 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 22nd T Tuesday Update. Let's get into it. This week I'm going to talk, today I'm just going to talk about the Bill of Materials. There's all sorts of things happening in the research, on the science side, that I'm saving up for the paper. The A-Life conference folks have not yet seen fit to extend the deadline, so I don't even know whether I'm going to be able to have a complete paper ready by then. It may end up being extended abstract, which is a two-page thing, but there'll be something to submit. We'll see what it is as far as we go along. The 3D printer story, which we've talked about a lot lately. The latest news is it was a little bit finicky after I got the clog out, but then did manage to get things to work pretty well. So we're cranking out new cases again with the modified for the not having the countersunk screws. Updated the firmware. That was a terrifying thing, but it worked all right. I'm not going to tell you about it. Okay, let's talk about the bomb. Where we left off last week, I had bought these thousand nuts to go on, to connect up to the bottom of the screws that are going to connect on to these things, as well as other places inside. Supposed to be shipping by DHL, but last we had seen, they had gone from Dubai to a tour of Europe and ended up in Cincinnati. In fact, they did show up the very next day, making the trip from Cincinnati to Albuquerque, and you know, there they were. They were shipped from China, care of Dubai. There's your global economy for you. That's my globalization. I don't know what is. This is the bag it came in. This was a little bit strange. It had extra special yellow and red tape saying it was repacked. The interior box also has a DHL tape on it, so I guess in the course of going through all of these places, somewhere along the way, it got inspected. But in fact, what was inside was a bag of nuts. I counted out a hundred of them and put them on the scale. Whoops, I messed up the scale. That's not the correct measurement because I got the tear wrong. By the time I got it fixed up, that's the same. Still 100 nuts, 30 grams for 100 nuts, 306 grams for the whole bag seems about right, and then they work fine. They took a long time, and I don't know. It really was kind of making me think, do I really need to be shipping all this stuff all the way around the world to get it? I mean, with these nuts, I could certainly get M3 stainless steel nuts locally or more locally. But when I was shopping on AliExpress, I got to the point where it was like, oh, that's a perfectly fine price. Why pay less? Well, why pay more? But why look more? Just go ahead and do it. So for the screws that go with these, I'm looking to local places. We'll talk about that in a future week. But in any event, yes, the cats were thrilled that the nuts had arrived, and they were actually all right. I wasn't completely thrilled with the fact that this was claimed to be DHL shipping, and then it took as long as it did. So I did leave feedback. Product was okay, but avoid the store if you need fast DHL shipping. I mean, I just gave it a blow-by-blow, and the store responded, thank you for your support. So be it, the nuts are in. Great. Also had the order for the screws that we had found that the screws that were going to go through this thing would be 28 millimeters instead of 25 millimeters, so they weren't going to require countersinking. We're waiting for those. Those, once again, we got this shipment arrived at incorrect facility again. Same thing. Now last time this happened, they went from Phoenix back to LA, and then came back to Phoenix, and then went to Albuquerque. They got rerouted locally and arrived last Friday. They also, and so here they are, these are the socket cap screws, and I did find a little bit of a clue what had gone wrong, that somewhere in the DHL routing information it said, you know, US-PHX, which is Phoenix, and it was supposed to apparently say US-ABQ. So that suggests that somewhere in China, when the package was ingested by DHL, the wrong code was put on it, and then it landed it in the bin that was supposed to be done in Phoenix, rather than traveling through Phoenix to get to Albuquerque, whatever. Okay, but here they are. Here's our bag of 800, I guess, of these. The black M3 by 28 millimeter socket cap screws. Here they are. This is the 25 millimeter ones that I got at Granger, and here are the 28 millimeter ones that just arrived, they seem fine. Here's what it looks like in the case. Now you see them sticking up, and you know, if this bugs you sticking up, you got to remember that, you know, actually once the intertile connectors are there, it's going to be, there's a whole lot of multi-level stuff going on, and really the the socket cap screws, to me, if anything, they just sort of create another sort of mid-level, rather than actually sticking out like they do when you see single tile by itself. Always want to remember it's going to be in an ocean of tiles. So, I'm fine with that. It's got enough, 28 millimeters, it's got enough thread coming through the bottom to grab into the nut or into a brass standoff. If that's what we end up using to mount these tiles onto a bigger sheet of acrylic or something to hold a power zone, to hold a lotus. So, great. But, we still had the issue of the P3, the P8 and P9 headers, those are the ones that actually connect the Beagle bone to the board, these two long hitters in the middle. We looked at them from, you know, a long story going back weeks, starting with Adafruit, the one in China that has had the parts. They also had the intertile connector parts, the shrouded headers. They had a good price on that, but you had to buy a thousand out of them in a crack. And we went back and forth and all this stuff, can we get this order? How long would it take? And well, you know, the orders, please order this instead of order that, and the orders could be, you know, three to four weeks. And then they ended up with pretty much no matter how much I worked back and forth with them, I couldn't get a shorter number for that. And I don't want to wait until the middle of April to have these things, although who knows, maybe that will be fine the way it works out. But, I said, screw it, the Digikey price for the intertile connectors, the shrouded socket headers is not that much worse, especially when you take all the shipping costs, the DHL shipping costs and so forth from China, 260 bucks for enough to do 200 tiles. I just said, do it. And they arrived yesterday. And here they are, 12. These things actually takes up a fair bit of space. Here they are, they're in trays, very nice, tray after tray of these guys. These little 16 pins total, 2 rows of 8 each with a key in it so that we can keep the north and the west and the east all separated from each other. Fine. Check. Now, once I was starting to order from Digikey and so forth, I said, well, the other parts we wanted, the J9 connector, which is the 26 pin connector, which is this one over on the side that's used to connect the displays, connect the display to the board. Digikey's price on that, again, not at great but availability is good. Same thing for the 6 pin header which is for the serial port debug. Pulled the trigger on them as well. But what about P8 and P9? They were 75 cents each from Adafruit and they didn't even have enough of them if they wanted to before including shipping. The equivalent part from Digikey is 71 cents a piece even in quantity 400 and that doesn't include shipping either. So what? Could afford it? Well, you know, alright. There was another company on AliExpress HelloTronics that for 400 of them instead of being 280 bucks it was 80 in change. I passed over these guys because they didn't take PayPal and they didn't have DHL but I just pulled the trigger. So we'll see. The different places that you look on these things they say 12 to 20 days, 23 days we'll see. At least that's not business days as far as I know. So that has been ordered and now the long and short of it is is that our bill of materials that looked like this a week ago with red here by the middle of the week it looked like this and as of right now it looks like this. In other words all of the red items except for this one up here all of the red items now have orders in flight to complete the bill of materials. Here I've only ordered 100 of them because I'm getting them locally I want to check out the screws and make sure they're good but then it's easy just to make another order for that. So basically all of the bill of materials stuff has been ordered. This is where we wanted to be a month ago or at the very least where we wanted to be two weeks ago but we're here now and the cats are thrilled. So that's it. All the rest is I've been working on the software, the living computation stuff which one day hopefully will run on these tiles but for purposes of this paper I'm running them all in simulation I'm even running them on one big tile in simulation to make things simpler I'm still hoping that the program committee will push back the deadline because if it's really this Friday it's going to be an extended abstract for me full paper because there's a lot to talk about but I'm just not going to be able to get it you know when I talk about writing the paper there's certain elements of actually getting the data, getting the coding working and so forth writing encompasses the entire process for me and so we'll see. We'll have to see but thanks to everybody who has been asking me about writing. I apologize to folks who have put questions and comments in the chat room and on YouTube thank you for being here I hope once this paper ships will be, well number one we'll get back to making these manufacturing these tiles really happen but also be able to interact more and get back and waste my time on social networks like people are supposed to in the modern era that's it for now really short one thanks Dave see you next week, thanks for watching