 Computers keep changing the world, but their power and safety is limited by their rigid design. The T2 Tile 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 20th T Tuesday Update. Let's get into it. Ten weeks ago I set a goal of having a grid of these tiles, these incremental computing elements that you can plug into the copies of itself to have 133 of them manufactured and running by today. Failed big time at that. Did get a lot of progress done. What I want to do today rather than setting another, you know, five-year plan, ten-week plan, mostly I just want to talk about what happened last week because that's actually, you know, that's sort of what's real. But there is stuff about the next couple of weeks coming up, so I'll talk about that as well. Okay, so we had a bunch of, we had most of the parts we're in, the parts that we're missing were these through-hole parts, the things that connect one thing to another. And we last week found this company, 4Ucon, 4Ucon, 4Uconnector.com, via Adafruit, from their datasheet that was there. But they were in Spring Festival. That's done in China at this point, so they're back. I started getting in touch with them. I tried to price up an order for the intertile connectors that we need, 1200 of them, if we're saying a max build of 200, which is probably going to be more than we're actually going to do. But we'll see. We need 1200 of these, 600 times 200, plus the two main P8 and P9 connectors that we actually connect the big bones to the board with need about 600 of those. I'm sorry, I need about 400 of those, buying 1,000 because that's the minimum order quantity. Sent a mail to them saying, is there any way that we could reduce this minimum order quantity of 5,000 for the intertile connectors down to something more like 1200 that I actually need? So I proposed to buy 2,000 of them and said, you know, is there any way that we could do that with a higher price or something? And I sent it off. I didn't even wait for an answer. I went on and started buying other stuff. I need to get like 800 of the socket cap screws to screw the cases onto the boards. Found a guy on AliExpress, sent him a mail. His webpage said, if you wanted large quantity, get in touch. He'll get you some kind of discount, so I got in touch. I'm wondering if you could offer some kind of quantity discount for 10 plus units. Again, actually I want something like 16 plus units, but I was trying to leave a little room to negotiate. This guy has not answered at all. This sort of aggravates me a little bit, but we'll see about what happens going forward. Other guys getting these spacers to connect the beagle bones to the circuit board and perhaps just connect the circuit board to the entire tiles, to the back plane, the acrylic thing that's going to mount them for handling. I'm not sure. Found a pretty good price and this guy's DHL was pretty cheap, so I didn't even negotiate. Let's do it. Delivery time five to five days is a little bit scary, but you know. So I put in the order. I decided, oh yeah, better leave a little happy friendly message for happy new years on it and so forth. And this one has actually already shipped. These are, you know, I ordered a thousand of the screws, the matching screws to go with these things. There'll be at least four on a board to hold the standoffs for the beagle bone green. There might be eight on a board if they're depending on how we actually mount these things on to the back next backstop that we're going to go for it. 10 lots of 100 each. That's a thousand of a thousand of these things. They were only $30, $39 delivered, you know, which is really pretty cheap. But then it's just a tiny little nut. Actually, I went to alibaba.com, which is the place for the actual dealing with wholesalers where you're always dealing straight with the factory. And, you know, these things, the same part, the DIM, 4934 stainless steel nut of the M3 size, blah, blah, blah, like that. You know, you pay $700 on alibaba.com, but you get a metric ton. They really crank these things out. So that is also in flight. That has officially shipped according to a message a couple of days ago, although the tracking number is not working yet. That's one of the little tricks that they do. Even when you pay for, you know, FedEx, IE or DHL or whatever it is, they claim to give you a number, but then the number doesn't resolve through DHL or FedEx for like days. So we'll see what happens with that. I got mail back from the 4Ucon people saying many thanks. It was very nice. And so the problem is, is the reason it's a 5K minimum order quantity is because it's a special order because it's gray. If I would take black, which had a different part number than the minimum quantity, it was a thousand, which is much closer to what I needed. Now, the problem is I couldn't find black. I didn't actually want gray. So I answered thanks for the response. It looks better for me. I've been, I can't, but I can't actually find the point that you're linking to me on the website. Of course, I had to edit it and put in little apologies and whatnot. I don't know. I hate doing this stuff. I don't feel like I'm good at it, but I'm getting a little bit more practice at it. This is the whole outside the comfort zone thing. Sent it off. And in fact, I think their database was messed up and somebody actually went and fixed it. So this only took, I think this was same day that the answer came back, that they got it fixed. So that was pretty good. And so I found, I put together an order using the new number that they gave me for black of the intertile connectors, which is more what I wanted anyway. Plus the two by 23 headers. That's for the Beaglebone greens plus two by 13 headers. That's to connect the display to the board. And then the only remaining question was this lead time seven to 28 working days, 28 working days. It's like seven weeks. And well, not quite that bad six weeks and so on. So, but, you know, I figured, you know, there's a factory. There's billions of these things lying around. They just have to kind of scoop them out and weigh them and send them to me. So I wanted to double check, you know, is everything in stock? Is it really going to take 28 days and so on? And I got the answer back. No, these items are produced by order. We do not have stock. So three to four times three to four weeks approximately starting from when I confirmed the order. So these parts are not in flight. I haven't pulled the trigger on these things. But my feeling is, is, you know, it's time to relax a little bit. I've worked pretty hard to get an awful lot of parts in and in particular to get secure the parts that look like they were going to go out of stock for, you know, 10s and 20 week periods lead times. And so if this is three to four weeks, I'm going to be doing other stuff for the next three weeks anyway. If I do this kind of thing, then, you know, I don't also miss. I don't need to pay for the super rush shipping. So as long as we can be making progress and actually getting things coming getting things moving, it would be more cost effective to not rush quite as much. It's just, you know, I've been working on this for a long time. I want to see this thing running. Hardware is just a stepping stone to get to the architecture level to get to the software level to get to the living computation, which is really the goal for me. But made a lot of progress and need to relax. All right. The funny thing was was that so she suggested that, you know, please order 21 553 instead of 16188, you know, so what the deal is that. So this was 16188. This was the other one, you know, and what the heck is the difference? I spent quite a bit of time looking through these things trying to figure out what the difference is. Basically, the difference is the tolerances got a little bit worse. This is, you know, two times 2.54 2.54 millimeters is a tenth of an inch. You see that everywhere. Plus or minus 0.4. That's the original one. And where is it here? There it is 2.54 plus 0.45 and so on. So as far as I can tell the new version that I'm being encouraged to order, which I suspect is the only thing they've got everything in terms of the electrical properties all exactly the same. They just give themselves a little bit more mechanical slop. Okay, I'm all right with that. And all right. So that's where we were again. And so bottom line. Here's what the parts look like right now. Everything in green in in row H here in green is whether we have enough stock for the part to build 150 of them. In row in column I here is whether we have enough stock to build 200 of them. And essentially, we've got enough stock to build 200 of everything, except we need more Beaglebones greens and displays if we want to do 200. But we could do that after we get the order because the ETS guys assembling the board are not going to be plugging the Beaglebones into it directly. We're going to be doing that. So the real thing again, it's the through hole parts J1 to six. Those are the intertile connectors going around the outside P8 and P9 and so forth. Very little of this was green 10 weeks ago. This is progress. All right. So let's talk about 3D printing talk about 3D printing a bunch last week. There's been a bunch of follow ups. This is what things were looking like before. Last time we had the two legs, the two buttons in the middle plus the case around it. And we had had that one failure. Whoops. Always the one failure where one of the buttons came loose from the bed and ended up, you know, I don't know flopping around. I really don't know how it managed to get this kind of hairdo. So again, last week designed a brim, an extra little thing to give more surface area on the build plate to help it stick down. And that worked pretty good. But then you had to kind of nip off the little ring off of each thing, which wasn't hard to do, but it was an extra step. And I ended up having all of these little nipped off rings lying around my 3D printer. And Andrew Walpole suggested that you could do a raft or you could do these other things and so forth, which led me to think about, you know, well, you know, if really the only goal is to have a bigger footprint on the build plate to let it stick down better, then why have something that has to be removed at all? Couldn't we make this thing just be a little bit bigger? The radius of it can't get much bigger because the buttonhole is near the edge of the case. If the diameter of the little pusher foot got much bigger, it would hit the case. But it could be asymmetric. So I, so right, here's a picture of it printing out with the brim. So I designed these things that I called duck legs that are still the same diameter on one side, but they extend a bit away to get more land, more area on the build plate. And this solves an additional problem for me, which is now that they're asymmetric, the position of it's easy to tell where the little bump is that's going to go into the push button shaft hole, which used to be a small pain point because it was black, you know, plastic going in a black hole and so on. And the thing that you were holding on to was that pusher at the bottom and it was completely symmetric. So you'd be spinning it around trying to figure out which one angle to get it to go in so that they would make properly. And now making it asymmetric because it didn't need to be symmetric. You just grab it and you know, bam, it's going to go in. So that's nice like that. And let's see. So here's another angle, a couple of pairs of duck legs. And here they are mounted on the board. So they're right angles to the locking shaft and the locking shafts are both pointing in the same direction. One of them points along the side of the case. The other one points into the case. That ends up working out right given the other material. So here is the one. So it's a little hard to see. There's the duck foot there that's pointing along the case. It could not actually point into the case because it would smash into this giant capacitor, which I built in there, which is probably way bigger than it needs to be and so on. Here's the other one that is pointing into the case because there's plenty of room there and so on. Now I was a little bit worried that in particular that this guy, you know, his duck foot is running right along the edge of the case. And I was afraid that when you were assembling it and the button could drop down a little lower, it might get rotated and latch under the corner of the case and make it inconvenient to set it down. And so eventually I said, well, okay, but I could narrow it down so that even if it rotates a little bit, it won't go out far enough to catch on the edge of the case. So now these aren't duck feet. These are more like, you know, Pinocchio legs or something like that. Some kind of industrial accident like that. But these actually are working pretty good. I printed up a few of these. They assemble easily and so forth. So that's pretty good. Now, last week also we were working on the holes for the glow rods that the light emitting dials go at the bottom for the power supply showing the red for the grid power supply and green for this individual tiles power supply. And I was having trouble getting the hole to be uniform enough so that it wouldn't be either too tight or too loose. Now Andrew Walpole pointed me at a... What's going on? Oh, wrong button. Pointed me at a video by Makers Muse. There's a great YouTube channel that does lots of... does 3D printing stuff, you know. Better 3D printed holes CAD for newbies. Like that. And the one I liked was this third example that he showed where you sort of just cut this little relief arc so that when you jam in the hole through you can make it a little bit tight and then these little veins here can give a little bit to compensate for any variation. So I tried to do one of those and I made a little blank to try it on and it seemed possible although it was really super tight so I had to start scaling it up. Here's where I was testing a range of percentages over the 1 eighth of an inch to get it to work and eventually it turned out to be plus seven. The 7% solution to make the hole 7% bigger than the thing just because of the nature of how it works and these are all 7% holes. They're just oriented differently with respect to the first layer printing and so on. And these are working pretty well. There's what it looks like in the first layer getting put down. Here it is, has built up a little ways and so forth. Now, you know, sometimes it crud gets in the middle and it gets into trouble but mostly it's really not bad. So here's an example where some crud got into the middle. I ended up reaming it out with a Torx bit and then it actually worked okay. But you know, it's always something. And here's an example of it in use. It's sort of the happy Cyclops Glowrod Holder. Not bad. Got to hurry up almost out of time but started having some first layer failures which is if you've done any 3D printing, you know my pain. You know, it's probably, I didn't clean the build plate well enough although I've gotten pretty religious about that. So you know, I had to, it was a disaster. But so Google about it and you read about these things and one of the things to do is to raise the temperature of the extruder so that the plastic is a little more liquidy. Raise the temperature of the bed so it's all a little sticky just for the first layer. I raised it up 5 degrees to 220 degrees centigrade and 65 degrees for the bed and that's working pretty well. So far I haven't had a failure. This is it's laying down in the new one. At least I haven't had a failure on the first layer. Just one thing after another. I'm sorry, I'm sure this gets boring but this is actually what happens. Finally was getting to the end of the first rule, rule, the first spool of Prusament. Now this i3 Mark III printer, one of its big features is it has a filament sensor so it can tell when it's out and stop. So alright, so we're going to see it happening. It popped loose from the thing when it came in. It gradually slurped it up and then it detected that and then went into filament changing mode. Press the knob to unload the filament. I did okay, please pull out the filament immediately. There is no filament to pull out. It's gone in already. So I had to kind of skip that step but I went ahead and I put the next one in and it did try to suck it in a little bit and it did squeeze out a little bit at the bottom but it did not squeeze out as much. When you change filament normally you get a whole little pile of squeeze out stuff. That is not enough. Long and short of it is my extruder is completely clogged at this point. I can't print anything at the moment. Try these things, whatever. I will spare you the details. We'll find out. I'm dreading trying to get this thing cleared and this is all because I didn't buy it from a kit. I didn't learn all the guts. I tried to get it assembled. Alright, so that's that. Now, bottom line. The next goal is the Artificial Life Conference. The abstracts, the papers are due Friday, March 8th. It's about three weeks from today. That's going to be the focus of attention. I'm going to have the parts discussions and the ordering and the stuff in flight hopefully happening in the background but I'm not going to be working on the hardware. Not going to be working on the software except in so far as it serves the needs of the paper and that's what it's going to be. In the words of my friend, Melanie Mitchell who has this on the door, the fundamental question is why aren't you writing? And I can use your help. In the next several weeks, the next three weeks, if you see me on the internet, on social media, please say hi Dave, why aren't you writing? I'll be back somehow to have a brief update next week. Thanks for being here. Thanks for watching.