 We'll talk about that at the end. Hey folks, happy New Year. Thanks for coming by. I've got a video here about stuff that I've done for the last two weeks. Let's take a look at that and then we'll talk about where we are and where I think we're going. All right, I don't know. The back plate goes on this way. The first DCR. It seems to be the Beaglebone Green. Seems to be insisting on booting from the internal drive. Once upon a time we were supposed to have to push to get that to change. The long and short of it is I made 60 more tiles, two boxes of 30. I was going to heft them up here but I'm still having terrible problems with this whole video set up so everything's fragile. I hate it. The long and short of it is is we are now close to 100 tiles with 60 I just made plus the 20 something that I've been using that have been in the existing T2 demos and so forth. During the process I didn't focus on it in the video but there was one apparent board failure that I tried a couple of different Beaglebones with it and I couldn't get the thing to boot. I didn't actually diagnose this. This is part of my arc going from electronics consumer to electronics maker. Once there's actually a pipeline, a process, some things aren't going to work and maybe you fix them and maybe you just put it aside and up your selling price enough to compensate for it. We'll see whether I go back and figure out what was wrong with that board or not. I haven't yet. Going forward in the hardware front my goal is to try to power out another 30 tiles if we don't run out of anything. I'm actually worried about running out of the little Phillips head screwdrivers that screw the Beaglebone down onto the board although there's really no reason why I have to use four screws and so forth but we'll see and then go ahead and start building the power zones which I'll talk about in a second and then facing this off for demons which I'll also talk about in a second. All right so this is a figure from 2018 that is actually still largely correct except now I don't hyphenate intertile connector anymore you know it's the way it is you know words start out separately then they hook up and then after a while they become a whole one single word together. The idea is is that one of these tiles and I've talked about this but I haven't talked about it that much lately the connectors that go in between them there's three different kinds of connectors and so this is the one that we've seen the most if you look at it I guess we can probably see it there's two little sockets there each of these goes into a separate adjacent t2 tile this one and then there's a little circuit board that holds them together and then a little 3d printed handle this one has got sort of a lozenge pill shape this is a dp that means it connects data lines and power lines so if there's power going into one of these tiles and there's a dp connector the power flows into the other one and that's by design and the the point of it is is that all of this stuff the wiring and the circuitry and all of this is all size to carry a certain amount of current and not more and so the way it was designed to the way I designed it was that something on the order of 20 tiles should be able to have the amount of handle the amount of current going through these connectors and so forth so this is the original design for a power zone it's 19 tiles one tile surrounded by six surrounded by 12 for a total of 19 and you know I shifted to a more rectangular shape a five by four shape but I'm tempted to actually go back to this because it's I just like it better it seems more organic to me but the important point of it is is that that is all they're in the middle there where is it can we see it right right there is once the third well there's three types so we saw the data in power one this is the data only it's got you see the same thing it's got the two connectors the circuit board but the circuit board's a different circuit board and it has this different sort of flared handle to distinguish it from the dps and those are data only connectors that go all around the end of a power zone so the idea is you take a power injector the rarest kind of itc connector that's effectively a dp data in power but it also has this pigtail that you can plug into a wall wart and the way the whole thing is designed it uses 12 volt wall wart power supplies with a connector that matches the one that's used for a lot of led strip lighting so it's it's very cheap and they're all over the place so the idea is you take a 19 tiles you connect them together by data and power connectors you surround them with data only connectors and you plug in a single power injector and that's a power zone now actually with more experience i would actually rather have two power injectors per power zone so that if you need to remove a tile that happens to be connected to a power injector you could remove one power injector and still have redundant power going in somewhere else i don't think i have enough circuit boards and headers and so forth manufactured to actually do two power injectors per power zone but you know we'll see how it goes the point is is that the original size of the build the plan build there it is down there 133 tiles that's 19 tiles times seven arranged in this kind of flower and and this is what i would like to shoot for can we get to 133 trials trials before running out of something i'm not sure uh but we'll find out but if we can manage to make seven power zones and arrange them as one power zone with six power zones surrounding it i'm calling that success on the hardware front we'll see i don't know okay but that's the plan going forward uh on soft software in some sense the story of last year was me trying to figure out how to make the engine processing the event processing on the t2 tiles more robust and failing and failing and failing and i thought about it quite a bit over the you know while i was making tiles and my feeling is you know and this is not a new thought but it just really came home solid was that um you know the simulator mfms the movable feast machine simulator uh has been absolutely wonderful and critical to the development of the whole project but it has some design limitations in it that you know we sort of knew about but we we lived with and in particular the mfms design does not actually do much work as far as handling tiles going away and coming back in the simulator there is an option to pick a tile and disable or re-enable it but in fact even when it's disabled it's actually still processing packets from the neighbor it's just not originating any events of its own so that's a certain kind of uh you know something that the software might need to deal with but it's not the same as the neighboring power simply powering down neighboring tile powering down or rebooting and so mfms which informed the design of mfmt2 the engine that runs on the tiles uh really has nothing much to say about how to deal with much more radical things like the neighbors rebooting or powering off and my feeling now is that you know i got a little bit you know it's so easy to get hooked on determinism you know the first hits free um and even with the asynchronous behavior of the mfms simulator uh the fact that tiles essentially were set up when you power up the simulator when you run the program and you can disable enable but they're always there that creates a possibility that once in a tile has managed to get a lock it's pretty sure that that's going to succeed and its events going to succeed and its neighbors are going to reply and that's what we have to do without so my plan is to start from a clean screen start a new branch for the thing and redesign start over eventually sure i'll be able to pull in little low-level bits of code from the existing branch but i want to do that really gingerly to avoid sort of the slippery slope back to where we were in particular i want to focus on you know each tile is going to say well hey you know i'm going to try to coordinate with the neighbors but i don't need the neighbors the neighbors can go at any time and i will have a clearly designed uh definition of what to do i will finish any events that i am in charge of i will go ahead and commit them i will mark the neighbors as being that space as being non-existent which is now will now be visible to the upper level ulama and splat programmers um and just take it all from the sort of tile centric no matter what happens the tiles toes are still tapping in this self stabilization style and i'm even thinking this may not work out but i'm even thinking there's a possibility to use the whole generalized distributed ring oscillator stuff that was embodied by the ringo dot ulama code uh uh last time a couple times ago there might be a way to do an analogous bit of that at the intertile level as far as coordinating events i don't know about that we'll see but that's the plan uh i am had it with trying to force myself to do little patches here little patches there and to pretend that that's going to lead to anything that's going to be at all rust at all robust i don't i no longer believe that this is the plan we'll see how it goes all right uh so that's the main thing oh yeah so the little logo at the beginning i thought it would be uh you know worthwhile to try to come up with a new little tighter uh bumper intro logo to put at the front of these t tuesday updates and i thought hey let's why not do the the computing team creed you know it appears we can't really see it because it's covered with the back plate but it appears on each on the back of each t2 tile first be robust then as correct as possible and as efficient as necessary the t2 tile project like that so i made up a completely terrible one about two hours ago uh as a placeholder uh and i wonder you know if if there's any folks out there that have you know graphics or or video or any of this kind of thing that that might want to take a crack at making a better little intro bumper for the t2 tile project using the uh the computing team creed uh and and anything i mean i don't you know just as long as it's you know less than six or seven or eight seconds tops uh and doesn't use any copyright stuff so we can just go ahead and use it uh i would love future stuff if anybody actually wants to take a crack at that for my own goals the short science fiction short story search quiet wake i had a couple of readers now a couple of select folks have read it and i've gotten some select feedback from them and in fact i did another pass over it and changed it a fair bit my goal for the next two weeks is to send the story off to asma of science fiction magazine or possibly someplace else but you know send it out get the clock running let them reject it uh you know if they reject it then well that'll be part of the story if they accept it that'll be a new piece of the adventure um we'll find out have some fun i need to keep reminding myself of that you know like when i was building the tiles i discovered i mean they took me about like 12 to 15 minutes a pop to actually do all the assembly part you know after the flashing was done um and i could do about six of them before my brain would start start to start to fry and i would make mistakes and say you know have i been put all the pieces in and so forth and so it was like okay so so do six and then go do something else and then come back and do another six have some fun it's working out okay uh and then finally uh you know build some more grid let's get 120 hopefully uh or more tiles put together and start doing the the structural work to put together the power zones and we'll see how it goes that's the plan uh uh and you know for all of us uh let's try to have a robust 2022 thanks for stopping by