Bitcoin Forum

So, Novak and I are working on a proof-of-concept device which we think has potential. It'd be a U3-style "Pod" miner sporting 8x BM1384, which puts it at 8 times the hashrate of a Compac or approximately one eighth of an S5. The pod would have fully adjustable (in software) voltage and frequency, meaning it could be cranked up to full power or undervolted to a quiet 0.28W/GH (approximately). Power comes in through either a 12V brick or a 6-pin PCIe (both jacks would be standard). USB connection to a controller, just like any other pod. Instead of a custom heatsink there'd be screw holes to mount a standard CPU cooler, which I could probably source cheaply if you didn't already have one laying around. Cooler fan speed would be automatic and thermostatic.

Here's the thing. I talked to some of my cronies a few weeks ago about an idea like this and, at the estimated cost of materials and such, I was told it wouldn't sell. Not efficient enough, $/GH wasn't there, stuff like that.

So, what if we recycle?

We're cooking up a design that actually reuses some common components from previous-generation hashing boards. We've got boxes of this crap laying around, and the parts are still good, so why not? They're basically free, just take a bit of work to pull and clean up. And in order to get more parts in, we could trade miners for last year's boards that contain the parts.

The most important components, the hashing chips themselves, really can only come from S5 or S5+ boards. I know a lot of people probably have failed S5 boards, so in order to get some of that hashrate back would you be willing to trade a dead S5 board for an 8-chip pod?

Some additional components can be found in common power circuits like on BTCGarden AMV1/AMV2 blades, ASICMiner Tubes and to a lesser extent on the boards common to Rockminer BE200 gear, as well as AntMiner S1 and S2 boards. As the power parts don't represent near as much expense as the hashing chips would, a quota of these parts would cover half the cost of a miner, so you'd get one miner for your old boards and $25.

I'd only need the boards. Heatsinks and whatever else can be recycled or reused locally. Honestly, shipping speed doesn't matter to me either (though your miner might not go out until I have your trade boards in hand) so that can be pretty cheap.

And if you don't have boards to trade, or we have so many boards already that I have to suspend trading and sell for cash only, the price is still going to be substantially lower than it would have been otherwise.

The miners would, obviously, be built from used parts. But as with everything else we've ever built and sold, they'd be tested before shipping and go with a full warranty. If it breaks and not because you played football with it or tried to push it to 400MHz with one of those baby i3 coolers, it's probably covered by warranty.

Once I've pulled the parts I need, all the excess board will be taken in for proper recycling/reclamation rather than hauled to a landfill.

So, show of hands. How many people would get in on a program like this? I'll be honest, I just thought of it a couple days ago and we just talked it over today and I just 20 minutes ago got some semblance of a prototype approximately working with hacked-up chunks of other miners, so it's very much a plan in progress. It won't go very far without community support, so, community, how much do you support this?

I like the idea tbh. Sadly I don't have any S5's, only S1's!
Could you make them with 120 mm fans? Thinking about noise level.

If I had dead S5 boards I would consider this.

Two S1 boards would get you to half price. 400MHz on the pod would get you the same hashrate as an S1 for a quarter the power. Just throwing that out there. And then if we can ever get the resources together for TypeZero boards with new chips, you'd already have a bare S1 chassis to strap 'em to.

I won't be making them with any fans. It's a board to mount a CPU cooler on, so whatever cooler you have or find or what I can find.

Love your work, but voted for stupid idea :(

The only problem for me is I don't have any dead parts.  I have always in past sold them off.  I don't believe in sitting my miner gear on a shelf as it loses value.  If people did sit them on a shelf it would be a amazing deal for them.

Myself though without the gear I will have to pay.   And I don't mind the idea of a CPU heatsink as long as it is one that is not to bad on cost, I'm sure it would take a little searching to find which one this is.

The hardest part I see is mass production competing against U3's.  U3's are no near as efficient but they are cheap.  So in a way you would direct compete with them which is bad because they have massive volume.  And I suspect bigger after antrouter as a lot will want one or two to plug in antrouter.

well i have about 30 to 40 s1 boards, 2 s2 blades, 1 dead s5 board and 1 s5 board worth of pulled chips.

It's sad because Novak and you have super cool idea for the home miners but from my understanding Bitmain do not want to sell you the last generation chip. Or if they want the price will be prohibitive.

I have a couple defective SP20 boards, anything you can scavenge from those?

Seems unlikely there'd be much of use from an SP20.

Competing against the U3, yeah that's a bit of a problem. Of course, the AntRouter kinda sucks (at least until someone hacks the firmware) and so does the U3 (with its poor efficiency and known stability issues) so I figure someone might want a better option anyway, especially if it can be had for cheap or free depending on what's in the bin.

We've got enough parts running around to build a small batch just for ourselves if nothing else, but I figure if anyone else might want to get in on it I certainly am not opposed.

I need to talk to the proper owners before making any arrangements, but I have several cases of new-in-box Freezer 7 Pro (or whatever) coolers gathering dust on my shelf for over a year because some hosting customers got screwed by Technobit and never received their 50-odd HEX4M boards. Might could get a deal on those which would help people out and they'd certainly do well cooling these chips even at top-end.

ID pay either way + plus donate parts .

so 50 bucks sound fair to me  :) .


I have a S1 board I'll send i didn't think you want, I want  nothing in return expect keep it up for US .:) .

Once I have a better estimate of parts (which will of course require more of a finished design than I currently have) the price may go down. Or it may include a cooler, in which case if you don't want a cooler the price may go down.

Also, toptek, your dead S5 board donation partially inspired this idea so you'd be getting one anyway.

With the nice cooler what will be hashrate when you say "which puts it at 8 times the hashrate".  Is it times the lower or higher range?

I didn't think of this till after but if it's the high side of chip at 50 it could be a better deal then U3.  Say 16 x 8 chips would be 128 and that could fight U3's at the 50 dollar range.

*Edit 1/8th of a S5 would be around 137 is that the speed were talking about for around 50 dollars?

It's times the entire range. Why would I build something you couldn't adjust the voltage and frequency on? That's no fun. Since it's 8 chips, it's 8 times the hashrate of a Compac at any frequency (and probably slightly better efficiency). 100MHz gets you 44GH, and you could take the voltage down to where the whole thing probably burns under 15W of DC power; 400MHz gets you 176GH at around 90W. If you had a good cooler you could probably push it to 450MHz and see just shy of 200GH but the efficiency would be probably pushing 0.55-0.6W/GH at that point.

Adjustability was noted in the first paragraph of the first post, in the sentence right after "which puts it at 8 times the hashrate".

I don't have any boards, but I would probably buy 2 for sure.

Sadly I do not have any parts except for heatsinks .

But if it can do 80 gh at .3 watts it would work for stick holders like myself.

I have at least eight ports left to use on my stud hubs.

I could fit this in with the stick setup.

So I am in.

I can go for one btc .

This would be four to six  most likely five pieces.
Of course if only one  is available vs more I would take one .

Me too...  :-\

Thanks one that has the entire range would be a lot of fun to play with then.   That makes  U3's a crushing competition as you offer more GH and more efficient then and is around 50 dollar range.   

I like both jacks on it that is a good design to give options to power it.   If it is not to expensive on cpu coolers I think you could sell a good amount of them.  And I know you hate the antrouter.  But if there is a hack or you can make these run off antrouter I predict even better sells.  As I think a lot of people will end up with a antrouter with no device and want something to plug into it.

I have a couple of working S1's sitting in the garage collecting dust-- would love to get in on the deal...

I can donate a complete S2 with all boards, I think 1 board has missing (yellow) resistor thingy broken during shipment. 
I like the idea, why not?  Keep the creative juices flowing.
F the big companies for releasing 1 product per year and at a premium.
Long live the "Gekko Glee Club"  GGC!
Let me know how soon you want to proceed and I will send the boards.

"Now this is Pod racing!"   How about calling it "G-Pod" or instead of Pod call it "the Puck" why the puck not!

Right now ASICs are in tighter supply than power parts (I have power parts for about four times more boards than I have ASICs for, especially given it's an 8:1 ratio chips to VRMs) so I'm hoping some dead S5 people will get in on it.

I think the pod line will carry the Amita name. Stickminers will be versions of Compac, and pods would be versions of Amita.

I'll start working on PCB layout tomorrow. Novak's out for a couple days so we won't have any comm/control prototyping for a bit and it'd probably be two weeks at least before I had any sort of prototype PCB in hand. Mass production distribution would be, best case, about Thanksgiving. No need to send boards just yet.

If this is called something pod..... which I hope it is.  I will be able to get some great pictures of my lifesize jar jar binks and the pod.   Just thinking of star wars pod racing when I hear pod racing :).

And yes one of the odd facts about me I won a full size replica of jar jar binks at one point in my life.

I would guess the "stupid idea" votes are from folks that either don't know how much fun playing with the compac sticks is, or are looking at this from a purely "roi" frame of mind.

I have 2 S1 boards I'd gladly donate toward the cost of a pod miner.  These little usb miners are fun to mess around with, I still play with one U3 despite all of its headaches.

Oh in case anyone's wondering, about half the hashrate currently mining on the Burger (http://eligius.st/~wizkid057/newstats/userstats.php/1BURGERAXHH6Yi6LRybRJK7ybEm5m5HwTr) is my proof-of-concept. About 115GH is seven test Compacs Novak set up running at 300MHz and another 88GH is my 8-chip setup at 200MHz. Like I said it's not a proper build, it's all hacked up but the main circuitry is pretty much the same as what my board'll have all integrated.

I have 2 pcb s5 death, and perhaps this morning has burned the 3rd.

I keep saying that the chips are built with substandard materials :-\ :-\ :'(

looks like that, some of the stuff on the PCB don't look that good, some of it does as for the high end parts the S5 to me was a fast buck for them and roughed compared to the S3 or even S7 from what a S7 looks like.

my S3 are work hoers the S5 at times I'm afraid to reboot it or turn it off to long for fear it may stop . that's how cheap the feeling is get form S5 but so far the three i have left keep going i had five at one time .
and they all  have done ROI a friends ask me one day was it worth it doing this i said yea then it got me thinking was it really then i looked at when i bought them etc it had done a ROI for me by then , i don't mine to get a ROI  either  :)" .

My S3 i have no such fear of . even the ones i upgraded

s3 is a rock.
s5 is a shit miner

The "Trouble" with the S5 is the chain voltage supply. It is both it's greatest strength in that it's very low cost and very efficient with no Buck Converters and on paper allows easy undervolting by just reducing the supply voltage. It is also it's greatest weakness in that you have a "Christmas Tree Light" one down all down situation when you get a fault.

Also it's difficult (or at least I find it so) to then find where the fault is. I have been doing a rob Peter to Pay Paul exercise, with not much success yet, to try and get one good board from two bad ones... Which is why this is a great project.  ;D

Rich

You know you want to put this pod with something like this:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51ry1x%2BbyZL.jpg

 ;D ;D ;D

Count me in for these guys. Prolly 20 or so of them, those will sell like hot bread down here.

Sadly I have 1 S5 and its is not dead.  I would be willing to purchase a couple miners though if people sent in an excess of parts.

Bring some added value to s1's, s2's, and s3's and the world will come knocking on your door.
I can't be the only one thinking of putting them in the trash.

Keep the S1/S3 heatsinks and fans. The goal we've been working toward for the last six months is being able to build new hashboards for those old chassis. I'm still working toward that goal.

I'll have to check S3 boards for parts I'm looking for, but since most of those probably work and you can get $70 for a complete S3 I didn't figure folks would be willing to trade.

these would also allow membership in the sidehack stick solo pool.  which I am running here


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1177508.0


this pool will always have free hash added by me to promo sidehack products. At worst 1th a day on average.



we will soon be starting the non beta run of it.

hey i have a request instead of sending me that pod could you maybe do some kind of give a way for it on the forums ? . i was thinking i really would rather pay for one even thu i donate .

I'm not an ebayer, well never a seller I mean. Without even looking at current prices, my mind works like this... You've got to box the thing, pack it well, at least better than bitmain did with the s2's,  wrap it up in tape, pay a 'ups store' a marked up price and hope the receiver doesn't have any complaints.  I just can't justify it.  Beany baby's maybe, but not miners.
If you send me a prepaid shipping box, a roll of tape, and a bunch of bubble wrap, I'll pretty much put anything you ask for into it.
Provided of course that it leads to progress and that maybe I'd get some consideration down the road.

Fine print.. this is not a giveaway to the general public.

Actually, all you have to do is grab a screwdriver, pull the hashboard off the heatsink, stuff it in a padded envelope, and mail it to me as cheap and slow as you want. Looks like a pair of S5 boards in a padded envelope would ship first-class within the US for less than $5. Shipping for the miner itself would need to be paid, but for most US customers a single miner, possibly even with a cooler, would be about $10.

Seriously, I don't really care what condition the boards arrive in so long as they're not shattered. I'm pulling parts. I don't want heatsinks or fans or controllers or anything else that make shipping difficult or costly.

Something like the original-version BTCGarden BE200 blades are probably too long to fit comfortably in an envelope, but I have no problem with one being chopped in half and sent as two pieces provided the power components are intact which gives you about a two-inch window of "right in the middle" to hack away. S2 boards would actually be the opposite - all their power parts are in that middle space, so you could chop off about four inches off both ends and it'd still be acceptable. Though I could probably find a use for all those 470uF caps if boards were delivered intact.

toptek - Maybe I could do a raffle. Maybe 0.01-0.02BTC gets a "ticket" and the drawn winner gets a free pod. Two boards sent in gets you two pods, so unless you want one of them I can do two drawings. Maybe I'll do a third-place winner gets a free Compac. Something like that will have to wait until I've got at least prototypes built, so there's a while to figure out the details.

What a great idea. Would fit right into my solar powered farm. Have a couple of S1's gathering dust but shipping from the UK probably wouldn't be worth the effort. Anything on Gridseeds of use? The small boards could be shipped cheaply or even just a straight donation from the likes of aliexpress....
Keep up the good work....

Naw, Gridseeds are a different breed of cat. Not much on 'em or in 'em that would benefit my design more than about a dollar's savings.

The options lined out in the poll above are for the things that I guarantee I can work with, so I'll probably stick with that list for now.

Any chance of making a 'good' PCB to put in a U3 and making it reliable?

Probably not. I'd rather put effort into making a nice open standard design than put effort into rebuilding within someone else's lame mechanical constraints. The idea has previously been considered and rejected.

I really like this part of you building from ground up.  I really don't want to have to buy one of the pods and tear out guts and mount inside.  With this only needing to add a CPU cooler sounds like a very doable build.   

And if it's like the compacs a rock solid design, that is fun to play with.

Will pm you. Now get back to work.

Your biggest problem is going to be getting functioning S5 chips.  By the time you get enough of them the network will have grown and it won't be as viable.  An easier way than putting all this effort into it would be to simply undervolt an S5 by putting say 11v instead of 12v into it to achieve better efficiency.

he bought a batch of s5 chips from bitmain months ago. but he would also be using used ones.

Correct. Saying "Your biggest problem is going to be getting functioning S5 chips" is pretty much repeating what I said myself in the very first post, and then offered a solution to that problem as noted in the first post and as the second option of the poll. This project exists because of dead S5 boards as a source of chips.

The project would be even less viable if I didn't have that as a material source, because even if Bitmain would sell me more chips (they won't, I've asked repeatedly) they'd be cost-prohibitive (about $26 per pod just for the ASICs) and instead of a $50 purchase option you'd see a $75 option, minimum.

If I'm allowed to simile, your suggestion is akin to telling me I should worry about rebuilding engines for drag racers because it's a better use of time than designing motorcycles from junkyard parts. Not only is the customer base different, but the whole concept is different. I'm not trying to solve the problem of making the S5 more efficient for the people who have one that works. I'm solving the problem of having one that doesn't work, and the problem of retired miners gathering dust, and the problem of no good options for entry-level miners and lottery boxes.

Maybe I'll tackle your S5 undervolt problem next week. Right now I don't care.

With proper volt control, these pods could be of interest at 50$(or one dead S5 board) each if one could buy enough in one go to be worthwhile. You would need to buy/sell them in small batches because of the the numbers are as such;

Buying a used S5 including shipping right now= 0.2$-0.26$/GH.

One pod + shipping to Canada = 0.4$/GH if the pod include the fan/heatsink you said you had somewhat available = no amount of fanciness can cover that price as a ROI-able investment. However;

6 Pods at 50$ea, which is the seller's price on the marketplace atm for a S5 + shipping would now give you a total of 340$~ so the % of money going to shipping is much lower. The final number become 0.28$/GH which is reasonable at the moment + quiet/volt control very much justify the extra price for people with cheap electricity.

I think the project with the figures you mentioned can be feasible at current market values. If you can pull it off before difficulty make this impossible or a new option lower the value of such a pod considerably, this would sound pretty tasty.

In current condition and prices(assuming it include the heatsink/fan already) i'd be inclined to fill 3000watts with these at home assuming they can do the 190gh per unit at 0.5~ efficiency.

To be fair, someone in Canada with 3KW to spare also isn't really the target customer. I have nothing against Canda, but filling 3KW with 80W pod miners doesn't seem terribly practical. I mean that's fine; if you pay for 'em and I can get the materials together I'll build 'em. But I'm looking more at people who want entry-level, who don't want the size of an S3 or the noise (and expense) of an S5. Comparing this to an S5 makes some sense in that they're in the same efficiency class, but they're not in the same use-case class, power class, size class or really much else.

I don't think your pod fit the entry-level miner to familiarize themselves with bitcoin either. I would recommend the sidehack stick for that. It doesn't make any noise, is cheap, cheap to run and doesnt take any space.

If you target the few people, only in the US, who want to run a single one next to their router for fun, learning and well just having one little miner that isin't meant to be ROI'd.

Then sure that could be your target, which would work if you only plan on making a handful of these.

Because as purely a recycling small scale plan, this would only be for US customers;

Ffor one pod or two, and i ship you a dead board. And then i pay for shipping back, that would be more money than just buying a S3 and undervolting it, getting same efficiency range and more hash and more hash/$.

Its totally okay if that is not your plan, but then i can't tell if its feasible.

Within the US, shipping a dead board and me shipping the miner is going to cost less than $15 total.

Right now I am able to make about 50. I have that many chips. It's worth it to me to make that many anyway even if I don't sell them, because nothing beats the $/GH I'd have in materials from stuff I already have, not even your S3, and nothing beats the efficiency except the S7 and I sure as heck ain't gonna pay for one of those. If I make more than that it's because other people are getting in on it and sending boards I can raid for parts, or because demand is high enough that I go find more parts anyway.

Also, how does the S3 get the same efficiency range if this thing is about 0.3 to 0.55 wall? Is the best-case for an S3 that low? I guess the very bottom end for an S3 is comparable to the very top end of this guy, but the difference is in two months the bottom end of the S3 is no longer viable while this thing would probably run you all the way to the halving. The S3 is closer to this guy's use-case than the S5 to be sure, but still not really the same. This is a U3 replacement, or a New R-Box replacement, not an S3 or S5 replacement.

And yes, in the grand scheme of things I likely will only build "a handful".

Sadly this is the world of asics.   Some countries make it harder to be a customer then others.   US to US is as bout as simple as it gets.    And shipping as long as it does not weight a ton can be done at a decent price.

I think on recycle US will make most sense unless you find some great shipping rates in canada or other places.  The pod is still in the category of past pods, and U3 I believe.  So comparing it and S3 are apples and oranges.   And sidehacks will be much more efficient then S3 and funner to play with.  

I would not knock scale.   I think there is a decent amount of loyal customers sidehack and novak have made, including myself. Sidehack is right if your looking to fill 3000 k watts you honestly are looking for a bigger miner.  I cant imagine 3k watts of any pod at this point.  

I had not realized the value of this unit for people who have high electricity cost to validate the unit's ability to go down to 0.3. I have no argument there.

I figured if going from 0.5 to 0.3 and losing half the hashrate on the unit is your target, then i think that range is already obsolete for such a person, because of the price of the unit.

The math i did was undervolting the S3 down to the 0.5X range would give more hashrate for the same efficiency than that pod, for less than just shipping you a board back and forth.

And thats only because US/Canada shipping became crazy after 9-11. Its not because the S3 is a better unit.

In my mind, this unit you'd be building is already obsolete to people who pay their electricity, thus i would of imagined you would target people where $/GHs is more important than GHs/J because of how cheap their electricity is.


Why? Filling 2 breaker with this is only 20~ units.

This is a great project, would be so nice to see some recycling, and as I have a couple of faulty S5 Boards I am a customer for it, but.... it does not solve my problem...

I already have a fully underclocked & undervolted S5 giving close to 0.3J/GH at the wall, but.... as my electricity is 15 Cents / KW it will just about remain profitable until the halving at which point it's great money looser.

What I would like is an S7 that could be fully undervolted and I could then probably keep mining profitably for at least another 6 Months, but.... I do not want the outlay of an S7....

So, what I look forward to is your MK2 with the BM1385 chip.  :) You have said that you don't like the idea of tearing down a perfectly good $600 S7 Hash Board, but... and I am sure you have done the maths.

If with a bit of price reduction & some value for the controller & other parts that could be $540, to make the maths easy,  then that's $10 a chip, which is not bad.

So if the MK2 had 4 BM1385 chips then at 775MHz taking about 50W that gives 155GH/S and at 425MHz for about 15W would give 85GH/S

I would very happily pay $100+ for one of these.  :)

Rich

this item works for me as a supplement to the 20 sticks I run.

my hubs have 38 usb jacks I have 20 sticks I can add 1 to 5 of these.  I am running a pc to do the sticks and a node.  this means I have spare pcie power for maybe 4 of these.

If I place these carefully the heatsink fans cooling them can help to cool my usb sticks.

translation for some that get .4 watts or .3 watts a gh  with them I will be doing better then that.

I like this because if it works and carries into the future to salvaged s-7 boards   would do that.  I also have 2 s-7's running so I may pull a board and ship it to sidehack in a while.

This idea does not work if you don't have a dead s-5 or a lot of spare parts or a setup that can use these at 0 extra cost (me and my sidehack sticks)

Is this ideal build no an ideal build is one from s-7 chips sold at cost to sidehack.

Why would bitmaintach want to sell sidehack 2000 s-7 chips at next to cost?  Well they don't want to sell him any at all.

 They should do it an ask for a no compete agreement.  ie max size sidehack could build would be 5 s-7 chips which would be about 400gh at 100 watts.

I actually think it would be good business for bitmaintech to do this.  I also think it would be good for btc for sidehack and for the smaller miner.  But thats my take on it.  Bitmaintech is not going for an s-7 chip sale at the moment.

I'm all in for trading, you can have $50 and all my NRB boards, also if you want, cases and sinks too. but they are all dead, thanks to plugging the usb into a laptop, when the box is connected to a PSU, or vice-versa. (floating earth to grounded earth)..

i just want my 400Ghs back :(

but be prepared to gather a lot of junk if you want to head this path.

hell, i might buy the depopulated boards off you, for gold/silver scrapping :-? (shipping gonna be a killer though)

If he really shipped all of the boards he ends up pulling to you for scrapping the gold-silver then double-bag them in wall mart sacks and put them in duffel bags.
By the time they get to you, they will be already ground in powder from being kicked, thrown, and beaten dust by the shipping company.



On another note, I think it is a great idea for people to understand trying to ROI on this is not the main attraction.

On yet another note, Phil you are exactly right, it would serve to help increase BITMAIN and other mining manufacturers income, but at this time, only BITMAIN would make money selling sidehack chips.
1. They make profit from the initial sale of the chips. They are probably charging 160% markup (or more) where standard markup is around 60%.
2. The people who are introduced to mining.
I understand mining is for the big players who claim 1 PH+, and even the hundreds of TH players when discussing top level support, best price, etc.
I also understand that there is a high chance some of these less expensive, "community-driven" and / or "community-vetted" devices are going to be gifts (great gifts), etc and will have a high chance of being in the living areas to be seen.

It is smart for BITMAIN to support these guys. It is great advertisement, it gives BITMAIN a customer approval rating bump the end product is running on their chips. If you have the parts sitting around nothing else better is going to come along.

It may not be for everyone, but I do not think it is a bad idea at all no matter what anyone says.

I think some people are itching to get their S7, or maybe have become a bit jaded about mining. Understandable.
If someone thinks this is a bad move, regarding mining in general - are you considering the alternatives available to you?
This isn't a buy coin and hold or buy miner debate. As has been pointed out, apples to oranges and all that.

You can put me down for $50 and I appreciate it guys. Next stop TypeZero 8)

Shipping from Venezuela to the US is about $5 for a dead board via DHL, reaches destination in 1 or 2 days. Dead cheap too. I think i can scrounge enough boards around here for that, gotta begin hunting them.

This pod thing... this is genius... my country needs these kind of miners because:

• Most people can't afford even a S5
• Heat... lots of it everywhere
• i7 heatsinks are dead cheap here, i guess a pack of 20-30 pods without heatsinks would be VERY cheap on the freight side

The pendrive thingy is really hot around here... even $1.2/mo (@375-400 mhz) for most people here covers about all the basic services (electric bill, internet, cable tv, water) without breaking a sweat... so yeah, pod miners are the way to go.

I guess a lot of people from third world countries will enjoy these and the GH/$ ratio can make a net positive impact on lot of lives (more than you can think of).

Take for example my country: Minimum wage here is about 7k VEF, which is about $10. Those pods, at the max speed will make what people earn from a whole month of VERY hard work. This is sorely needed 'round here.

I'm not sure how a device you can get for free or close to free which will quietly generate 100GH from about 35W - which is more efficient than any miner (which I didn't build) that you can buy for less than $1500 - is already obsolete.

I honestly didn't expect to see as many people voting for the "I'd pay $50 for that" option, because as mentioned, the $/GH isn't so great. If I was buying chips straight from Bitmain it'd be even worse. At top clock it's about 0.25$/GH but that's also at 0.5W/GH where the S3 at 0.5W/GH is probably priced comparably but you get a bit more hashrate from a single unit - except it also has no future.

Anyone wanting to run 3KW should probably fill it with S3 or S5 or S7. Monolithic units with less per-unit overhead. As soon as I can (which is to say, as soon as someone has available chips worth using), I'll be building TypeZero boards that run up to 300W each and mount on the S1 chassis. Then I'll meet the needs of people who want to run 3KW or 30KW or whatever. This is more for people who want gifts, toys or lottery machines but want something bigger than stick miners. Honestly, if Bitmain keeps making things on the scale of the S4+ or S7, I really won't be competing in their domain. They're building big KW boxes and jet turbines and I prefer to specifically avoid that.

If I can get BM1385 chips, I'd probably port the 8-chip design straight across. It'd actually be easier to design with the new chips because Bitmain did a heck of a good job with the pinout and integrated features. You might not be able to push the chips quite as far as the 1384 design because the per-chip currents increase for the same power dissipation, so with a good cooler you'd run into power availability limits before you ran into power dissipation limits. But it'd still be a heck of a good little box.

chig, if you can get a board from Venezuela to the US for $5, make sure to send a shipping label because I guarantee I can't get get a board to you for that price. Maybe with the absolute cheapest slow-boat takes-a-month shipping option. Maybe.

The builder himself designing them said 3000 watt filler is not what they are meant for on target audience.   For one reason if there are a limited amount of these selling 20 to one person chances are is a lot of them.    And you really do not want to mine with 20 devices when you have an option for 1 or 2.

If your just trying to fill up 3k make your life easier and get a S5 or S7.   But these pods will be a ton of fun to play with I already want one.  I think I have an addiction.

I would be in. I have 2 S5 boards and 2 S1's.
So if i get this right and you will start this project. I send you the boards and you send me working pods? Sounds like a plan.

Prolly going to use my FL based courier, so the standard US-$15 rate would apply.

It's very likely that I'll start this project. Even if I don't sell them, it's worth it to me to mine on these pods myself because, since most of the parts are scrounge, the $/GH is better than anything else I could buy and especially better when you consider the combination of efficiency and adjustability.

The real concern is how many I build, which is going to depend heavily on how many other people want to get it on it.

Yes, the deal would be you send S5 boards and I send you working pods. You'd have to pay shipping for the boards and the pods, but as mentioned before, if all shipping is within the US that'd be in the $15 neighborhood. I really wish I was able to ship internationally for cheaper. Even shipping to Canada costs $45 for something I can ship for $15 within the US, and it'd be $65 to anywhere overseas.

They could make great room heater instead of using electricity cooling for this winter.

I said "obsolete" when i should say efficiency is already one generation behind. And next gen chips surpassing the S7 are supposedly already in existence, however not easily available. For example the nice SP chips we were talking about making a 400-600gh pod at under 100w. So in short, a pod using the BM1384 could fall 2 step behind before 2016.

Since the chips are available with the S5, you're competing at that efficiency but your pod would be a great value for people who want to control the voltage without using special PSU's or downsteps. And only the S5 v1.91 board seem to take the downvolt properly.

And for getting them in lots of 6, i don't really see a problem in term of setup. I already run more Antminer S1's than any other miners, so i thought of the pod as a "upgrade" for them. Albeit i suspect your pod wont run on wifi.


The builder himself doesn't know my situation and what is my best target for ROI. Seeing how so many more people voted 50$, he probably did not imagine all the situations that people maybe be in. Or why people people are so interested.
Because at the price he suggest, This would be a much better option for me than getting a s7.(Which i just can't, the price is ridiculous) And is also better than buying more S5's which are insanely hard to find in Canada, at least at a reasonable price/proper seller.

For example the S7 is about the worse ROI of all my active options. Because the $/GH is just horrible. And more S5 is already what i'm doing but there are a few reasons why the pod is better;
-I could get all that i need from one deal and pay shipping once.
-Possibly better overclocking than S5
-Volt control (Awesome sauce)
-Lower heat density = less noise
-And i suspect easier management as i believe Sidehack said they would daisy chain connect to make it easy to run all the miners on one controller.

While the deciding factor is i can't run a S5 next to my head to me when i sleep,... while maybe 12 pods running at moderate freq might be. I need miners that will run in my room quiet.

If the amount is limited, then of course. I said "I'd fill 3kW with them" before knowing there could be so few, after all, he's going to have made over 1000 usb sticks.

But who knows maybe some people are sitting on dozens of dead board that would let sidehack make a few hundreds pods.

If that is not the case a single lot of 6 would be just as nice since i got quite a bit of S1 and old Scrypt miner to replace.


A small pod should be 30$ with USPS. A lot of 6 should be 45-50$. From experience with all the stuff i bought from sellers in the US so far. Its bad for one pod, but okay for 5-6.
If you decide to keep them, then i could see value in you doing that until they become unprofitable and you need to sell them to others. At either point i'd be interested in buying them.

Welp, the moment you say "go", i'll start hunting borked s5 boards  ;D

Obsolete -> one generation behind; yes I get it now. By pure efficiency it's pretty good compared to current stuff only by merit of its adjustability; if someone else makes an S7-caliber miner that's adjustable this guy starts looking worse.

I have talked to Spondoolies about their new chip. Spondoolies likes NDAs so I can't talk about anything that I know because NDA. I don't know anything about what Avalon or InnoSilicon are doing right now. But I'm not too worried about "2 step behind before 2016". That said, I'm very much looking forward to working with current-gen chips. This project is another step toward the end goal of making not-crappy miners for not-crappy people.

The pods won't be daisychainable. Each pod will have its own USB connection so you'd have to hub multiples together, but they could still all be run on a single controller - say, a Pi with cgminer. That controller could have a wifi adapter. I don't know.

1000 sticks requires 1000 chips. Chips are the limiting factor. I have 1000 chips budgeted for Compacs, and another 200 for whatever else, and then a bunch of pulls. For 1000 chips I could make 125 pods. The chips I have available after Compacs are over can make about 50 pods. If someone wants to scrounge up a berjillion S5 boards that'd be pretty smexy. With the six boards I should expect from survey responders that's about 16 more pods (not counting the 6 that would be given in trade for said boards) so it'd take a lot of scrounging to get a big batch.

So, say... 1 board + $100 would net 3 pods?

Are the pods going to get external 12v? with standard PCI-e connectors? (that would be rad)

Now i know the limit amount of BM1384 chips you have/had.
chiguireitor seem up to the challenge, maybe he can scrounge up that berjillion S5 boards ^_^"

For the non daisy, usb hub still work, its a small extra expense, but very manageable, especially since i won't be getting 100 of them apparently. :P Good idea for slapping a Wifi adapter on the pi if ever.

Cool for SP NDA stuff. I guess this mean at least there is a channel of communication open. Hopefully at one point you get to tell us you'll have a batch of their chips.

Maybe we can setup something for the dead board. For instance i wouldn't mind buying dead S5 board and have them shipped directly to you.No point in having them shipped to me, then i reship them to you, especially since there's probably a bunch of them, dead already in the US.

Most of the network runs at .51 to .65 watts per gh. Yeah the s-7 is the best at .24 to .26 but it will take a long time for most of the network to be at .25 or less.

The future for home miners is effiecnt smaller gear pointed at a solo pool.  But I will never hit a block. So one hundred watts doing four hundred gh makes sense with twenty five  partners doing it . You have ten th mining in a team.


If your gear is really efficient and the club has good size you actually make money.

The stick club I am running is just a bit too small we do two to nine th each day.

But the math is there to make the idea work

Chig - "Power comes in through either a 12V brick or a 6-pin PCIe (both jacks would be standard)." First post, first paragraph. I figure why limit it to one or the other and potentially force the customer to have extra expense? At the same time, someone with only a brick is limited to the brick's output power so full hashrate wouldn't be available.

VirosaGITS - I don't really care where the dead boards come from. You provide a dead board, you get a pod. I mean there's practical limits - if the board had Prisma'd and all the chips were charred or something I wouldn't take that in trade.

I probably shouldn't make the "you get a pod" guarantee since this whole project is still somewhere between "is it worth doing this" and "how do we make this happen" on the stages of project completion. So nobody move just yet.

I've been fairly annoyed by Spondoolies' engineering pretty much since I first learned about them. They really like to make things really complex, which ends up making things expensive and failure-prone (well, more potential failure points anyways, not necessarily actual failures). From a business standpoint, regarding customer service and general communication and not-being-a-dickery they've always done well. Better than any other mining manufacturer I've talked to. I don't know if we'll be able to make good use of their new chip, as there's more to consider in a design than just efficiency, but I'm not ruling it out yet.

Roger that. I will wait and when we get the go ahead, i'll see if getting some boards to you would be doable at that point.

Thats rather vague comments regarding the SP chips and i'm not really "in" that circle so, i glean that there would be engineering challenge with their chip, but nothing certain yet.

Meanwhile I haven't heard much about Avalon's or InnoSilicon's chips. And who know for how long Bitmain will keep their BM1385 to themselves. They aren't ultra efficient but then maybe it would be a more familiar chip to work with.

It would be a shame if SP does not work out since they seemed to be the only one announcing they would be inclined to sell batches of chips SoonTM afaik.

Yeah, the Spondoolies chip has potential. You can tell that from the posted specs, it's promising. Without even considering priviliged information, look at everything they've built so far and note that it's always super complex and hard to work with. I didn't want to work with Rockerbox, just like I don't want to work with SFARDS, because BGA sucks. If I can help it I'd like to stay with smaller chips that don't make routing evil. SP's new chip package appears to be smaller and less evil than the Rockerbox at least. The BM1385 looks like it'd be super easy to work with. I really like the pinout and all the integration saves a lot of hassle and additional parts. It's quite a bit closer to a chip I'd have designed myself, as far as that goes, and I'd really enjoy working with it. InnoSilicon made a darn good chip in the A1 and I want to see what they can do with new, but when PlanetCrypto talked to them about samples all they were interested in was someone to lay down a million dollars on a full batch preorder, apparently sight-unseen. Nope. Avalon hasn't said a word to me since about June and I honestly have no idea what they're doing these days.

But anyways. Whoops I seem to have dropped this stats page screenshot of my 8-chip proof-of-concept hashing away at 200MHz on 650mV core.

http://gekkoscience.com/misc/pod/8_chip_proof_stats.JPG

Hopefully BM stop dicking around and sell their chips but, their communication skills in English seem very poor.

Is that a prototype board with BM1384 that you already have working? Sound to be too soon to have PCB of these set up already, are you running this without a PCB? I wonder how that would look like o.o;

It's chunks of several different things all jerry-rigged together, and falls back on some of the work I did this spring and summer which led to Compac design. I don't have a PCB layout yet (I'll start on that tomorrow) and since we don't have multichip code yet it's running off an S5 controller. Mostly I wanted to prove the electronics - the basic topology and power systems - but there's definitely some improvements to be made yet. I don't expect to have a single-board prototype for at least two weeks. I need to do more testing before finishing the electronics enough to send off for a PCB, and there's still Novak's input on controls interfacing which needs to be done. I don't know how long firmware will take for full integration.

Sometime in the next few days I'll probably hook this up on a meter and get some efficiency curve estimates, but I have some stability improvements to make first.

I'm impressed, this is pretty awesome. If you're up for it, i'd invite you to take some pictures sometimes from development stages. Seeing a jury rig of parts would be pretty cool to me. But if you want to keep your trade secrets, i'm sure people will understand :P

If I weren't worried about trade secrets I'd have already posted pictures. Once I have a single-board prototype you better believe it'll be going up here though.

you know, that'll make my life easer, I'd ball-mill them then wash the glass/epoxy away, leaving the metals behind..


... why is ebay aus so barren with any miner (anyone for a U3 for $115 excluding post?)? you'd half expect there would be some on there now.. so it'll be worth me getting some dead S5's and shipping it to side..

2xS5's +$25 nice deal make that 1 S5 for 1 pod.. but I has 4x non-communicating NRB, can i haz 1? :D
I'll endeavor to find some BM1384's or S5 boards to trade, that should help the project more

To be honest, right now in trade negotiations I'd prioritize dead S5 boards much more highly than I would boards for power parts (NRB, S1 etc) because I currently have power parts for four times more pods than I have ASICs for, and that's a conservative estimate. Unless a lot of ASICs start arriving, it's entirely possible I could build every pod there's demand for and still have power parts left over from my own stash.

Any use for an S4 board?

Please do keep in mind that there are many "common" CPU cooler families around with different mounting hole requirements - Intel and AMD have not uses the same size mounting holes since the days of clip-on coolers (and the only heatsinks that used "holes" in those days were the Swiftech 370 and Alpha 8045 types), and even within Intel and AMD there have been a few different "families" of mounting holes. It's possible to design a PCB to support more than one set of mounting holes.

 I'd actually vote for the "clip-on" type cooler mounts, though you'd probably need one cooler for 1-2 chips if I remember the max power draw of the BM1384 correctly.

Please keep in mind also that almost every CPU cooler contains now a mounting accesoires for all existing sockets, so the different configuration of mounting holes should not be a problem (sure in case with "standart" configuration of those holes, i.e. 'as for LGA-1155' or as for any other (more convenient for developer in certain circumstances) socket).

It is "unlikely" to say the least you would want to 'modify' a 2013 KNC 550gh Jupiter (although you guys are certifiable as being crazy on your projects imho) :)

So when this 'madness' of a project takes off (hey looney bin...lots of folks lots of stories ..you get to 'act out" I'm in) :)

Would someone such as me ...be better off getting a S5 or whatever off Ebay for your modifications...or is there enough old stuff gonna flow into the
project ..someone like me ..who went the KNC route would not be left out? (unsure if i need to get my own 'junker' to get in this club/shop or not?) :)

but yeah ..if it is really about 50 bucks or so (hell could be more) I'm in....we could all maybe jump in and  pump another sha-256 coin huh? (lol) :)

(man I really really am gonna miss home mining.....when home mining dies ....I mean really we are at the point in time where it is out of desperation

"PIMP YOUr ASIC" (TM) (TV show rights can be negotiated) :)

(so low I've fallen so low...I thought I'd at least get a home miner that kinda/sorta worked up till 2017...alas I was a misled newbie back in the day) :)

Anyway I'm in

Searing, how many times has someone responded to you with a comment about "whatever you're smoking"? Just, you know, just wondering.

To be honest, the only time I've ever seen anything KNC in person was the one day we visited MinerSource in January 2014 to talk about PSU boards. I didn't realize until about half an hour before that we were in the same town and that was during the big move to Colorado but there were still a few miners on site. I don't really know anything about anything KNC has made. Except that the Neptune will kill you in your sleep, but then everyone knows that.

If you buy an S5 off eBay, you should probably mine on it. If you buy one that doesn't work, make sure you don't pay a lot because it doesn't work. Or you could buy a pod directly? I dunno. Do the math and see what pops out.

I'll probably hole the board for LGA1175 coolers. I believe that's what the few HEX4M actually delivered used, which is why there are hundreds of unused coolers in my shop that I've asked about purchasing for this project. Also seems like something fairly standard/common and easy to get parts for. A clip-on cooler for 1-2 chips doesn't make much sense unless your cooler is awkwardly tiny, because top-clock performance on the BM1384 is 10-12W per chip so you probably aren't remembering the max power draw correctly.

Can you recycle anything from the U3 miners?

Probably nothing that would offset the cost of sending it in.

Just bought Holybitcoins last two advertised BTCGarden V2's, if this project goes thru, I may send them your way for conversion once I've had a chance to play with them a bit.

Nifty. I think I have two Garden boards that work, and about 20 that don't.

Also, I'll be basing the chip field dimension on the base of the "ARCTIC Freezer 7 Pro" cooler (3cm square). For aftermarket coolers I also have a couple waterblocks but the contact area on them is substantially larger. 8 chips will fit in that area, but it'll make routing and bypass caps interesting.

Maybe have a clearance area so everyone can fit their selected cooling gadget. I think that would need to be done anyways if you want to support either AMD or Intel heatsinks for the pod.

There'll be room for larger footprint. What I'm saying is, if you don't use at least a 3cm square contact base, your chips won't be cooling properly. I'll leave plenty of space around it for a bigger (probably at least 6x6cm) base cooler because I know some folks will want it. I'll try to keep all tall parts outside an 8x8cm square to allow for cooler mounts and such. It's gonna be a bit tight because the board is planned to be about 10x10cm but I'm pretty sure I can make it work. Right now I'm planning to have holes for LGA1150 coolers.

Way to go, this is the best plan imho.

works for me I have a few .

I'm going to have to go through my parts area.  I have a few but been so long I don't remember what they were all were deals at one time or another I bought incase I needed.

Hopefully I have a LGA1150 in there.  I guess not a huge deal if I don't.   Normally I don't pre-order.  But do you think you will do pre-orders on the pod?  I for one feel safe enough for you to pay in advance if it helps you through dev.

I might do a limited pre-order to help offset initial costs of PCBs and other required parts (all the controls, jacks, signal logic and LDOs), but as always I'd prefer not to take in money until I have a working prototype. I'll probably do some refining on my proof build tomorrow and hopefully test out some stuff that doesn't work quite so well right now which I think I have solved already but it's not implemented on the old board. Did some recalculating on buck design today as well so I'll have a few more parts to replace on that and get it closer to what should be final design. I don't want to get too far into the specifics of a prototype PCB layout until I have all the problems "thoroughly licked".

As is always the case, controls and code is Novak's domain. I assume he'll be testing communication and control stuff while I'm testing power and whatnot. To be fair, I don't actually need his code to work when I do the board design so long as the hardware portion is intact - parts selection, pinout decided upon, etc. He can code firmware and bench-test stuff while we wait for the PCBs to arrive. But once I have a working prototype with my hardware and his software, I'll take stock of what parts I have and how many we're to build in the first batch and see what people want to do. Right now I think ordering prototype PCBs in a week is somewhere on the optimistic side of realistic but not quite impossible. Since I won't be building more Compacs next week I should have a good bit of time for R&D.

Speaking of Compacs, I think I'll reopen an order queue for the next batch.

Yay! More blinkedy blinks! :D 
I think I can speak for most that this time around a little preorder whether it be funds or equipment is completely understood.

Hah, dibs on pre-order if i can afford it in the short window. I think waiting for a prototype sound reasonable if that work for you. Worse case scenario, you do a pre-prorder for trading-in parts first? Dead S5 boards, components you actually need, etc?

If i'm tight on money when the window open, i can always ship that board to the US. That should be relatively cheap to do.

I'll have to take stock of what I already have, which right now is enough scrounge parts for 50 pods. What I don't have right now is money for non-scrounge parts for 50 boards, so if I do take preorders I'll certainly be open to people paying for pods. I'll also be open to people trading S5 boards, assuming interest in the first batch exceeds 50 pods.

anytime you want 50usd to 250usd in btc let me know. I will keep a coin on the side for sidehack.

Well, good news. Looks like routing is possible with the chips that condensed. I haven't dropped in power bypass caps yet but there's room for 'em and all the signals are routed in and out each chip with DRC compliance. That's seriously a relief. Maybe now I should go home for the night.

I'm keeping a tad away for it aswell.  Sidehack has shown very qood quality on the compacs.  I have enoyed playing with them a lot.

This pod sounds like fun in a bigger miner even a pretty cool pod design with being able to add your own cooling allows for some personality to it.

And so far it seems like all good news.   And a lot of work going on.  Cant wait to play with one though.

yeah the knc comment was just to get you riled up ..you would hate me forever :)

ok still unclear on what I'll need for any of this i will wait for it to firm up some etc :) (ie lurk) :)

ie likely i'd have to 'tweak' my way into being one of the 1st 50 pods you have stuff for I guess (if i am following this correctly on this thread)

keep up the good work :)

If you want people to hate you forever, all you have to do is use an emoticon on almost every single line of all your posts.

I also get pretty annoyed at run-on sentences with zero punctuation, putting an apostrophe before ending "s" at random, the classic their/there/they're and common spelling errors. Nothing against y'all but my mom and sister are both English teachers and I grew up on classic literature (my toilet book right now is Chaucer) so I kinda start twitching when I spend too much time reading the forums.

Also, nobody has to cheat to be in the first batch of pods. Right now nobody at all is in the first batch of pods. When I figure out the final plan of action I'll let everyone know and then it'll be first-come first-served.

My end goal is still to build a bigger miner. The nice things about this project are it allows me to use parts I already have so it'll move quickly and cheaply, it does something people apparently want but can't really find on the existing market, and the entire communication and control system would port directly over to a larger board which makes design work for the next thing that much easier.

I think you should keep a whole lineup of products for all the tastes: stick miners, pods, blades and semi-jet turbines. Gekkoscience is starting to be synonym to quality, no wonder you start getting a lot of orders in for the pods.

Regarding the trade-in/$50 dichotomy, i think most peeps that send you a board will happily buy at least 1 pod per board, which would leave at least another pod free for someone else.

As i told you via pm, i think i can find several borked boards.

Admittedly the sticks are pretty fun. Now that I have a very solid base design, a lot of the hardware work of adapting to a new chip would be pretty simple. I think Novak and I are agreed it'd be good to make the next one software voltage controlled. Honestly that puts more work on him than it does me, but it'll pull a lot from the same controls work being done on this pod so probably won't actually be that bad.

I'm not sure about turbines and the like. It's probable a 300W-max S1-sized board would be the largest single unit I make, which two would make a nice S1-formfactor, and half a dozen could make an industrial miner. I'd prefer to stay away from things with S7 power density, and things which require S5 noise to run. Even with an S5-level peak power consumption, running at that point wouldn't be required because I refuse to build a miner without voltage control.

I certainly don't mind having a varietous product line, but it's going to take more resources than I have available right now. Gonna have to change my plan of attack, I think. Oh also and get some new chips to play with, but that's up to manufacturers whether or not they want to share.

Bit of updated info. I have a fully-custom 4-chip test board currently running below an S5 controller because it's the only thing I have with BM1384 multi-chip code. Novak's got me a schematic for the entire controls, including volt setting and temperature monitoring. I reckon tomorrow he intends to work on multi-chip code of our own. I'll be out all day tomorrow but when I get back I'm gonna get back to the PCB layout. I have an assortment of schematics on hand which cover node-level parts, the power system, and all the controls so all I have to do is put it all together on one board. My goal is to be ordering a few sample PCBs by Friday.

If everything works, I'll probably make a few so we can run a few for testing and I might raffle off one of them as a way of building interest and resources for the project as a whole.

I'm all in for a Raffle! I'm just trying to thing how one can accomplish this on here, these forums don't have a raffle ticket system, hey?

I'm no expert, but random.org has a nifty raffling system with true entropy....

I won a R290 on a Dogecoin pool raffle - it was a "twitch type" setup where everyone in the raffle watched their Streetfighter character battle match after match to win.  Was actually quite fun. ::)

I think it would be a cool touch for the pod to have a slow pulse led, one that started dim and got brighter (not like Night Rider but similar effect). 

I'd participate in that raffle.

I don't do raffles, but I will run it if someone is needed to run it.

A slow pulsing LED like the constantly annoying one on my sister's Mac laptop? I think I prefer not that idea.

I think a raffle would be pretty easy. Set up an address specific for the raffle that folks dump coin into, say 0.01BTC per ticket. Signed message to verify your entry. I could do it the old-fashioned way and put a bunch of labeled balls in a bucket, shake it up and see which one falls out; I could also do a direct drawing with labeled slips of paper out of a shaken-up bucket. That'd probably be a bit easier to conjure up. One grand-prize winner gets a pod, two or three runners up get a free Compac each? I'd probably determine how many free Compacs go out based on how many tickets get sold, seeing as if I give away too many I'd be losing money. Probably have some publicly posted thresholds, like for every 10 tickets sold after the first 25 tickets I add one Compac as a runner-up draw. That'd probably be alright.

I'm interested in the project for remove my olds 4 bitburner fury, the raffle sounds interesting, but I don't know how the messages work :(

What about auctioning it.  People get crazy bidding for stuff that is unique.  I would start off the bidding at .35 BTC (if it becomes an option)

One could potential get more out of a raffle over auction, look at a raffle at a fate, each ticket is worth $5, and its for $50 of meat for a BBQ, but the people running the raffle could end up with thousands.

where as people will only bid on an item upto the cost they are willing to obtain the item, so the $50 of meat could only go for $75.

I think Sidehack's way is better, it will come off by as less trying to exploit people and making a profit and more promoting his gear in a more gamble-y/fun way. He get to raise awareness and stimulate a few sales of Sticks instead of trying to turn up a big profit.

I think thats pretty clever/long term vision oriented.

Raffle idea gets my vote, too.  I'd buy in a couple "tickets" for a chance at the first pod.  Plus the runner up of another compac would be almost just as cool.

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3898/how-does-sign-message-work


http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3337/what-are-the-safety-guidelines-for-using-the-sign-message-feature/3339#3339

I think raffle will bring most money, which will hopefully help on pod dev.  I'm sure it's costing some cash and time so I view it as kinda a neat way of supporting it.

You could double dip in a way.  Do a auction and a raffle.  My suggestion is don't do them at same time do raffle then auction, I think you will get most this way.   It allows people to try for rafffle then who knows what crazy bid you get on bidding.

So combination of two should get some dev money flowing.  And I still am willing to pre-order as I'm sure many others would if you need any money for dev, I'm willing to trust you on it.

As always I can front 2btc and not pester you about payment or gear.

I don't trust many companies but I would agree deepening price I also would be interested in pre-order of pod.  And also same no pestering about delivery knowing it would come when it's done.  So no trying to rush you.

I think a lot would pre-order with no pestering a lot interested if you need money up front.  But I know you don't really like to pre-order.  But if you change mind ever just let us know.

I was out of town all day Wednesday for a funeral so I think ordering a prototype board by Friday is out of the question - probably Monday. Two funerals in one year is pretty bad, but this one was 94 years old so not as rough as my 25-year-old cousin this summer.

Anyways. I intend to have the layout finished and order some prototype PCBs come Monday. If I can get a couple working (which will depend on Novak's code as much as my hardware, since this is a device requiring firmware and drivers) I'll probably run a raffle and maybe then look at pre-orders for an initial batch. No money yet.

Some things are more important out there then bitcoin or money.  My condolences on your situation. 

No need to even worry about updates in times like that.  I wish you and your family the best.

This time it was my best friend's grandpa. I've known him and his family over 15 years so I was there for them. My own family is doing fine.

But yeah, there are more important things than money. I treat money as a resource, something I want because it enables me to do awesome stuff. A lot of people want money just to have money and whatever power or comfort having lots of money could bring. Me, I just want resources - but I don't want to feel like I didn't earn what I have, which is one of the things defining my stance on preorders and investment dollars.

Speaking of resources, i've just got 1 dead board from a friend, there's about 15 more incoming my way, that would net about 16 boards "if" the project goes trough.

As soon as i have them all, and you say "go" i'll send'em.

That's a lotta boards. I'm assuming you'll want 16 pods in return.

If the project goes through... yeap

Also, willing to put some dough for at least 20-25 pods... you wouldn't believe how much fans Gekkoscience got on my family :D

http://ritahubbard.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/INVASION-OF-THE-POD-PEOPLE.jpg

The image is even green for gekko science, haha.  :D

"Pod people" always makes me think of Apple device users. Especially the "devour your soul" part.

God! We can only hope to be consumed--- Bring it!
"Just a few minutes could save you hundreds.... on mining equipment" GekkoScience.

I am in for either an auction and/or a raffle.  I am also in to send in some boards.  

8 - Garden blades
4 - Asicminer blades
4 - S1 blades

I want some PODS ;D

Garden and S1 I doubt have a ton of value behind them.   Kinda like old A1's just not really worth it at this point for most.

Which asicminer hashing blades are they?  If prisma or whatever then yes likely worth something. 

These are what he may need if sidehack is on short supply of parts but as stated not as urgent as the chips themselves.

I based it off the OP - But yes they are Prisma - thanks

Some parts are being scavenged from Prismas, but I have a fair supply of those - enough to supply parts for mroe boards than I'll build, likely.

S1/S2 blades are looking to be a bit higher demand because they have a nice supply of 470uF and 680uF solid-state caps which I'll end up wanting. AM Tube and BTCGarden AMV1/V2 blades are also desirable for power parts but since I already have those parts for 150 boards without tearing down my S1 stack (and I probaby won't have to if folks send in S1 and S2 I can strip).

The breakdown is about like this: An S5 board pays one pod and supplies about $25 worth of parts each for two more pods. An S1 supplies $10 worth of parts each for 4 pods. A Tube or Garden board supplies about $10 worth of parts for 8 pods. A Prisma supplies about $1 worth of parts each for over a dozen pods. Therefore, S5 boards are much more highly valued than anything else because the one board gives me about $50 worth of scarce parts while everything else has various cheap parts in spades - a lot of which I already literally have buckets of.

The options in the survey pretty much are the options. If the survey says 2 boards and $25, it doesn't mean 4 boards. If you have four boards you can trade 4 boards and $50 and get two pods. That's also subject to limitation based on my needs at present - if I need the parts from an S1 more than from a Tube to complete the batch, I may not allow trades from Tubes but still take trade in S1 boards.

Friggin' economics, man. Right now the priority is first S5, then S1/S2, then anything else in a distant third.

Still working on the PCB layout. Not sure if I mentioned or not but we expanded the board size a bit to make it actually possible to manufacture in a single-sided board and still have room  for a CPU cooler with mounting and clearance and stuff. Current dimension are 10x15cm, about 4x6 inches.

The mount holes I'm putting in are the proper spacing for LGA115x coolers. One thing to note, however, is that our ASICs stand between 35 and 40 thousandths of an inch (about 0.9mm) above the PCB. An unmodified CPU cooler is likely to sit well above this point, being as it's used to mating with a fairly thick processor in a fairly thick socket. With this in mind, I've added some extra holes which line up to some direct mounting on the Freezer 7 (since that's what I'm referencing) and also making sure to keep clearance around the chips to use lower-profile coolers like stock Intel i-series (which I don't recommend for near full speed operation since they have a round core and corner chips will probably run hot). Basically, I'm trying to give options without going crazy.

My test board will have some added instrumentation like output current measurement and extra pads to directly measure and manipulate. It's likely some of this won't be on the final version, unless y'all really want the functionality (at slightly added parts cost). If I don't run into issues with time management, I should be able to order some prototype boards tomorrow and they'd be in by probably middle of next week. During that interrim I have some other design tasks and some manufacturing to take care of.

After we have some working prototypes and the firmware is finished and tested, I'll raffle off at least one of the prototype pods and start taking in funds for a full batch. I don't know yet how big a full batch will be, but it looks like there's interest and materials enough already to merit about 100.

I like the sounds of this :).   Sounds like making good progress.

There is not a lot of companies I say take my money I trust you.  But I feel the pod will be fun just like the compac.

This project is probably the best thing happening in the home miner scene.  I posted the following on the SP50 thread but wanted to share it here where it is more applicable-  :)



Maybe I need to start the "GekkoScience Fan Club" - kind of like the Nasty Fan Club - with the motto - "By home miners for home miners"

You should probably wait until we have more than two server boards, a stickminer and basic hosting before going quite that far. Also consider we're not the only ones doing what we're doing, and we couldn't do anything at all without help.

I in for that even at extra cost. I think the experimental/learning aspect of your gear is a major plus. I also like the intel i series stock heatsink option holes as I have several of those from builds. I understand the clocks wont go as high but they will work until a hand-me-down aftermarket cooler makes it over from another build.

Also, I should mention we're looking to use a temp sensor that sits a few thousandths shorter than the ASICs, and park it right in the center of them, so it should make fair contact with the heatsink and get a decent measure of that temperature instead of, say, the temperature of the opposite side of the PCB.

got a layout for these chips? they going look like a 3x3? since they are 8mm by 8mm, thats a 24mm by 24mm, less any space between the chips, so give it 2mm between them 26mm by 26mm, so I don't think them stock Intel sinks would work, I can't find one atm to measure.
I'm happy with throwing a "NoFan Icepipe" on that little beast anyway ;)

As stated earlier, the chips are arranged in a 3cm x 3cm square. There's a bit more routing required between them than 2mm will allow, especially considering the pads for the no-leads need to stick out from the chip a bit to make soldering correctly easier. The stock Intel cooler I looked at had a 5.5cm raised circular center, a little over 3cm diameter of which was a solid core. This would have pretty much full contact with 4 of the chips and a little over half contact with the other 4.

I'm still talking to the current owner of my surplus of Freezer 7 Pro coolers. I have permission to use them on this project but am still waiting on a price.

What about using some of the high end thermal pads with slight adhesion- I know the Phobya has some thermal pads that are in the 7 W/mK and the lower end Phobya is 5 W/mK.  I have never tried thermal pads with ASICS but it cannot be as bad as some of the manufacturers using a gallon of thermal compound.  I ask because it would alleviate the need for cooler mounting holes.

you did? oh bugger me, I'm half reading things again!


well, sticking a CPU cooler to the chips would make a lot of strain, and having the mounds holds them tight to the heat source.

if anything, large 3cmx3cmx3mm copper shim would do better..
but the Freezer 7 pro looks to have plenty of contact area.

and I thought the W/mK was meant to be higher number is better? Nope. Wrong! http://www.ccfltd.co.uk/Trade-Support/Calculating_U_Values

If the board is flat and stationary then it would not add any strain at all.  

Yes- the higher the W/mK the better.  I think you are overthinking it.  You are looking at the thermal conductivity = less conductive is more efficient but with a Thermal interface you do want a higher conductivity in order to pass the heat to the cooler. This is why silver is a great TIM but is conductive which creates another set of issues.  Silver has a thermal conductivity of about 418 - while silver thermal compounds have a thermal conductivity of 2-8. 

Bitmain used thermal pads on the U1 and U2-U2+.  I've had my 30 U2+ sticks running 24/7 for almost two years now. In the end, thermal pads/tape, what have you, cost more than Chinese gov't subsidized  bulk PASTE.

New kid on the block here, at least as far as actually commenting on the forums is concerned, been reading for a while. I've got 4 S1s and 2 S3+ units that have been running since December, and the S1s are about ready to go out the door. Would love to help with this project, and get a few pods out of it as well :P
Slightly related, noticed you were in Missouri, sidehack? What region, if you dont mind my asking? NE here. Anyway, keep up the great work, love the fact we are reusing EoL gear, instead of just throwing it away and buying new. That's what I'm all about.

I'm going to leave the holes, because some people already have screws for things which were designed to be screwed in place but not everybody has thermal pads or quarter-inch copper plate - I among them. Y'all can do whatever you want to mount your coolers though, since that's part of the point of the project.

I am excited for this pod miner!!

Just got one of the usb miners, works great. 

grindseeds, ASICMiner Block Erupter Tube and other miners use them in fact you can still buy the ones used for ASICMiner Block Erupter Tube here https://www.wtcr.ca/catalog/product/bm-amtbp-01 not sure how good they are or whats good but about find out the best ones to use.

Have fun with it, with a stable high powered hub it's fun to see what it will do.
Oh and the flashy light thingies are fun too.

My future plans a couple months back weren't involving GekkoScience but it would be foolish
from my perspective not to put more effort in supporting this so called "Movement".  It above all
else is refreshing and to have an open forum of discussion here. 

Yes, I'm excited for the Pod as well.  What it brings isn't measured on hashrate but one more step closer
to a competing miner at a reasonable rate, possibly.  Not to mention a continued line of quality product
which will grow GekkoScience to a place it deserves to be.

Well I have yet to figure out how to vote in one of these polls. Perhaps I just come across them after the voting is complete?

Anyhow, I would be interested in the purchase at $50 option. I have no miners suitable for parts, so purchase is the only option for me.

Thanks for your efforts!

-fvineyard

I think you select the option you like and then click "submit vote".

Sidehack, are you accepting blades now? I am accumulating a pretty good supply and want to do what I can to see this take off.

Nope. Not until I have a working prototype and I know I can start taking in for a batch. I didn't get the layout quite finished today (Mondays are usually catch-up days and Novak and I tend to burn several hours talking about awesome stuff) and since tomorrow I have a lot of packing and sandwiches to take care of it might not get done tomorrow either but I should be sending off for prototype boards Wednesday. I'd expect at least two weeks after that before I have it tested satisfactorily, which probably puts a November delivery out for a final product.

You have to have a number of posts (20, 25??) to vote in the polls.

 Ah sidehack what you could do with these chips and some IPO $$$ (not impressed). Doing what you would do 'should' if you could get such high end chips
and  BW would be charging way way more $$$ to do so (turn to the darkside 'sidehack') just saying note below BW 14nm usb stick 34.6 to 63gh chip ONLY 0.86 btc (bulk of 333)
so even if you could get them at that price NOT in bulk of 333...even as a legit .pre-order this FALL at about 231 bucks a usb chip! and they will ship it to you sometime Winter 2016!

heh lame

here is the info

Here you go 14nm usb chip for the masses..you pay thru the nose for it....but a cute toy (and the joys it looks like of a pre-order raffle)

Info on BW company itself


https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/the-unknown-giant-a-first-look-inside-bw-one-of-china-s-oldest-and-largest-miners-1444675310 (https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/the-unknown-giant-a-first-look-inside-bw-one-of-china-s-oldest-and-largest-miners-1444675310)

on the supposed 14nm product

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bw-to-launch-nm-chip-and-miner-for-general-population-1445278227 (https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bw-to-launch-nm-chip-and-miner-for-general-population-1445278227)



from the above

quote


Along with the announcement of its bitcoin chip, the company has announced that it will be releasing a bitcoin miner for consumers that will launch in Winter 2016.
“The miners are now available for pre-order at a price of 0.87 BTC with a minimum order of 333 miners which is 1 petahash,” Virgilio Lizardo Jr., Head of International at Bitbank told Bitcoin Magazine in an exclusive interview. “This price will be available until November 11, 2015. This winter, the miners will be available with no minimum order required; the price at this time has not been decided yet.”

According to BW, each 14nm chip in the miner will be able to attain anywhere from 34.6-63GH/s. The power consumption is 18W based on a voltage of 0.59V to 0.76V.

end quote

So the above says (assuming you could get one w/o bulk at the bulk price above) it would be as I type this $230.99 for a 34.6GH to 63.0GH USB Stick!

Sheesh. I can get any number of ASIC miners NOW ..electric be damned for a better return then that! and still nerver  ROI indeed and have my no ROI Toys NOW!

But anyway another toy....but right now you could get 10 8gb usb stick Sidehack Gekko Miners (overclocked say to 10gh each) for 250 bucks would be 100gh NOW TODAY!
..so I sure as hell am not sure why the hell you would do the above on these BW sticks arriving in Winter 2016. The ROI is the same. A smile :)

but toys be toys I guess.

Sidehack sales thread here

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1126705.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1126705.0)

Humans are nuts!

I was under the impression that the BW preorder was for 333 miners at .87 BTC equalling about 1 Ph for a total of about 289.71 BTC

Well if that is the case from the above I stand corrected...but they said 'bulk orders' in the above so usually that means 'a piece' then they hit you with the
amount you have to buy in bulk to get that price (or not)

I really doubt you are gonna get 333 usb miners for $289.71 usd it would be nice 1PH for $289.71. But again they are talking about 'miners' not 'chips' so
I think my price is correct on the above

(Never wanted to be more wrong in my life ..so if so ...point it out) :)

I did some math over here:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1186100.msg12735287#msg12735287

I think there are some mis-commuications. It's around 289 BTC not USD.  So that likely added to it.   

They appear to be talking about the same Lketc miners in the bottom-end 3TH version - this is NOT a bloody USB stick, whoever came up with that concept needs to go back to school and learn some basic math.

 The quote was in BTC, not $ - though even the quoted 0.87B per miner seems a little low even as a batch price, it WOULD be nice and competative and would make RoI on these things achievable!


 "per chip" does not specify "per miner".

quote author=QuintLeo link=topic=1203190.msg12735338#msg12735338 date=1445330928]
They appear to be talking about the same Lketc miners in the bottom-end 3TH version - this is NOT a bloody USB stick, whoever came up with that concept needs to go back to school and learn some basic math.

 The quote was in BTC, not $ - though even the quoted 0.87B per miner seems a little low even as a batch price, it WOULD be nice and competative and would make RoI on these things achievable!


 "per chip" does not specify "per miner".


[/quote]


yeah I stand corrected it says 30.6gh to 63gh per chip per MINER if I remember the GH right...so not usb I did not 'see' it correctly

So yeah this could really really say at a 3 TH miner run the bitcoin difficulty past doubling in some kinda asic mnfg to chip to in house at cost to data hall and cheap china electric

..well gonna be quite the WAR imho ...and this stuff always seems to work out where it all hits the world at the same time :)


Heh! I got that wrong on both the BTC and the 'chips in miner" quote..could be worse I guess I could have been working for NASA and everyone woulda died! :)

Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times!

Indeeed!

I am all in for S1 option. Got plenty of old boards sitting around.

actually it is 'reading comprehension" in that I'm sick and miss read both the BTC (i saw usd) and the  'per chip" where it was 'per chip per miner'

heh....shoot me (please sick as a dog!) Sorry about the confusion. But it is gonna be 'quite the war' of the giants imho.

Thanks Jake. That would explain why I do not see the vote option. I guess I need to get more active and stop being a "lurker" :)

- Frank

can't wait but not till winter next year :( .hoping to see real cheap miners then if it doesn't happen, i some how see bitmain getting even more greddy and selling 12 th miner for 3 k and we pay like fools ..  

but isn't that how it is with no one to stop them .  if SP or Avalon or LK had come out with some thing about the time S7 came out , we would see then around 400 or 500 they would more then likely be selling chips , sense on one is out there atm to go against them they can do what ever they want to .


SO quite the war it will be if more start  selling to the public the money is there , just will they at a nice price :) .

Many enjoyed the pricing battle between SP and Bitmain.  We just need more product continually being released to benefit.  At least sidehacks work is a nice reprieve from the once a year releases.

So, who thinks I should put a cap on how many S5 boards a person can trade for pods? What should that cap be? Five? Ten? I know right now only 8 survey respondents have selected the straight trade option, but I'm also told that the market value for dead S5 boards has been increasing since this thread appeared because people are buying in anticipation of the opportunity to trade.

Should I worry about a cap, in order to prevent some folks from being taken advantage of by a few opportunistic individuals? Or should I not care and let the market fend for itself? I don't like being party to someone getting screwed, but at the same time it's not my job to be the dick police.

Also, y'all will be pleased to note that I made absolutely no progress on this or any other project today.

I was under the assumption that you needed as many chips as you can get from trades of an S5.  Given more people seem to be attracted to a product with a higher hashrate. 

It doesn't make sense to trade in a working S5 but a non-working one definitely.  I think the barebone costs of this pod miner will sell like waffles ( I mean pancakes). 

This project specifically was based on the "rinse and reuse" philosophy as I understood it.  So my 2 cents says to continue on and if it looks to be an issue change paths at that time.

Who knows this could go beyond what your estimating in sales and at worst have some extra parts to play with. 

maybe dead boards needs to be amended to X# of viable S5 chips = 1 x 8 chip Free Pod ?

Why cap it?

 More sales should eventually drop the cost at least a little, and might help sell "extra" units on a non-trade basis for those of us that don't have "dead" S5s.

Yeah, market for the dead boards is getting rough. Like REALLY rough. I haven't been able to get ahold of the amount of boards i told back then (just 1) and everyone down here on my country is stashing them :) Guess it will be great for the project, maybe i instead will arrange a group shipment and buy-back of the extra pods.

Kinda nebulous atm on how i will handle it :( i have at least 4 peeps on my family interested on the pods, plus a lot of people on a miners group talking about these babies.

What happened between the post below and now?


To go from 16 boards to 1 is quite a few less.  Just curious what happened in only a few days would had been exciting to see that many shipped in for this.

Assuming each board traded in brings in more chips to the project and would increase the overall amount of Pods I would not cap.  But that depends on the amount of Pods.

If there is a number like 50 pods or something like mentioned once I would really like to see limited a little bit to spread around.  Even offer pre-ordering as I think quite a few of us would be willing to do this and not bug you on timeframe.

As many people as are popping up with boards, I'll probably look to making more like 200 than 50.

I guess what I was thinking for a cap was limiting the number of free pods that could be gotten for S5 trades; say, past the cap an S5 board would pay for half a pod instead? That does seem kinda crappy though. I think I'll leave it wide open.

Regarding "extra pods" if folks don't buy them all up, that's not really a problem. Heck I'll just mine on them myself.

I think the guy that was selling me those dead boards will send 'em himself, so it is a win anyways. I'll probably be looking to buy more pods for me come the moment then.

DO a poll ?  . if you need to do it make it 8 to 10  :) .  10 is 2 th worth of power ? . there gonna sell like hot cakes


you all ready care enough to want to keep home mining going shouldn't that be enough ?. you won't be a party to someone getting screwed, that's like those fools who kept buying into per orders after they got ripped off 4 or more times, yet they kept doing it then complained, once would have been enough for me and it happen once and only one time to me, so now i just wait and watch but i was smart enough to use the right payment and got my money back etc . but once was enough kind of why i don't like buying direct from bitmain, no way of a refund if they go bad, that's a you never know with them .


You can't stop it . :) . it's goona happen with or with out a limit some one is going to try and do it, some fool/unknowing players will get ripped off regardless  ;) .it  just will happen . your miner are that good and can  make a lot of money for those yow hos.



PS how ever you take what i said , it's the truth, it will happen either way , do care, but don't over care, it will worry you more .

We don't know your financials and trust you to make a decision that profits GekkoScience as well.  There's no shame in profitting since we know it will help future ventures as well. 
There won't be any torches or pitchforks if prices change or trade ins change.  We want to help... some of us can't financially so trade ins help those in that situation.

I would say that as long as no one is cornering the market on your pods via trade-ins that you should let the market work itself out.  My only concern would be someone sending in a crap-ton of boards and hoarding all the pods you make, only to try and turn around and resell them to make a buck.  The only people that should profit from this venture are gekko science, I would hate to see someone try and take advantage of this opportunity.

If someone corners the market by hoarding pods from a bucket of trade-ins, within a few weeks I'll have turned those trade-ins into between two and three times as many pods.

Also, the only people that should profit from this venture are not GekkoScience, but GekkoScience and its customers. If we're the only ones coming out ahead, that means the product is not worth buying.

A company that cares about its customers investments.... this is part of why I really like your products.  Some companies do not share this mentality to say the least.

I am excited about these Pods though.  I think it will be another fun toy and if you do the same as compac's it was amazing the efficiency you got.  So cant wait to see that.

I think you know the direction, you just needed some feedback.  Push on!

I am in if your still in need of S1 blades? Have 4 of these working blades laying around and it would be nice having a Pod!

Well, just checked and I have 8 working S1 blades (and 2 S1 controllers with all cables if needed..)

Well theres got to be a cap somewhere, you do need the other parts to make the pod: Power, sinks, other passives..
if someone comes in with 50 boards and say "50 pods plz" and you only had 20 heatsinks to go with them, who's paying for the other 30?

Also, how many of these boards are going to have viable ASICs on them? how have they been treated after death? manhandled like some 500lb gorilla? and for them, are you willing to say to them "no sorry, chips are no good"?

do you have a rig to test these chips off-board? (got one if them $100+ QFN sockets?)

Heatsink isn't part of the base cost. Someone wants 50 boards with 50 heatsinks, that someone will also be paying for 50 heatsinks. One S5 board only gets you the 8-chip PCB and nothing else. You provide your own cooler, power, computer running cgminer et cetera.

I do not have a socket to test the chips standalone. Since it's, as far as I know, a custom footprint (I don't know any other QFN with corner pads like this one) I'm not sure where to even look for a socket.

My assumption is at least 24 viable chips per 30-chip board. More than that is a bonus.

just to clarify, with the power, and passives, I was thinking the other components on the pod, fare enough for the rest, (sinks, power supply and mining controller) being up to the buyer to supply.

Yeah, forgot about that customization of the QFN (Y U DO DIS BITMAIN?!),  I've never really had a good hard look at the layout, I thought maybe the Vcc pads would extend to the edge of the package? I would think that would be just as painful as BGA and the unknown of it being properly soldered.

If belly pad contacts don't get into the VDD corners, I guess a 56QFN socket could work.

I never messed with the BM1382 but that package looks like it sucked quite a bit. BM1384 is fairly straightforward and BM1385 appears to be a stock footprint. Anything with perimeter pins like QFN is going to be a lot easier to work with than BGA or a bump die package because you can more easily verify alignment by looking at the solder rather than just hoping it was right. Belly pad floatation also helps a bit. I haven't worked directly with much BGA so I don't know how well those self-align, but they tend to be larger packages as well so the weight could prevent some of that movement.

I must ask, how does one align these QFN packages? every time I attempt to solder a replacement cp1202, the leads shift between the PCB pads, which requires me to reattempt it. In attempting to re-solder the package, cleaning the solder away (for the 2nd time), a pad or 2 just comes away, ruining he PCB.

As for BGA, you really need to X-ray it to see if it is properly attached. 2nd hand airport baggage x-ray machine may help?

Depending on who made the socket, some are a little round nail that touches the belly, others are pads, some even have simply a hole.

I'm doing some looking now on what's available. Apparently 8x8mm 56QFN is a less-than-common package because I'm finding lots of stuff for everything to either side of that.

Maybe I can find something and throw together a modified Compac with a test socket. That'd be awful handy. Also awful tedious to test a thousand chips one at a time, but still pretty darn handy.

When I resolder a replacement, I clean off the existing solder with a good wick, repaste and then hot-air the chip. If it doesn't align quite right, poking it with the big tweezers will usually bounce it into place.

Thats probably my problem, bad wick, I have to flux it and hold an iron to it for about 5 minutes to warm it up... and its only basic 5mm wick too..

i might have to go back and remember what Ben Krasnow did when he was playing with QFN devices, i think he just pulled the spring pins out of a socket and soldered them to a footprint..

I've got decent wick, but sometimes it needs a bit of fluxing. I also have a 75W iron though. I tend to wick the solder as soon as the chip is lifted so there's still a lot of residual heat, otherwise it still takes five minutes.

I think I found a workable socket, but I need more information on it (what pins go to what contacts) before I could design a board around it. If I can get that information in time I can mod the Compac layout and send off for a prototype board with the two other boards we're hoping to get proto PCBs of ordered tomorrow. It's not an immediate need, but if I can get it done on time it'd save shipping.

Kind of an aside because I already voted for the 2 boards +25 deal.
But in the spirit of voting often, and because I have 3 fully functional S2's (a whopping 30 boards, sorry no BKWhoppers),  
I want to suggest an evensteven trade deal. Boards for Pods. No cash or coin.
You'd have to come up with numbers and mix e.g 2 S2 boards plus 1 S1 board missing no more than 2 capacitors, would get get you one pod.
Or six S2 boards, and 4 S1 to S3 upgrade boards would get you 4 pods. You get the point.
I don't have or expect to have any S5's or S7's and I wouldn't be put off if those who did got a little better deal as these appear to be more critical to the project.

I hope you consider this and I hope you recognize that once you release any 'close to final' payment schedule the UPS man is going to be all over you and you'd be smart to find some extra carts and dolly's.

If they were S5 I don't think trading would be a problem.  Unless a bunch of parts on it seems like S2's are a lot of old chips.

So I don't think they will hold a even trade on S2's.   But I could always be wrong.

I was going to point out the same, board for pod, S5 has the required components, S1/2/3 all have the older chips, no good for the project, the only thing worth it is the component for power (buck ICs, caps, etc). The 4 odd New-R-Box boards would cover 1 pod, instead I would be more inclined to find the BM1384 chips off the S5.

Somewhere around here, sidehack expressed there was value in S2 boards.
If I find it, i'll plug the quote in here.

I'm not suggesting they're worth a lot, only that they are or can be useful to him.

Actually, the S7 is not critical at all since it has probably none of the parts I want - or at best, very few - for this project.

The parts that come off an S1 or S2 I might prioritize higher when I've exhausted my own stock. I don't have any S2 boards to part out (all mine are museum) but I have enough S1 boards to provide caps for 50 pods. I'll burn through those, but 30x S2 boards would run power for over 100 pods. However, an S5 board provides about 5 times the value in parts I'm short on compared to an S2 board (when component cost is considered). The design has changed a bit such that the S1 and S2 now have more valuable parts than I had originally assumed so they will be prioritized a bit higher.

However. Only trading pods for the hardware required to make more pods is not sustainable.

Only about half the cost of the pod is recycle parts, so for every pod that goes out in trade for hardware I have spent a decent number of dollars which did not come back. Additionally I spent a lot of time pulling, cleaning and readying parts for assembly on something new. I know a lot of people will be paying money for pods, but a lot of other people will not. If I don't keep a practical ratio on things, I'll end up with a whole lot of parts I can't use and a lot of PCBs I'll get ten cents a pound for and will have basically paid a lot of people to take my miners. Unfortunately, I can't trade old PCBs for sandwiches at a very favorable rate, nor can I pay the rent with them.

You can't just send me parts and assume I'll send a miner back. I will not send a pod to anyone, no matter how many boards he ships to my door, without having agreed upon the terms of the transaction first. The agreement will be based on the availability of parts I already have and how much I value the parts being provided at that moment, which means that at different times different boards will have different values because I'll need them more or less than at other times. If I find that I have enough boards already on hand to build every pod I feel like putting together ever again, I'll stop taking trades entirely and only sell for money (or other things which I find interesting or worthwhile, surprise me).

How about a combination thereof?
You need parts, but you also need money.

PCB's don't make for very good snacks, that much is understandable.

For instance i could offer a combination of one dead S5 board + some Working S1 boards + some money, if i was to get several miners back, i could get a significant upgrade over the S1's i'm running now and you'd be making miners out of the parts i gave you(in equivalence) + some from you + you'd also have money to cover your time.

I think the big thing is he will not know what parts he needs unless he pre-orders or something.  If he sells 50 it sounds like he has a lot of parts.  If he sells 150 then likely he will need a lot more boards.

I think board trading in on older boards will be based on if needed.  I could see him making S5 open ended since chips.  But other I think it just will very on production.

I have a lot of blades of all of the ones you need, how bout I send in enough blades (mixed variety) for say 10 pods - I will then donate 5 Pods to be auctioned off to raise barbecue money for SideHack and Novak and only take delivery of 5 Pods.  Essentially I am offering to pay twice as much for the Pods.  Not because I am loaded but because I have a bunch of blades that are doing absolutely nothing for me.   :o

It's stuff like this that is really neat to see.  A maker who cares about his customers.  And customers who care about the makers.

Wish all miners had this cooperation between miners and makers.  Seems like a team atmosphere in these threads which is a nice breath of fresh air compared to some miner threads.

Yes and no.  I think we are all too anxious and we all have boards that we would happily donate even to get 1 or 2 pods plus cash possibly and whatever else.

We need to stop ( for now ) flooding the posts with our own personal deals until the time sidehack lets us know what he needs.

He stated it would be on a one on one basis when the time is due.

I may be reading into this all wrong but let's not get too apprehensive and piss off "The Maker".

As always I am good for 2 coins.

A loan whatever no pressure. Or demands .

I think that was reading into what I wrote a little much.  I am not trying to strike a "personal deal"-  I am simply offering a way for SideHack and Novak to get properly compensated for the hard work and dedication.  If those guys want to only accept BTC and sell them outright I will still be one of the first to raise my hand.  I am simply trying to give them more than they are asking.

I share philipma1957's feelings, count me in for a few - bitcoin, cash or trade - doesn't matter.

In a way, you're both right. I appreciate the support in form of both money and materials, but at the same time I don't want either until I'm ready for them which is several weeks out.

Just to be clear, are you still looking for S1/S2 boards to use? And how about S3 boards? I have 2 s2's, 9 S1's complete and all retired along with over a dozen s3's I'd like to retire...
Trade-in value for them?

Just to be clear, I likely will be looking for S1 and S2 boards but right now I am not looking for anything and I will not speculate on the exchange value of anything at this time.

Sidehack, hope you don't mind. I'm testing a few units, off and on at the Burgerfund. I was asked to repair/replace a few PCI-e connectors and the guy uses F2Pool. >:(  HA, so he gets to change that part when he gets them back. ;D

I been kinda wondering where the extra hashrate was coming from.

Werks for me. Good to know there may be some use for the things.

Yep. In a few weeks I'll have a hopefully working prototype, might raffle off a couple and announce what I'm thinking of for batch size, price and estimated trade values. For now all the information I have is already posted, and the only information I'm looking for from anyone else is an estimate of demand - which will be mostly based on survey results, I think.

It seems for me that for every other stick sold, i have a potential Pod customer.... so it will probably be at least 10 pods for sale here + whatever family and friends want to get (say, another 10).

I think I finally have the pod PCB finished. It's going to need to be verified (this thing is easily the most complex PCB I've ever laid out) and it looks like I need to draw up a BM1384 test board with a QFN socket and also verify Novak's newest project PCB before sending out for prototypes. If we put 'em all on one order we save on shipping, you understand.

In any case, it's almost sandwich time and whatnot so it won't get done today but it might get done tomorrow.

The pod PCB is 10x15cm and has both 3- and 4-wire fan headers, each with its own PWM implemented so you can use pretty much any kind of computer fan ever made. Also tach signals are hooked up so it should report fan speed. The onboard micro will be able to measure and modify on-the-fly your VRM voltage, and it can measure the output current. Power comes in from a barrel jack and a 6-pin PCIe, and we've got both USB-B and USB-mini jacks. All in all, it should be pretty flexible. Heck, I may go ahead and add LGA775 holes for the heck of it.

Is there or is it possible to have some sort of fan or temperature protection? For instance the stick does not have a temp sensor so if its clocked high and has a fan, no problem. If it does not, its going to melt.

Not too bad on a USB stick but the pod start being a bit more pricy and worth protecting, imo.

Really with giving us so much possibility on how fast to push them, I think it's kinda up to customer not to melt it.  We will be given a certain spec and we will buy our own coolers.  If you push it to a point it melts.. you went to far.

Most I think will watch pretty close and be able handle knowing if you OC to far you can damage gear.   When you give people so much versatility on speed it's kinda up to them not to push it to hard I think.   As likely there will be a big difference of CPU coolers people choose to use, some much better then others.

I understand what you are saying, but its possible for the fan to fail and stop. At which point it does not really matter how far you pushed it, even just running at "standard" speed, the chips would probably overheat.

I don't mean to implement a idiot proof protection, just if the fan suddenly go dead, turn off the miner, or something. It could be done software side fairly easily, i believe. In that case asking Novak(?) might be the better idea?

Good idea also like the flexibility of retrofitting pretty much any fan and/or power connector you have laying around, Nice!
So I'm trying to picture it... a little far from a pod but more like a small board with heatsink/cooler.  More like a (do I dear say_)
Technobit setup.  If so is the pcb safe to sit around ala Raspberry Pi like or can feet be added for stability.  Since those coolers can
get pretty heavy and tipsy.

Can't remember right, but i think sidehack told in a previous post that this pod will have a temp sensor.... i could be wrong.

 Heh this thread is so .. well Borg like.....


pods

http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/inconsistencies/curiosities/floppy-borg-qwho.jpg


the use of 'assimilated components" (old asic stuff/chips/etc into a new product)



want below for the logo of your pod product


http://johngushue.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451f25369e2017c383d101b970b-pi

If you melt it you're doing something very wrong.

What we've talked about doing in the past, it'll depend on what Novak implements but we've talked about doing fan control independent of cgminer. This avoids problems like the S5 meltdown, where the chips keep running hot for some reason but cgminer is down and so is the fan. If the onboard controller, which reads the temp sensor directly and also controls the fan speed directly (and actually even knows how many watts the chip string is pulling), can be given a curve or profile for thermostatic control and run the fans based on that without cgminer intervention, burnup should be fairly idiot-proof. The controller would have a default profile and you could, probably through cgminer, push a custom profile if you wanted to do something a bit different. The only way this might screw up is if you ran without a cooler and the temp sensor was not accurately reading temperature - but at that point most of the chips' heat being dissipated will hit the PCB, and the temp sensor is sorta soldered to the PCB right smack in the middle so it'd probably still be close enough to true that it'd shut down before catching fire.

Yes, the pod ended up bigger than I was initially planning. If I wanted to make a double-sided board and put only the ASICs and their associated bits on top, then tuck all my power and controls underneath, I could have fit it all in a 10x10 pretty easily. I'd much rather build a single-sided board (by which I mean, I'm capable of building a single-sided board) and making room for a CPU cooler pretty much means I have to mark out a 9cm-diameter circle with zero tall parts and let's not forget the legs coming off it for screwing to the board. By the end of it, there's almost no room on the 10x10cm square for anything except the cooler and ASICs. I could fit most of the controls on there if I had to, but not the power circuit and none of the jacks and headers. So instead we make the board a bit bigger and now I have all sorts of room. Should be able to stick rubber feet on it.

Someone might look at the U3 and say "oh well those guys fit all kinds of crap on a tiny board". To which I respond yes, but they only had 4 ASICs and those were all on a single power rail and they had a custom-milled heatsink to fit around stuff. The total parts count of my thing is probably four to six times the parts count of a U3, and it's built with two power jacks and two USB jacks and can fit a dozen different heatsinks with two, three or four-wire fans. It's intentionally general which means I need more room to cover all the necessary bases.

Also, and here's a great part - all the controls we're putting on this board not only make it awesomely flexible and tweakable, but they'll translate almost directly to the S1-sized board I hope to be building next. So there's more good reason to make this thing slightly more awesome. I mean, as if "because that's the kind of feature set every miner should have anyway" wasn't good enough reason.

With the right mounting holes, this pod board would fit on a Gridseed 80 "blade" heatsink.
10cm is a bit narrower than that HS, the length is plenty short.

 (HINT!)

The short answer is "no". The long answer is a lot more technical but ends with the word "no".

Sidehack, btw, what controller will the pods have? It would be cool if it was a PIC (or something similar) one could program via ICSP for custom fan control and such :D

I think hacking the firmware should be unnecessary.

What kind of power connector you will use for the pods?

I'm feeling a bit cynical this morning, so I choose to not answer that question but instead tell you that information is already present in this thread. In fact, every question about mechanical, electrical and interfacing attributes of this pod have already been answered. Just gotta look for it.

Sorry sidehack, I lost some days I go to search the info :) and thanks for the answer

Any idea if the chip coolers on the Bfl singles would work or know if they fit a certain socket.  Looking to build the
Bfl Pod possibly. ;)

No, but I guess I got one on the museum shelf I could pull a cooler out of and see if it meets spec. My assumption is "probably not" but that' just an assumption.

In the end, are you going to get your hand on that stack of cooler you mentioned you could get? I'm guessing people might be interested in buying it packaged with the pods for ease of setting them up.

Some people probably already got their coolers planned out but it might be a handy 1 stop solution for others.

If you would that would be cool.  There's a local guy that has a ton of them and if I can get them at $20 a piece I would have a case and
possibly two coolers as well. ::)

I am calling this picture "Pod Porn"

http://i1077.photobucket.com/albums/w463/docpromos/FullSizeRender_4.jpg

That is far better than Porn in my book.  Can't wait for everyone to post their Pod pic setups.

Why is the phrase "Pod People" now running through my head?

 8-O

I dream of being a "Podaphile"  ;D

heh....'ditto'.....

but I have no 'stuff' to contribute so I will pay whatever it is one has to pay for this toy I guess :(

Putting your weiner in it voids the warranty.

So there is a warranty?  Nice!  I'll be sure to clean it real good before I send it in. ;)

LOL :D

Because I posted a picture from the movie Pod People a few pages back and it has subconsciously stuck in your brain.  :D

I think a shirt order might be a fun idea with that as the theme.  It worked before.

Should we get some news this week on your test pods or will it be next week?
Overly anxious for some info.

I would guess he has a very busy week.  With compac's starting batch 2 sometime soon just a lot of time I'm guessing there.   I would guess he does some on project on pods.

But guessing busy for a bit.   And really he always has cool projects for us to look at so I don't know if I've seen a time he is not busy :).

He has been a little tied up with prof.hell this week as well.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=637595.new#new

I assure you that is not me posing as a nubcake, but I haven't put it past half of you  :D

Actually, that guy came out of nowhere and I have no idea who it is or what he's doing. I can't say I'm completely dismissing him, but I am certainly not spending any time tracking down what he's up to.

On the labor front, this week I'll be helping Novak with some interface boards and then busting out a bunch of Compacs. I don't expect pod proto PCBs until next week, but they'll arrive at the same time as a PCB for a Novak project which means we'll havce two firmwares to write before both are successfully tested. I can get a good idea of hardware functionality on my pod without needing his time, but it won't be fully approved until the controller is up and running.

He and I spent most of last week on this year's Halloween project, and I just got back from some Hamlet and BBQ so not much progress on anything miner-related until I start on Compac manufacture come Tuesday.

Well I have 3 blades with problems for S5, I am happy to help.

Let me know what do I need to do.

Thanks Marco

I don't have anything to trade but I'll get the wallet out for this as I'm very happy with the sticks you produce.

So I voted for 50$ :)

Note that heatsink mount points will have to be specified, as I have a bunch of cpu coolers around from different generation.

Or I could go with watercooling if the pod follows known cpu mount points :)

I love the idea of reclaiming old hardware!  I'm in.  Keep us updated sidehack...

Has anybody explored the idea of using the dual mining SF3301 ASIC chip? Supposedly they are available for shipment but you have to contact SFards directly. I would totally be willing to pay for a dualminer pod but it might take a bunch of us getting together in a group buy for some chips.

Here is the spec sheet posted by Sfards

http://cryptomining-blog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/sfards-sf3301-power-usage-hashrate.jpg


For dual mining, SFards is advertising 100 gh/s mining Bitcoin and 1.75 Mh/s mining litecoin @ 35 watts per chip when mining simultaneously.

My recollection is that sidehack has no interest in trying to build something using the SFards chip, for a variety of reasons. I am sure he'll weigh in to correct me.

Fair enough. Has any chip other than BM1384 been discussed? The reason I ask, unless you already have an Antminer S5, those chips are hard to find. Bitmain does not sell them directly as far as I know (or even produce them anymore now that they have the BM1385)

he is looking to used dead s-5 boards.

right now no one wants to sell 'new' chips.

I do agree that this would be better with s-7 chips but antminer won't sell them to anyone as far as I know.

I think hed settle for the new sp chips or even the new AvalonMiner 6.0  chips https://ehash.com/product/avalon6-v6-0/ chips, so to answer your question: yes he has.

I don't see why they won't, it won't hurt, them, and help others .

Well I'm not really concerned about it being "better" I'm mostly concerned with finding a source for the chips. The BM1384 chip is not available for direct purchase but many other chips are. The idea of using dead s5 boards is excellent but there can't really be that many dead s5's laying around can there?

I'd like to use new chips. However, until new chips are available old chips is the only option. Also, trade-in parts keeps the cost down. A BM1384 design like this wouldn't be feasible now if I had to use all new components and charge the end user for them. With trade-ins, some people get stuff for "free" and everyone else gets it for a lot cheaper than would otherwise be possible. Would I rather be working with new BM1385 or A3218? Heck yes.

Maybe he can give you some bad boards :):
http://www.ebay.com/itm/AntMiner-S5-1155Gh-s-0-51W-Gh-28nm-ASIC-Bitcoin-Miner-/141841810461?hash=item21066e441d:g:76YAAOSwT6pVp9kR

so my cgminer-gekko on raspberry pi b+ with active hub and the EU sticks is also not working.
in the usb management under "list all devices" there's just this:
Bus 1 Device 6 ID: 10c4:ea60 bitshopperde Compac BM1384 Bitcoin Miner inactive

when presseing e(nable) and entering any device number it just says "invalid selection"...

any solution?

edit: sorry, wrong thread / tab

check in here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1173963.0

TL;DR-maybe try bfgminer 5.4.1

I talked to some one who may have been ripped off by this seller on ebay,the guy who told me that is buying my last s5, once i get a 18 pin cable and test the replacement board and other board to gather.  he told me he paid about that and is fighting with PayPal to get it back . just a tip.

I see the auction as kinda funny "EASY REPAIR!!! DAMAGED, DEFECTIVE ONLY ONE OF THE HASH BOARDS ARE WORKING REPAIRABLE".... if it's so easy why did seller not fix and sell as working S5? Am I the only one seeing that.

Sounds like scammy or at least bad sellsman to say it's very easy to fix! I just cant do it... you can though!  Also talking about bitmain warranty when I doubt any S5 is within warranty... no one should buy from there.

Well he says half of the hashrate, only one board working as if all those are half S5. Maybe just an idiot since he list;
Processing Speed (GH/s):   1155 Gh/s

Which would not be half speed so anyone could report and return.

Anyways the price is too high to tangle money even if only temporarily.

I see all kind of stuff wrong there !!! i even tried to put one in my cart and got a 404 page error if i click to add to my cart, but, if I click buy now, it sets me up to buy, i don't know how many, LMAO ..


Now the add to my cart works and it said it was the last one for 288 $ ,

I trust the guy on the forums that told me, then that link . i have bought a few things off the guy that told me about that seller.

hmmm..got no dog in this fight...(never got into antminer ran out of $$$ as a newbie :) ) but let us know how it works out on here ..think more then a couple of you guys jumped in on this on this thread....

(crypto ..the drama ...the soap opera...the moon)

https://nguyensindy.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/x-x-everywhere-meme-generator-drama-drama-everywhere-ea7b40-1.jpg?w=300&h=163

Any new news on the Pods?  Was hoping the silence meant chips have been sourced or in the works. ::)

I gotta admit I've been lurking on this thread without a single post, just waiting for a release date or something solid with the chips before I commit. I know for a fact sidehack is solid and I've bought from him before in the tune of $1,000, me sending first, with no reservations. He has done me right everytime and his breakout boards and miners work great. Big work for a small operation to be sure.

That said, the longer Bitmain puts us off, the less these S5 chips will be worth working with. Its a bit sad for me because I once tried to work with some people on creating a miner based on first gen Avalon chips, and Avalon not providing us with chips when promised killed it. It cost us all more than you can imagine. We spent months non-stop getting things ready for the chips. Im never going through that one again. Mind you this was durring another 10%-20% per adjustment period, just like the one were entering. This kind of diff adjustment makes the pressure on delivery and money lost compounded in a harsh way.

And just so you know (for those who don't, this was mid 2013, and the major topic of discussion on the forum at the time) Avalon claimed that the "Chinese Mafia" (Yes, this was the actual excuse for not delivering the chips) extorted them and...uhmmm...sorry.

Sorry you guys spend tens of thousands on community funded R&D and sorry you collected millions of dollars in funds for the chips. Sorry people spent months of non-stop work on OPEN SOURCE design just to have us not deliver chips and improve on your (now FREE) design.

I've never really gotten over that one and sorry to say I never expected bitmain to ever offer chips despite saying "maybe". I do however support bitmain with my continued business buying miners and they have never done me wrong with direct purchases. I am dubious however of their intentions of ever providing a chip for sale. I'll take a maybe as a no.

Avalon is another story altogether. While I think its clear they have improved as a business, I'll never trust that company again, for good reason.

Basically still no chips available. Although I had heard that it took ~3 months for Bitmain to release BM1384 to Sidehack after the S5 was released. Its been ~3 months since the S7 was released. So who knows maybe when S7 sales slow down they will make BM1385 chips available. I think it helps that Bitmain seems to have legitimate competition from Avalon, Spondoolies, and a few others.

It's not that there are not chips.  It's that it is very hard to get chips without spending a massive amount.  If you bought a batch of chips... chances are they would sell it.  But that is a massive amount of capital needed and would really have to go twords big miners not pods.

I hope the chip situation changes as I like sidehacks items.   But I'm afraid it will be a bit on new chips.

I could have bought a full batch of BM1384 earlier this year, but I didn't have an extra quarter million dollars. Right now I could sink a quarter thousand dollars on a sample order and not feel bad about it, and I'm hoping I can convince Bitmain that's a good idea. 20 chips would buy me a month of prototyping, at least.

Silence does not mean chips have been sourced. A very loud and excited announcement that chips have been sourced means chips have been sourced. Trust me, that's not something I'd be able to keep secret.

Regarding pods, this week I have to bust out the final Compacs and finish up my hosting expansion. After that, pod prototyping will be priority. However, it's December so I probably won't be working weekends like usual because family and stuff. So, you know, progress will be made but not immediately.

I think that is the problem if you wanted a full batch... it get's attention.   I really like your products and enjoy playing with them so wish I could get them.  But even with crowdsourcing or something a quarter million dollars is still a lot of money.   

I hope you could get some prototype chips.  But honestly I'm not sure how receptive they would be knowing you are not looking to buy a batch.   But I keep hoping one day a hear a big yes from someone selling to you.

I'm not looking to buy a batch right now. I might someday, if I had a good enough product that folks got behind in a big enough way to buy a batch. But I will not take a cent from anyone for mass-producing a design that I haven't yet built and tested, and building and testing requires sample chips. Sample chips, then, are the first necessary step in a series of steps which may end in buying an entire batch.

I'll just continue to hide in my hole and watch for updates here :)

Thanks for keeping everyone in the loop sidehack!

+1

I anxiously await updates also.  It is good to see things progress from an idea to reality to people actually purchasing items

I'm finishing up Compacs tonight, and the next couple days I have to finish up interior wiring for my hosting expansion (50KW available, 8.9 cents per KWh if anyone's interested) but after that priority goes to pod dev. We're right this minute assembling a parts order which includes components for the control section, and Novak's got a head start on firmware already.

So I'm pulling this thread back up because there's been some work done on the pods. I need to redesign the power layout since I'm getting some errors that I know aren't component-based, which kinda leaves noise as the likely culprit. But the really tight scary complex parts of the design proved themselves pretty well.

My test board right now is running stable on borrowed power and it's been cooking for four hours at 325MHz. I intend to let it run overnight and I'll probably check on it tomorrow, maybe see how it behaves at 350MHz. And then I'll probably assemble a few more. The onboard controls don't exist yet, so it's hotwired to an S5 controller.

I had a thought while eating my Friday cheeseburger a few hours ago. What if I build two boards to fully functional off an S5 controller, mounted on a common base with coolers attached, and raffle the thing off? If it works I'll build a pair so there'd be two winners. I need to do a bit of repair but I do have two S5 controllers sitting idle right now, which means I could build two complete units and all you'd have to do is hook up power and ethernet. If they'll run 350MHz that gets you about 300GH of fairly quiet undervoltable hashrate, pretty much plug-and-play.
The only real problem I can see is, without onboard controls, there's no temp sensing or software volt setting. So you'd have to adjust voltage manually. It's no harder than tuning a Compac; you turn a little knob and if it doesn't hash, you turn it up a little higher and restart cgminer. But make sure the chips get adequate cooling.

So if I sold "tickets" for, say, 0.02BTC for a dual pod prewired to an S5 controller (in a possibly jankety but solid/stable manner), complete with Freezer7 coolers, who'd get in on it? Unlimited entries, two pod winners, and let's say two "runners up" who each get a free Compac.

If anyone's wondering why I'd sell an incomplete product, partly it's to raise excitement and awareness and partly to pay for a prototype batch of boards with an updated design. I'll take feedback on the idea for the next couple days before deciding for sure what I want to do. So let me know what y'all think.

I am in... ;)

Sound good, especially if not too many tickets are sold. Would still be good for development so i could scrounge up 0.02BTC. The pod would need 1-2 PCI-e of power supplied?

I am in too  :)

As the guy needing the money to continue dev (and the cost of materials for the things being raffled), I have an interest in selling many tickets. The pod takes 1 PCIe.

ditto for me to ..i imagine there will be a 'raffle thread' and google doc on such folk sending in the 0.02 btc (or $8.70 per ticket by my current calcs)

anything to support the project....(could make it a "PIE" sale but with shipping an all...that could get messy) :)

I'd be in.  I kind of dislike the unlimited tickets option as one person can basically make sure that no one else has a shot.

However, I'd still be in.  The rules are yours to set and I'm entirely down for supporting the project in whatever small way I can.

Well if someone decide to throw 1 BTC in there, then maybe Sidehack could use that BTC to give that person one pod in the first place and raffle off the other 2, keeping the rest.

Or not, but it would be good for the project.

A while back, I pointed a Btcgarden v2 at the burger addy to verify my attempt to fix it for someone else (36 hrs). Anyhow, I've kept looking back at that chart, to see what your testing.
So I think it's cool that you hash too a publicly known/available address.
 Now I wouldn't want to donate some add. hashtime by pointing to your live test run data collecting/sharing spot. Throwing the chart off in other words.
But, I could point my ten Compacs @ default too something (other than solo pools) ie.burgerfund for a time and maybe others with Compacs could join in and see how much GH/s we collectively generate too/for the project (milKshakefund), over a specific time like 24, 48 .... hrs?

anybody?
 

If you use a worker tag, the data from that is charted separately. I've got some leftover Compacs (mostly Novak's toys from the first half of the run) on the burger, but pod testing has been pointed to slush pool because having a vardiff below 512 is handy for getting good data quicker on low-hashrate gear.

Even if someone spends 1 BTC it does not guarantee win since random, just raises the chances of them winning.  I think everyone that participates is doing it knowing money goes to dev of pods.  So if a few go wild i view that as a good thing.  The more dev money I think benefits people wanting pods.

So even with unlimited tickets I still think it's win/win.  And eventually we will be able to buy it once it comes out so there will be other way's to get eventually even if you don't win.   

Think I got it going now. I'll have to look into the slush side later.


https://i.imgur.com/Qk3Sud2.jpg?1



https://i.imgur.com/9iBSjR8.png

I'm in for a ticket or 2. 

I am in for a couple tickets.

One Ticket here!

Posted in another thread but it feels more appropriate here; I have a lazy S5 I'd be willing to trade for some of these 8x pod thingies. I'm in the US.

im in for 2 tickets

Looks like they're running at default freq :)

Good to know

I would buy a raffle entry or two.

Same here. What wallet address do we send to to get a ticket?

As for s5's... I have 3 that I'm willing to donate to the effort. They generally are fully functional but every week or so will drop one board, a simple hard reboot and they are happy again.

http://gekkoscience.com/misc/pod/heatsink_strapped_350.JPG

I've got this guy running at 350MHz, pointed at the 1BURGER as _testpod. If everything stays golden we should see 154GH average. I'll let it run overnight, might play more tomorrow afternoon. Right now it's only been running 10 minutes but I'm seeing dead on 154GH and 0.03% errors, machine-side.

Right now there's no raffle going on. I'll talk with Novak and see what we want to do, and see if I can get two more boards running stable and with solid wiring - basically, good enough to let outside the building. If I can do that in the next couple days maybe I'll open something up with a facy vanity address.

I'm in for a raffle!  2016 looks golden.

heh ...looks cute..I'll get one ..but I mean really...in my case this make NO SENSE AT ALL :)

I am in no way sure what kind of sickness I have ....I could just pull 1 asic out of my 550 KNC Jupiter Miner and pretty much do the same.....in that
it would look pretty much like the above and do 137.5 gh...sheesh...what am I thinking? :)

Ah well....got to fund such independent projects anyway....but got this 'home mining asic sickness" real bad ....sheesh  Issues it seems I have indeed!


anyway look at the pic below... for such a setup if I ever got fired up enough to do so ..... Note 'knc evil twin picture below" :)

http://www.earnbitcoinsfast.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/1553.jpg


too many projects...too many toys ..all them LCD's and whirly noises etc :)

Your uh, ahem, your Jupiter probably wouldn't downvolt to 0.3W/GH though would it? Just throwing that out there.

I honestly don't know how many BM1384 pods I'd make. Could be weeks or a month before I have a final design around that chip, and by then they're getting pretty tired. Maybe someone will get back to me about new chips once they're recovered from whatever holidays fancy people use as excuses to not do any work.

yeah point taken....was just pointing out I"m Insane from an ROI point of view :)

too many toys....then again I have a bitseed v2 node ..and that won't make me any btc...but it is pretty when the LCD on the cable to it flashes in the basement...

for me its all about having something going in the basement ...when the KNC Titan Scrypt Miners go to doorstop status

(damn home mining bug...damn btc kool aid in 2013...) sheesh :)

Also your unit is 'pure' for the projects sake....all KNC stuff is EVIL ...I dare not make direct eye contact with the Titans in the Basement when doing Laundry or they

will try to "Brick Themselves" out of Spite :(

So again you units are 'angelic" in comparison :)

So the test pod is currently running 400MHz. I have it marked at 11.9V 7.3A for 86.9W; 400MHz calcs to 176GH so 0.49W/GH board-level. This does not include fan or controller. Because of the heating problem with the strapon power, I have a small fan pointed directly at it keeping the thing cool. As it is, I wouldn't want to run 400MHz without it. Could be fine, but I don't want to risk it. Hopefully it picks up but right now hashrate is a bit weak and I'm seeing 0.4% errors but the buck is topped out for voltage. I'll let it run a while and see if it looks like it'll behave, but I'm quite pleased with 350MHz and 375MHz performance.

Tomorrow I'll see about building a few more boards and see how they behave. Hopefully they're good, and I can get some raffle-able setups, and we can get prototype pod boards in and tested quickly. It's entirely possible we don't end up batching BM1384 pods, but then I might see about a small batch of 50-100 for y'all if the demand is still there when we're ready to roll.

Edit - thing ran like poo on 400MHz, average hashrate was way low so I put it back to 375MHz and it's gonna run there overnight. I'm still a bit short on hashrate - 156 instead of 165 - but that's not so bad. Errors at 0.07% and drawing about 78W of DC juice.

So cool to start seeing the numbers come in.  At this rate I will unplug my S3 for a couple of these - same hash rate but way less wattage.  Plus I can sell my S3 today for more than I paid for it a year ago. :)

If there is a small production, I will do a group buy for Canada  ;D

Great job Sidehack as always

I'd say I'd do a group buy for Europe, but you may want to use bitshopper.de for the pods too ?

Little, 5 day update  ::)


https://i.imgur.com/9rmRtMm.png

He'll add VAT and profit, I'd rather you do it :)

bitshopper.de actually was pretty good when I tried to get one in the US.  I wanted to collect them all on compac's.  He went above and beyond to get me one for decent of the EU compacs.

I don't think you will avoid VAT if you live in EU, but I could be wrong.

He'd probably wrangle if he was manufacturing, but that seems unlikely since I'll be making, if anything at all, a short batch with pull chips and I can really only do that because I'm doing all the assembly myself so I don't require reel packaging.

I don't doubt his customer service, I'd just rather a group buy as I know it would be cheaper, that's all.

So, my test pod has been running at 350MHz for 5 days 2 seconds, averaging 151.45GH (calculated 154GH, so 98.3% expected) and 0.0016% errors. I believe it's set for average node of 800mV, which is a bit higher than it probably needs but that's how you get a 0.0016% error rate.

I've been distracted the last several days with various computer troubles (some motherboard reflowing, laptop rebuilding, RAID recovery, you know...) and haven't gotten around to building more pods. But it'll be priority tomorrow. Which means that, hopefully quite soon, I'll have some pod setups which I can demo and/or raffle off. I'll be sending off for an updated revision PCB which hopefully fixes the power issues but I won't have any of those to play with for a few weeks. I think I've figured out a way to clean up the wiring on the current pod design, which will allow me to interface to an S5 controller in a much more stable manner. This is good because until Novak gets his firmware and drivers ready - which he can't until I get him a test board - the only thing I have to run with is the S5 controller.

So no real news in the pod front yet, aside from that the hacked-up prototype (using someone else's power and someone else's controler, grumble grumble) have proven fairly stable. I guess there is some news in that we're building another batch of Compacs, but no news on the pod front yet.

In fact I think about the pods as well. I like the design and of course the idea and would love to have at least a few of them in hand for private pleasure. Most probably there won't be an EU manufacturing like with the Compacs. Due to the low batch size and high fixed costs for assembly no one would like to afford it.
I could imagine to provide sidehack some chips and to get fully equipped PCBs back in return to assemble it with a fan etc. here in EU.
Definitely it would be cheaper for you to import it to EU by youself (as private individuals). But you would always risk to get it drawn by customs due to missing CE conformity proof and missing WEEE registration (customs requiremens which I already fulfil for the EU Compacs). Some of you may remember the problems with EU customs for Smartwatch Pebble buyers?

[MacEntyre]
bitshopper.de

never had a problem with my 2 pebbles bought from the US, or the 6 sticks I got from asicpuppy. (green > black)

So I got a fresh pod built with a nice compactable buck off a New R-Box board (which are courtesy CrazyGuy, by the way) and better wiring. It's pretty tidy. Course I killed one of the ports on my S5 controller, but that's irrelevant. In any case, it's burger night so I gotta split but later (maybe tomorrow or Monday) I'll probably put up a picture and do some more testing. Right now it's running 200MHz and appears stable. I need to push it to 350MHz stable before I'll approve making more for A RAFFLE WOOHOO.

Great news! Enjoy that burger!

I was disappointed to see the 3-hour hashrate for Burger_testpod was less than 80GH, since I left the pod on 200MHz which should yield 88GH expected. According to the webconfig stats, over the last 8 hours 35 minutes it's averaged 87.73GH (99.7% expected) with 0.0013% errors. I see 1101 accepted shares and 115 rejected (probably stale), which is about a 90% effective submission rate and 90% of 88Gh is a shade under 80GH so I reckon that explains it. When I left, the whole thing (fan and controller and everything) was running off about 36W, which puts it at 0.41W/GH average. Not great, but pretty good. When it was at 100MHz I saw something like 14W for 0.32W/GH. Think how much better it'll be when the controller burns about 0.3W instead of however much the whole S5 brain eats up. Maybe I'll test that tomorrow, see how much the controller pulls by itself at various hashrates. And I'll probably switch pools to something with fewer rejects.

very cool hack i would be interested in this pod once you get it all figured out

Well, the new test pod seems to not mind 350MHz at all. I'll probably take it home with me and see how it likes running in a bit higher ambient temperatures than we have in the shop today. The buck's staying cool, and after 12 minutes I'm only seeing 0.04% errors at 775mV average node and 350MHz. I mark the S5 controller and fan at 5W, and the board at a shade under 65W, which 350MHz for 8 chips should run about 154GH which puts this guy at a solid 0.42W/GH at the board alone (not counting fan and controller). Pretty decent. If it runs well at 350MHz I'll make a couple more. The only trouble's going to be I need to warm up the robot room because the cold has thrown off its calibration and also my solder paste appears to work best when it stays about 80F. So probably have to figure that out Wednesday. I know I'm way behind on those already, sorry. But the good news is the new test pod is super tidy. All signals are brought in through a 4-pin header and there are only 3 jumper wires on the board and they're all under 2cm in length. It looks really nice compared to the last one. And the buck chip is heatsinked better too.

Very nice update! Hopefully we'll get to see a sneak peak of the new board sometime!

You know a thing or 6 about warming up a room.

Pretty impressive considering my first 2 miners were BFL 10GH/s Jala's bought through TigerDirect. They pulled 65w each + the 20w needed to run the Host PC. Them 2 lil' bastards are what got me hooked on BTC
Sweet.

And he'll have ample hardware to do it once my lil pallet of presents arrive for him ta play with  :D

you see I, I .. I got this problem, you see, all I see is words on words, but no pictures. how does one tell a story without Pictures?!

also, not to be a nazi about it, but can I has paragraphs? its my dyslexia that makes me read about 3 lines then starts following "rivers" along the text.. then I'm like all "Shit, what was I reading?"

That was a paragraph. Or you want me to break everything into single lines like Phil does?

I thought about posting a picture. But then I decided not to because my camera was in one room, the pod was in another, I was in a third and I kinda wanted to go home instead. Maybe I'll do it tomorrow.

Pod's running pretty good now. I have it at the house. The buck chip is staying cool, I'm seeing 149GH (of 154 expected) and 0.04% errors after 4 hours. I'll crank it up to 400MHz here in a bit and see what it does. 400MHz is just a hair shy of an S1 worth of hash, off about one fourth the power of an S1 and in a lot less space.

400MHz overnight was a bit of a letdown. 11 hour average 161GH (0.1% errors), slightly worse than I'd expect to see at 375MHz. But 350MHz performance is still good.
I think some of it's probably heat-related. The bottomside heat sink (which the CPU cooler is screwed into) gets pretty toasty. More effective cooling might get things running more smoothly?

A: slightly drunk, made reading 10x harder..
A2: I'm used to 2-5 sentences per chunk of text, aka paragraph (you had 13 odd), it just me, I'll continue to do my trick, Ctrl+C Ctrl+V count the periods and return on the 3rd one...
III: You lazy son of a.. I know, it'll have very little change since the 1 lot of photos, maybe less wires for external control?
Quattro: I can see these be a nice replacement for them N-RM! or even 2 of 'em to replace the Avalon Modual3 I have cooking out 270GH/s, oh yeah!

anyway, I'll keep my eye on Bitfury for any info on when they sell them chips, and continue to hound them..

Well, I found a bit of time today to try and repeat refinements on the Pod. Well, I found time to start it. Got the robot warm room and the machine recalibrated, tweaked the placement program a bit. Tomorrow's a short day and probably full of hosting tasks, but I'll try and find time to rig up the second new pod board. If it's going well, I'll see about splicing together some more adapter cabling and run two or all three test pods to the S5 controller I have working. And then post pictures.

I have been unable to locate my third S5 controller. Pretty sure I have one somewhere. Anyone got some extra S5 controllers?

Also, since the prototype pod is probably the last thing I'll do with BM1384, I'll probably start a new thread at some point since the old BM1384 Project Dev thread will be kinda defunct. But I may be working with new stuff sometime soon so when I have something worth saying I'll start a fresh thread to say it.

So no pods will be going out? Well damn if not, I would of loved to mess with it like to compac. I have an old thermal-take water cooling loop for a 775 cpu I could of thrown on there and took it to the max. I have a spare s5 controller setup you could borrow for a while, I may end up using it for a project down the road. I saw you had 1384 breakout boards somewhere in the thread, any chance you have some to sell so I can at least use these pulled chips laying around?

My old S1 is boxed up and ready to ship to you for trade in parts, sounds like we might be getting closer!  I'm looking forward to this pod since my last U3 died a couple weeks ago.

Once the snow from the storms in your area is cleared so UPS can deliver you will have 3 s5's in the load of donations I sent ya ;)
-Cheers!

Storms in my area? It's been depressingly un-stormy here lately. We've got a three-day-old dusting of sleet still clinging to the ground and that's it. Also, stuff was delivered about half an hour ago.

Hmm. UPS kept reporting it was stuck in St. Louis due to weather.
Anywho - Merry late Xmas! I see I forgot the 4 s1 boards from the 2 s1>s3 miners. If ya want them for buck parts I'll send them with the hosted miners next week. One of the new s7's that is replacing them here has one blade DOA so am seeing if Bitmain will let me send just the 1 dead board in RMA...

Yeah, they reported it was stuck due to weather but probably because they are babies.

Midwest is not the greatest on weather right now.  But I would agree delivery companies seem to love day's they can claim as weather.  Slap a banner on website it gives them reason not to be on time.

Let us know if they end up letting you send just the dead board.  I'm guessing they would want entire miner,  but that would be nice if they let you just do blade.   

Will do. So far been 7hrs since I directly contacted Bitmain and got an auto reply saying they got the msg. My initial contact to Zendesk explaining the tests I did was answered within an hour. They said time to contact Bitmain. fun fun fun

Even though just 1 bad board out of 11 s7 ain't bad, if BTC goes up a bit more I prolly should get a b9 just for spares...

In a way, this points to the biggest disadvantage to high TH/s per miner such as the s7 or BitFury's supposed 20TH/s rig vs things like a pharm of Pod's or stick miners. Sure takes up more space but for Home miners or small to moderate sized miners like me (and 1 year ago I never ever would have called ~70TH/s total 'moderate') if a miner goes down you don't immediately drop 4.7 THs or more of hashing.

WTF does this have to do with sidehack?

He will be getting this.  Have some fun sidehack


https://i.imgur.com/2zVDllt.jpg

full size below

https://i.imgur.com/T8v5BVI.jpg

Are you still looking for S5+ boards?  I may have a bad S5+ board as well.

Looks like just a bad cap?

yea but by blowing a cap could have done more damage then just the cap so would be better for somebody to look at the board that knows more then the adverage person to see if that is the only problem ... btw thanks again sidehack for fixing my undervolted s1 / my underclocked s2 and also looking at my compacs they are working flawless now

Right now I don't want any S5/S5+ boards. I'll take stock of what I got here in the next week or so and see what I got going on. In the next week I'll probably be starting gathering the remainder of Compac parts and also putting up some Pod news. I was gonna bust out some rafflable Pods today but cavalier came by for some repairs and such which burned up the whole afternoon. And since it's Friday, my afternoons are short anyway because cheeseburgers. But next week I'll have a better bead on what ASICs I'll need for Compac batching and any Pod batching we end up doing with BM1384. When I need boards, I'll make it known.

I have an S7 in hosting (Batch 1 I believe) that blew a board when I first fired it up. This particular machine had been sold on eBay and returned a month later with basically nothing on it working. Owner replaced two boards already before it got to me. I replaced a fan and sent the third board in for RMA. The replacement just arrived, and when I installed it one of the chips exploded. Literally exploded. Blew the heatsink completely off the top, with a little rectangle of IC packaging still stuck to the tape. So that's fun.

If you look back to the first post in our BM1384 dev thread, you'll see a description of what we wanted to do for mining boards. The idea, originally, was to make a quarter-S1 board (so, half an S1 blade which puts four to an S1 chassis) which could operate on its own with a decent heatsink and 120mm fan, or four at a time on an S1 chassis as a decent full-scale miner. The idea has shifted around a bit to larger boards and a discrete pod design, but I'm really leaning back to the single quarter-S1 board as a single product which, depending on mechanicals, can fit two or three market sectors. If we end up with, say, Bitfury chips or something on that power scale, we could make an S1 into 4TH or so and if one board blew you'd still have 3TH of miner. If the controller shoots craps, well, the boards are USB-connected so just cable them to another controller without needing special hardware. Modularity may cost a little more, but it does rule out and/or reduce a lot of potential failures.

Sounds like something similar happened to my S5+ blade.  I'm not sure what happened really but there was a heat sink that fell off and it still had the chip attached to the heat sink.  I think one or two heat sinks fell off and then the extra heat generated somehow caused some kind of chain reaction. 

https://i.imgur.com/8FrQzTX.jpg

I can understand that the bitfury chips would be the way to go, but if for any reason you want this board just let me know and I'll ship it over to you.  I love the idea of a modular miner.

I sent in the dead avalon6 board

would be interesting to know what killed it off and if the chips can be used for something like a pod .  most of the chips look good.


  https://i.imgur.com/2zVDllt.jpg

Any news on this bad boy?

Got 2 S1 ready for upgrade!  ;D

I assume Sidehack is busy making/shipping the compacs first, before more news for the pod.

Ahh nice one, didn't see this.

I honestly haven't read the entire thread - but I just got some cool new toys and could possibly help with teardown.  I have a full smd rework station and wouldn't mind donating some time - either tearing down or assembling.

Let me know.

P.s. I am in Vegas

Boomin

Send SideHack a PM on that. He's swamped with work on the pods and a project using Avalon chips. Both involve pulling parts from boards and remounting on new boards.

But the best part about pulling parts and remounting is it's pretty easy when you have a reflow oven and a putty knife and a pick-and-place machine.

At this point, pods as they've been discussed in this thread are basically deceased. The chips I can use are either about to be two generations behind, unavaiable, or have no datasheet. For now the pod as it is in this thread might be repurposed as a testbed for a new project but with the diff where it's going, it'll be hard to make a BM1385/A3218 pod feasible let alone a BM1384.

Ahh, i still have that (your extra) S5 board you sent me by accident. What do i do with it?

If you make some pods i still dont mind doing a trade in of S5/S1/AMTubes boards. But i understand that from a development standpoint it might not be worth the production costs.

A BM1385 Pod from a U3 would indeed be a great achievement.  :)

I hope he does it as I really like his work.  But I think S1/AM tubes are not going to be big on list of needs (unless from componets he needs), I just don't see chips being that great.

The good news for the project is bitcoin difficulty is going crazy.  Which is bad for miners.   But likely means S3's and S5's will only get cheaper and if difficulty keeps going like it is hard to say what cost would be in a month even.   So the good news is possibly cheaper miners with decent chips.   But granted they still are not the latest and greatest chips.

Yeah he said he needed the S1/AMT for the solid state caps and such. And that the S1 had more needed components than he expected. But the thing is its not very motivating to do this work when the pods would no longer really ROI.

Its too bad because i know pods would still be okay. I mean look at people still buying U3 just because they're quiet and they're run on free electricity. But its pretty niche now, i guess.

Personally i still want them, but *shrug*. Price wise it might be a bit icky.

If I do 'em it won't be with BM1384. Too tired.

why would U3 electricity be free ?

I can't figure out why people still pay so much for U3's.  I bought from crazy guy and eventually got R1 to control them with Crazy Guy's custom firmware.  I played with them for a month or two and i lost interest.  I actually made ROI by selling for some reason people  still pay decent on U3's or did during time I sold.

I am waiting to see if the pod happens I would add one maybe a few to play with.  I still would like to see a company sell current gen chips to Sidehack.  Would love if he got support and we see a pod with it.

i get some pretty good "bestshares" from my U3 compared to my others miners.

If the U3 actually worked as intended with no problems it would have been a fun little machine.  That's where the gekko pod comes in.  We all know it will work and we can surmise that, with today's better tech, it will work faster and more efficiently than the U3.  I really look forward to these pods being released.

I dont know. Why do people buy sidehack sticks for 25-40USD?

Maybe some people see them as lottery tickets. I got one as a toy, and if you run 100 of them on free electricity, then i guess you have a silent 1TH/s that makes 0 noise. Depending on the heat density.

I am waiting to see if the pod happens I would add one maybe a few to play with.  I still would like to see a company sell current gen chips to Sidehack.  Would love if he got support and we see a pod with it.
[/quote]

I dont know. Why do people buy sidehack sticks for 25-40USD?

Maybe some people see them as lottery tickets. I got one as a toy, and if you run 100 of them on free electricity, then i guess you have a silent 1TH/s that makes 0 noise. Depending on the heat density.
[/quote]


The community is supporting the gekko guys.  For one they make good stuff secondly if there ever is going to be a small scale miner for a hobbiest it will most likely come from these guys.

Somewhere previously stated that batches will most likely be bought by resellers making this stick an attractive introductory miner to learn on.  For roughly the same money is a newbie going to buy 2-5 gh miner when there is an 8+ gh option out there to get your feet wet with?

If bitcoin ever hopes for decentralization it will take new blood getting into the game.  With that being said what does it matter if they sell a "toy" or multi Terahash rig that only the hard core players can obtain?  Still need peoples to buy and operate the machines and    might as well learn on a stick vs. outdated used machinery. 

Hopefully these guys can obtain new tech chips and develop a miner in the future.  That's why we check this this particular thread.

That was why i do or did:)

So, question. If I chucked out a dozen or so pods that hooked up to an S5 controller (via the regular 18-pin cable, including temp readings), with 8x BM1384 under a Freezer7 cooler, with manual voltage control and a simple LED bar graph voltage readout corresponding roughly to 25mV node-level increments, would they sell at about $75 apiece? Note this does not include an S5 controller, but with the right firmware and cabling one S5 controller could hook up to 4 boards. I'm sending out for a batch of prototype PCBs of some stuff next week and want to know if it's worth it.

if i had a s5 controler i would

+1

Bitmain wants $50 for a BeagleBone with Firmware preinstalled but you have to specify which version up front. Anyway around that?

The secondhand market, I reckon. I've got three or four that could be parted with if necessary.

OK I will stick my neck out here.... BM1384 is dead, BM1385 will soon be dead. It does not matter how noble recycling is, how great the price is or how much efficiency you can squeeze out. They are just too power hungry for most Home Miners.

So my advice, much as I like the concept of what you describe, is put all your energy into a 14/16nm solution, which I think, given that the next step will be a way off, will have a reasonable lifetime.


Rich

That's also in the works. But I've had enough people still asking for pods that I figured I'd make the offer. If enough people speak up in the next couple days I'll add it to the list.

Query: Can a 'real' Beagle be flashed with Bitmains firmware and would it be a drop-in replacement for theirs? Newark/Element14 is having a clearance sale on them right now.

Of course you would still need Bitmain's interface board tho.

As ya know, I still have more than a few s5's running with 5 hosted by you ... What would the pod or boards hashrate & power be at lowest power setting?

After the Halving think they'd (as pods or retrofits) still at least pay for themselves at your place?

Excuse the noob question, but does the S5 controller need to be extracted from a S5, or does it have "extra" hook ups so you can tie into an already mining S5 with your pod?

I would buy one for <$100, put me on the interested list.

I have a couple of BB I brought from Bitmain and a couple of controller boards I bought from them as well. I want a couple of Pods  ;D

Believe it depends on if your controller board has the extra(unused) sockets on it as well as unused fan connectors. Someone else here was selling extra long data cables just for this. Along those lines... do the later ones sans unused connectors still have the board traces so connectors can just be soldered in? (and anyone have a link to those long controller/hashboard data cables?)

EDIT: Found it. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1173573.msg12359304#msg12359304
J4bberwock was doing them for both the s5 and s7's. Ya'd have to PM them to see if any are still avaiable.

J4bberwock seems MIA afaik.

We have a general scarcity issue on boards for PSUs 'round these parts.

Yeah, it sure doesn't help that my next board is about three weeks behind schedule. And that's behind the adjusted schedule. I was hoping to be started on 'em before Christmas.

im interested but no s5 controller here. but if all it needs is a beaglebone or something that can later be used for other stuff thats not an issue. otherwise, it is.

Bitmain has BBone that is set up for-
  BB board which can be used for AntMiner S4, S4+, S5，S5+，S7. Shipping out within 7 working days after full payment. Due to Chinese Festival holiday,
  So they also have-
  IO board for S7, with 3 connectors. Shipping out within 7 working days after full payment.
 
 The IO Boards is reasonably priced but I'm not sure spending $50 for a BB plus shipping is necessary. Someone has a thread on replacing their Bitmain BB with an off the shelf one but I think it was in an S2?
 Soo... would the S7 card work with the pods? The same as the S5?

Heck if I know, I don't have one to test with. But if the S7 controller will work for an S5+ which will work on S5 boards, then yeah probably.

I'd be interested.

Interested.  Where do I send my money?

Would it work if hooked to a running S5, I mean adding pods to a controller managing 2 blades already ?

I have to check how many ports mine has.

well, my S5 controller has 4 ports, and they seem to sell controller cables:

http://bitcoinware.net/products/18pin-signal-cables-for-antminer-s5-s5-s7-with-length-of-120mm

So theorically, I would be interested in 2 pods if I can hook them up to my running S5 :)

My S5 has 4 ports, also, two are being used by the machine and 2 are open.  Are the open ones what would control the pod?  Would be an interesting pod if it could run alongside an already running S5, like a piggy back system almost.

An S5 will run with 4 S5 Hash cards connected, so if the BM1384 Pod existed and if it had the same interface it would probably work.

Rich

I have a new S7 running, next to an old S3, which I bought off eBay to understand mining better. An S5 is coming, again off eBay. I'd love to use the S3 and S5 with upgraded Sidehack boards at some point. Look forward to hearing more. I bought the S5 with this project specifically in mind, so have a couple options for upgraded boards.

Maybe this project could transform into a "beef up your S5" type of project.  Like they build a couple "gekko S5 boards" that users could either replace their existing S5 boards with, or if they have the controller with empty spots plug in 2 more boards (add cooling, etc.) and get like a 3TH S5-gekko or something...

Nope. That's way outside the scope of this particular project, and this project is also almost entirely defunct. I will not build a full-scale board compatible with the S5 controller, and I will not build anything new with the BM1384. I'll probably go ahead and put together a dozen or so 8-chip BM1384 pods that work with the S5 controller, because it's cool and I might have chips left over after Compacs are done anyways. But that's it.

Anything new I build going forward will have our own controls set. Anything full-scale will probably be chassis-compatible with S1/3/5, but run on USB. Anything small I build going forward might work with a CPU cooler, or more likely I'll rig up a heatsink/fan combo for it since CPU cooler compatibility is sorely limiting, but they'll also be USB-tied using my own controls set (same as what's mentioned in the Community Miner discussion thread).

This all sounds very intriguing. I'm interested in buying one as a working art piece at this rate :)

CPU Cooler? I'm game :D
I have about 10 oem lga1150 cpu coolers in my closet right now, and if there is going to be a cpu cooler compatible board coming out even in a year, I think i'll keep em in the closet until this board possibly comes ot. Very interesting, and I love to see a good board that can be linked to a rpi on cgminer ( or even just windows pc).GUIs just cannot compare to bare details.

It's pretty unlikely, honestly, that I'll opt for CPU cooler compatibility. It was pretty difficult to fit 8x BM1384 in a 3cm square, and it would have been impossible to fit more chips than that under any kind of space I would expect every respectable cooler to cover. That, and leaving all the space clear which one would expect a cooler to need for screws and legs and stuff makes the whole board bigger than it needs to be. Had I my choice of heatsinking, I could have made the pod PCB half its size for the same power and hashrate.

what about converting some gridseed orbs? I have about 14 lying around

This question has come up repeatedly in the past, but it's been a while so I will go ahead and answer it.

No. In no uncertain terms, no. No gridseed pods, no U3, no R-Box. U3 is perhaps the most likely candidate, as it's probably the least uselessly small and dense. But in general, no.

Well whatever you decide on i'm interested and looking to purchase a substantial amount of hash power in the near future  :)

Depending on how near, look at kilo's "Community miner discussion" thread. That's basically taking over my TypeZero project and the plan is to build a USB-connected board that'll fit on an S1 chassis with BitFury chips.

What should i do with that dead S5 board you sent me? I still have it. Are you still pulling chips for sticks?

I probably have enough for sticks. But if you want to trade it for one of the S5-controller-compatible pods that'd be alright because I won't have enough chips for everything.

If you want. I'm from Canada so we'd just need to take the 3x $ shipping cost back and forth in the math. Then i could send you the two boards at some point.

I just thought you were giving up on S5 chips pods? Or are they Bitfury pods?

I'll take one I have one S5 controller BB no power board laying around will that mater if so i l get one ,


but one POD for me .


ty

What is the overhead to use a USB controller in the Pod Miner?

Not sure I understand that question. Please elaborate.

I think he means:

What the advantage of using a S5 controller vs integrating USB (like the compac stick or the U3)

Well part of the advantage is I don't have to write a driver for it, which is good since I'm already doing everything else (and probably also code work, since the guy who's supposed to be helping hasn't gotten back to me in 3 weeks) for a couple other projects right now - on top of manufacturing and hosting. If someone wants to port over S5 code to work with a USB/UART controller, this guy would hook right up to it - except you wouldn't have a temp sensor since that ties in through I2C on the 18-pin header. I had a board design about Christmas with all that stuff integrated, and I handed it to Novak for firmware but he never got around to it and then he left for a freakin' sweet rocket scientist job so it's not gonna get done in any time frame where the BM1384 is even really viable as a hobby miner, not when I have A3218 and BitFury projects already underway.

One of my computers has issues with USB miners (U3, nanofury stick, compac, you name it), I would generally prefer miners to use ethernet connections.  Not sure if I'm in the minority or majority on this one...

To me it depends on price to add Ethernet connection.  I am very happy just to use a RPI, they are cheap and easy to get at a store even if you need one quick.   So usb to RPI I am fine with.

I'm worried if you go to Ethernet on pod how much cost it adds. I think a lot of miners have a RPI or two already.

I won't be building ethernet directly into anything anytime soon. Maybe if I end up building a rack miner (probably using 6 or 8 TypeZero boards) it'll have built-in ethernet, but that'd be because of an internal Pi-like controller tying everything together not because I put an ethernet-capable microcontroller on anything.

I understand your problems, but let us help you.

Maybe somebody who's reading those threads has some experience working, or desire to work, ith those microcontrollers.

Originally, you had in mind megaAVR with assembly-level coding.

Later, you've mentioned some NXP part (presumably programmable in C).

Let us know what exact part numbers you have in mind for your design. Post somewhere or link to the code you may already have on your mind. People here may be able to help you. It doesn't cost you much. We (all of us, readers) may be able to constructively help you.

I, personally, am not making any promises to deliver on some deadline. I'm mostly curious. But I do have significant experience and I'm certainly able to help with various design decisions.

But in order for us to help you, we have to know what microcontroller choices you've considered and what are your preferred choices for the applicable toolchain.

Well I haven't made any design or toolchain choices. All that was Novak's job, so I'm trusting his decisions and picking up where he left off. I do actually have degrees in embedded and programming so I'm capable, just out of practice. And either way, it's not happening for a BM1384 pod.

I'm not buying your answer.

You must have looked over his shoulder. Did he paid for his toolchain or used a free (limited) one? What was his debugging box that he used?

I know that Atmel (now acquired by Microchip) offers Windows Atmel Studio 7 unlimited for free covering AVR, AVR32 and ARM32 (raw metal, not Linux).

You can post here or on any other thread of your choice. It is fairly obvious that the microcontroller and toolchain choice will be brain bandwidth (wetware) limited, so please post what were the tools that you've used and are comfortable with. (Plural "you", meaning "sidehack" & "Novak" & whoever else works with singular you "sidehack).

I was hoping the usability would be just as good as the Compac.  Could find a chip that supports both USB and Ethernet but adding a microcontroller can be heavy with programming and finding one that is easy to work with(Software version 7.0?).  I could understand by keeping it simple and the cost down by not having 3-5 different chips to support it that the Beaglebone could already do.

I'm sorry that you lost the resource of someone who could do firmware and software.

Why are the Compac's selling out?

A3218 and BitFury projects already underway?  Should we see a different version of this that uses less than 50watts?  With Next-Gen Chips?


Some computer mainboards either use cheap USB chipsets and hope that they work or the driver/firmware support may not be 99%.   Everyone only needs to use USB for just a mouse and keyboard right?


October 8th of 2015... Without Novak working on this idea, I'm pretty sure that it's dead unless if someone else can make up for 5 months of development?

I've been saying it for at least a month now, but there will be no mass-produced standalone BM1384 pod. If I had one in December, maybe January it could have worked. But I didn't. So I won't.

Compacs are selling out because people want them. They're sold out and no longer available from me because I'm tired of building them. I don't know if anyone could estimate how much manual work goes into assembling one of them, but when you make them with pulled chips the amount of manual work gets tripled. Now consider how much work would go into it if it had 8 pulled chips. Now consider how much of the price would actually be profit, from which I might actually get paid a bit for that work. See why it's not worth it?

Novak chose an LPC11u23 ARM, which is USB-capable and has a variety of ports and ADCs. It's in the same family as the ARM on the Avalon Nano and Ava6 control board (which I believe is LPC11u14? Going from memory on all these part numbers). I've worked with 8051 programmed from Windows, but not ARM programmed from Linux. He had a Linux toolchain set up, and before he left I believe he shifted it over to one of the general shop machines rather than his own box. I figure on utilizing the USB bootloader supported by the chip, so I can write code to it without requiring extra hardware - that also makes firmware updates in the future more possible.

So, I reckon if someone is pretty good with ARM, and maybe also c for some cgminer drivers, and has time to work on it in the next couple weeks, let me know.

So at some point I mentioned a BM1384 Pod prototype that worked off an S5 controller. Well today I finally got around to putting it together and guess what, it works. The same frustration with power that plagued the first prototype some time ago was still present, but this time I actually figured out the problem and solved it. So. The thing's currently sitting at 350MHz. And having that problem solved takes away some hesitation to future designs with the same power setup.

It's quitting time now, so I'll put up a picture tomorrow. But for now, it's mining at Eligius (http://eligius.st/~wizkid057/newstats/userstats.php/1BTCMUSEuM1uy4mCce9JGisMZD15RTG7em) and should average 154GH.

I still have a bit of testing to do; there's a node voltage display circuit built in that I haven't populated yet so I don't know if it works. I figured I'd get base functionality first.

I can put together about 8 more of these; if people actually want them maybe I'll do something about it.

Tell you what, this has actually been a pretty good week for prototypes. But the rest of that story will have to wait for another day.

[EDIT] And of course as soon as I say all that, I poke the wrong thing and now it's down again. Grumble grumble fix it tomorrow.

I'm interested aswell :)

Well, got it back to working after whatever happened last night. I think my poking around toasted the buck chip - well, not completely toasted. Screwed up the current trip level detection I think, because it would start but as soon as it tried to mine and detected an appreciable load the buck would reset.
So now I'm back to functional. However, the bigger problem I thought I solved is now a problem again and it's making me question how it was solved yesterday. I might have time to get back to it today but no guarantees. Hopefully I get it ironed out because I was really looking forward to using that power circuit on some other stuff for you guys.

If anyone's wondering, I'm using a pulled TPS53355 to generate about 2.6V across four nodes of BM1384. The '53 has an internal 5V LDO which drives internal switching circuitry and powers the switching FET gate drives. When the load increases, this 5V starts to sag. It's not a problem on any of the commercial miners I've looked at, and I've replicated some of those circuits in test but it still misbehaves on mine. I noticed some inordinate gate drive currents dragging it down, so a resistor inline with the boost capacitor solved some of that. Yesterday it started working beautifully after increasing the boost capacitor and 5V bypass cap, but now with the same parts in place it's still sagging so I'm a bit perplexed. Anyway it's running right now at about 175MHz because if I push it farther the 5V sags below 4V and the buck resets. I'm sure it's something very trivial that I've overlooked.

pm me a pic of yer circuit. Have you looked at the gate drives with a scope? I'm guessing either the switching times are off or possibly oscillations.

And of course definitely interested in one ;)

It's a monolithic with internal FETs.

omg yay! ;D where do i send my btc?!?! haha
no but mark me down for atleast 2, 1 will do if i can get it. or 3 or 4.... ;)
great job man! your keeping the home miners in the game!

Is what you are working on here just for fun now?  I think it's really cool that you have a working unit, but I am unsure what the end game is now that there are no plans to develop it for production.  Thanks.

There is no endgame. It's a one-off that I finally had time to mess with since I've been solidly busy pretty much every day for the last month and some. I just figured, if I can make it work right and I have enough parts to build half a dozen I'll see if folks want half a dozen. If nothing else it'd pay for the parts and be another dev step toward a product that simultaneously doesn't suck and is released at a reasonable timeline.

Got it, thanks for the explanation.  I bet you could auction off the ones you do make, I'm sure there will be a demand for the limited amount you produce.

That's kinda what I'm thinking. I'm building one fresh now based on the properly working configuration from yesterday. I gotta cut out early though so I doubt I'll get to fully test it.

If I can isolate whatever accident made yesterday's work perfectly for several hours and I have screen shots to prove it, I'll probably work on a similar configuration using a newer chip sometime in the near future.

By the way, this board integrates the S5 temp sensor so that works too. Fan control, not so much.

Fun things I've found that make circuits mysteriously work/not work:
probe loading
gentle breezes from cover off vs cover on - and not exactly related to local internal ambient temps
bright light when illuminating for close inspection

What a fun world eh? ;)

Would love to get one (or more) of these. I'm nearly certain people definitely actually want these