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Title: How to start with FPGA? Post by: Fredyy on May 28, 2012, 10:38:08 PM Hi,
I'm realtive new to Bitcoin and minig but i've got some questions. Right now im mining on a 7990 and a 5770 but the need a lot of energy and are pretty loud. I read about FPGAs as the new alternative, but i could not find any payable FPGAs for "Starter" everything seems to be >500$ but thats way more than i would like to invest for a my first steps. Also i read, that FPGA are not standalone but need a host computer to manage them via usb. So i think the best way to save some energy would be a raspberry pi. Has anyone already managed to start a miner supporting FPGA on a Rasperberry pie? What else can you suggest my for starting mining with FPGAs? Thank you for your Help and Greetings, Fredyy Title: Re: How to start with FPGA? Post by: hm on May 29, 2012, 03:29:08 AM I am still waiting for my raspberry pi as well as for my first fpga mining hardware.
I agree with you about the high investmemt costs, first I waited but then I ate the sour apple and ordered some fpgas from enterpoint. I am thinking of using a fanless Igel thin client with 1GHz cpu as fpga controller, but it draws about 20W. I have two spare ones to sell btw. Perhaps the Bifferboard http://www.bifferos.co.uk/ can be used to run the mining software on openwrt. The board has 150MHz x86 CU, USB, NIC, 2mb ram, 8mb flash, and draws just 1W. priced at £35. Another cheap alternative could be a TP-LINK TL-WR703N 150MBit mini WLAN router or other openwrt-supported hardware. also see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=76685.0 Title: Re: How to start with FPGA? Post by: BePrivate on June 04, 2012, 06:39:30 AM Quote ut i could not find any payable FPGAs for "Starter" everything seems to be >500$ but thats way more than i would like to invest for a my first steps. Quote I agree with you about the high investmemt costs i'm also looking for some good FPGA's, i wan to start a mining rig.. but FPGA's are still very high in prices Title: Re: How to start with FPGA? Post by: Phraust on June 04, 2012, 07:07:48 AM I've tested cgminer with a BitFORCE Single on a Seagate DockStar running ArchLinux. Seems to handle it just fine, and it draws about 9w.
Title: Re: How to start with FPGA? Post by: Garr255 on June 04, 2012, 07:13:48 AM Most FPGAs are very easy to configure and get hashing. You just need to install a driver along with python, and x6500s work great! http://fpgamining.com/
I'd also recommend checking out companies the GLBSE. Title: Re: How to start with FPGA? Post by: PoorGirl on June 04, 2012, 07:19:04 AM Hey Guys,
I think the best is to actually buy an FPGA and learn by doing it. I spend a couple of days to run some calculations and these products seems to be the best regarding Mh/s and low power consumption:
I know micro-controllers from industry automation (you may have heard of Advantech from Taiwan) and as long as these Bitcoin boards contain a Watchdog they should run super stable and be easy to use. Guess today only Spartan 6 chips are useful, so no matter which board you buy the procedure to get it running should be similar. |