the center. I just peeled up these layers and decided to try again. And I got another one. Now it's over in a corner. So now really we're dead in the water until Urmintemp bed can be dealt with. It would be nice to deal with print fan error as well. So, you know, we've been talking about this. So I did investigate the warranty situation on the pre-assembled Prusa i3 Mark III printers because that's what I have, the pre-assembled one. The whole point was I didn't want to have to learn how to do all this stuff. One-year warranty for the rest of the world. The printer shipped to us last May. So that means we have at least until May of this year for warranty service. I had, you know, sent mail. I had used, whoops, I had used the online. I can get this if I try. Here we go. I had gotten the, used the online send a note thing last couple of weeks. I'd sent a couple of notes, got nothing. The hypothesis was that since this had been bought by the department for me, the guy in the department that actually had the official account I was using was not linked to this printer. So I got in touch with the guy at the department and he said, well, you know, I can be him for purposes of talking to these things about warranty printer. So this is me. I got online with the chat thing to say, you know, how do I arrange for a warranty service to get this thing working? It actually didn't take all that long to wait. They were warning me it might take a half an hour. It only took maybe 10 minutes, 10 minutes or so. And I was talking to this Shane person and they were, and I saw it, I got the Irmin 10 bed and they said, well, you got to find the wire and not the thick ones. And it's like, well, but, you know, I can't see any thicker thin wires. I see the bed. I see the big wrapped cable. That's it. And, you know, I kind of knew the implication was, was that I'm supposed to take the thing apart to take a look at the bottom of the bed or whatever it is like that, but I didn't want to do that. I have no idea how to remove the bed nor in desire to do so. Is this how assembled printer warranty service works? Now, you know, okay, I'm being kind of a dork in the sense that, well, in the sense of what? In the sense of like a product that I bought assembled that comes with a warranty. I should just be able to say it's not working and they should say, okay, we'll fix it, but that's not the way it works here. I mean, and, and he says, no, no, that isn't the way it works. Yeah, we have to see what the issues are and then we'll send you parts. And so then it's like, oh, and then I have to repair the printer myself. The warranty repair I have to do using the parts you sent me. And yes, indeed, that's the answer. And, you know, again, I was really suspecting this was true, but I really don't want to do this. I don't even want to take the bed off because the last thing I want to do is have to figure out how to recalibrate all this stuff. That's why I bought an assembled printer. I don't know the reasons why I bought an assembled printer. Yeah, you have to go through the steps. They, they refer me to the instruction, the assembly manual, and I have to step 14 backwards, which turns out means I have to actually start with step 16 and do that backwards. Then step 15, then step 14, and then maybe I can observe whatever it is I'm supposed to observe. And I said, look, you know, what if I just want to ship it back to you guys and let you do it? How does that work? How much is it going to cost me? And I mean, I really thought that was a reasonable question, but actually it's not. Well, you ship it back here, they look it over, see if it's a warranty claim, get the parts and so forth, and how much would it cost? Couldn't tell me. And like I said, last thing I want to do is learn how to recalibrate all this stuff myself. And now I'm being told that I just, I'm going to have to do a recalibration just to check if it's a warranty service because of a part. I'm going to have to take the bed off and put it back on and then mess around with it and so forth. So I never got a straight answer about how much it would cost. And he kept saying, I would have to pay for shipping. And I kept saying, yeah, I understand I would have to pay for shipping, but then what? And then I said, OK, well, finally, do I need an RMA? Do I need one of these numbers? Couldn't tell me whether I need an RMA or not because basically I was, you know, I'm acting as if a 3D printer, a warranty to assemble 3D printer is like a regular consumer product. And Prusa and all of these guys, they don't want to treat it that way because really it's kind of not. It's kind of crazy and busting and you got to get into a relationship with your 3D printer to like it or not. And I have one. I just don't want it to hit the next level. So, you know, it was all crazy. And so finally the guy said that, you know, or the girl, I don't know, that they'll leave a message for the people when they come in. So the guy at the office of the department is probably going to get mail from them at some point. And I really am not sure how to pursue, how to proceed on this. I suspect I should probably take the bed off, remove these nine screws, remove these things, be careful not to do this and so forth. Because it might be possible that I could just find a piece of wire that I could solder or jump something and get back to work rather than worrying about actually trying to get them to send me something. But I don't know. I really don't feel like I had that kind of time. If there's any other way to pursue it. I went back to the brain trust at the chat room and, okay, you know, if I need to buy another 3D printer, what do I need to buy? And I'm open to suggestions there. There was a Creality CR, I don't know, something or other, that I looked at and, you know, way cheaper than the Prusa, less than half the cost. And I'm worried that the accuracy is not going to be quite as good and I'm not going to be happy. I'm going to end up being all frustrated with that as well. Don't know. So on the 3D printing situation, number one, we are dead in the water. We're not printing. And number two, not entirely sure how to proceed. That's the state there. All right. On the bill of materials. Basically, there's a couple of things that have been pending. Well, so let's just get into it. There was this whole thing with the screws for connecting the Beaglebone to the board through the standoffs and also to connect the, perhaps, to connect the tile itself to some next level mounting where the tiles get grouped together. I got these cheesehead screws from the Granger guys last week and they had these kind of thick heads, which is, you know, it was fine. I mean, that's what the cheesehead meant. So I kind of knew it. I only got these because they were the only ones that were listed in M3 5mm from the Granger guys, but really ended up thinking didn't want the cheesehead. And so this was one of the ones that came with a little kit I got. It's all nice and a little roundy and the head itself is not that much bigger than the Phillips drive part of it, which means you'd be more risking cam out. You'd be more risking a strip. But this is not a place where I'm going to be loading it up anyway. And here's what they look like side by side. Here's the cheesehead and here's the ones noticeably lower. So I wanted to find some other options and I found Bolt Depot in Massachusetts. They had very smooth website. You can make orders of $3 here, $2 here. So I got a bag, a hundred bag, a hundred of all the three different types of M3 by 0.5. That's the thread times 5mm screws in zinc and the two kinds of stainless steel that they had and got it shipped for $14. Very nice. And then here it was. I have a soft spot in my heart for Hingham, Massachusetts. It's on the south coast underneath Boston. My aunts used to live there. We used to go through there in the summertime. I like Hingham. And I also love how these days you can give identifying information of your own and it'll show up on the packaging material as soon as you see it. So indeed this is the H9 through H12 evaluation stuff, some sample stuff. And here they are. And the stainless steel, the two grades and the cheaper stuff, the zinc plated. And here they are all compared. This one on the lower left is the original one that I preferred. This is actually a 6mm shaft length so it's longer than the other ones. But that in fact, the 6mm is a little bit too long for some of the purposes. Sometimes in some of the standoffs it actually bottoms out before snugging up against the circuit board. So I wanted 5mm. But this head, this nice little rounded head, this is the cheese head, this is the big old thing and these were the three that came from the bolt depot. These were called pan heads and they seem kind of somewhere in between. They're not sort of flared out like the cheese head but they're not all nice and tucked around. They really sort of have a side wall. Well, so I tried them out. So here's what the nice ones, the actual pan heads that came in that little kit that I got a while ago look like in the board. This is the Beaglebone Green mounted on the headstile, the circuit board that I soldered up. This is the LCD, the liquid crystal display on top. And here's another corner of it. And you know, it's snug but with the original ones there's clearance. And here it is with the two screws from the bolt depot order, one of the stainless steels ones. And you know, it's thicker. Here's what it looks like underneath the LCD. I think it's probably all right but I wouldn't mind a little more clearance. And other side as well. Some of the sides don't matter at all. Yeah, this one, there's plenty of clearance here because the four holes that go through the Beaglebone to hold it down, which is what these screws are doing, are not in a strict rectangle. So one side is further out than the other and so on. And that guy, he's got enough clearance. I also discovered while I was doing this that you can actually kind of peek through the grill and see one of the screws from the front and you can actually peek through the east key slot to keep the intertile connectors going in the correct direction and see another one of them. So probably it's fine, but I only bought samples of these and I'm going to need order 800 to 1,000 of these. I think I'd like to keep looking for now. So that's the story. But bottom line, so the pan head Phillips screwdriver situation is still not completely set. But again, those are not soldered on. That does not block us from going to ETS. On the other hand, we have the P8 and P9, the two headers that mount the Beaglebone to our circuit board that I finally ordered from AliExpress. The guys did not offer DHL, so I went with this e-packet, which is free shipping, very scary. And then I ordered it and basically it didn't even ship. It was awaiting shipping, awaiting shipping. This processing time was seven days. It was ticking down. Finally, I sent them an email and then five hours later, it shipped. And so now I'm trying to track it and see if it's actually getting anywhere. It goes through this EMS site and it shows that it arrived at some sorting center and then nothing happens for days after days. This particular website has a very weird capture that you need to do. It took me a while to figure out. It's a one-dimensional capture where you have to grab this button and slide it over and you're sliding a little puzzle piece to line up with the other puzzle piece. This puzzle piece is always exactly the same. It's always light gray relative to its surround. I would assign this as a first task, is to find the puzzle piece in the picture for an image processing class. So here I am. I'm sliding this thing back and forth. I've almost got the puzzle piece lined up on this one. It's really silly. I can't believe it works at all. It seems like it's one of these sort of cargo cult captures that's supposed to make you think you did it one, but unless they're doing something about velocity of a thing that you slide the thing back and forth, I don't know. Eventually I found out from Googling the number that in fact I could track it via USPS because I didn't get it that EMS is using the national posts of the different countries. So it's in the China post when it's in China and then it gets handed off to USPS when it gets here. And indeed they gave me the same information, but it was a little less threatening and they didn't have any capture that I had to slide a puzzle piece on. And then yesterday they arrived in LA. I was willing to believe it could have taken weeks to get to this point, but supposedly yesterday they arrived in LA and they're supposed to be here on Thursday. Those are the last parts that need to be soldered on to the board. We're going to be all willing, ready to go. All right, so that means our last bit of red in the stuff that needs to be here to manufacture these tiles is now going to be in place in a couple of days, if all goes well. That's exciting. All right, so that's that. The paper shipped, the reviewing process takes about a month or something like that. I got my email from their automated email and an easy chair, the conference system that an awful lot of these conferences use. They received the paper. We're not going to pay attention to the time that it was 5.26 a.m. on Saturday, even though it was supposed to be on Friday with the extension, but the place was still open. There we go. All right, just about out of time. Next week, ready to build, payment methods ready to go, and maybe could even have a schedule for when these things are going to get made. We'll see. Thanks for watching.