Original Post

Soldered the first batch of hermaphrodite connectors onto my purple MUX tiles.
After ~25 years of “designing in my head / on paper / in CAD,” I finally have a physical tile alphabet on the desk (MUX / wire / constants / intersections).
I snapped a little patch together and it instantly reads like a language, not a random pile of PCBs.
The big boss this whole time wasn’t electronics — it was getting unstuck long enough to hold the thing in my hands.

For context: these are small triangular tiles that are meant to connect edge-to-edge into a fabric, where each tile is a symbol (a MUX tile, a wire tile, a constant tile, an intersection tile…). The point isn’t “a PCB exists” — it’s that a set exists, like letters you can actually arrange into circuits.

This weekend’s move is simple: stop theorizing and make the first real, connectable patch. That means soldering the connectors onto the tiles (with the correct orientation), chaining a bunch together so it behaves like one long object, and then using that patch to build the first tiny piece of compute.

And yeah — the fear was real: I’ve shipped ideas before, but this one could’ve stayed forever in the “beautiful concept” stage. Another year of upgrades and re-designs and cost optimizations and “next revision will be the one,” while nothing ever clicks together.

But now it’s past that line. The alphabet is physical, the connectors make the tiles obviously one-sided (so orientation is unambiguous), and the patch is finally something you can assemble, pick up, rotate, and extend. Next step is the fun part: take just three MUX tiles and prove a D-flip-flop behaves like a D-flip-flop — not in a schematic, but in a little chunk of this fabric.