Bitcoin Forum

My co-worker said he has a home made BTC miner with ASIC chips. Everything is done he said except programming it. I'm not a programmer, so I don't know what he means by "programming it" but are there any people here that can help him out? He and his friend bought all the parts/chips from China already. Have the board all done and casing and just needs programming done. His friend's family is into an electronics business and was able to get their hands on ASIC chips according to what he said because of those connections. He told me things about a J-tag USB identifier and all stuff that doesn't make sense to me. If you want to maybe help in this little project, let me know and I'll pass on his contact information to you. I think they have parts for about 20 inits. That's all they wanted to build I guess.

These are specifically Bitcoin mining ASIC chips? Because they make ASIC chips for thousands of different applications, each is unique...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrated_circuit

I'm just going by what my friend has told me. He said him and his friend have everything needed to make their miners but lacking the programming. I'm not sure what they were going to do when they cam to that point, but I would have just forwarded his contact information to whoever wanted to help out with the programming and let them talk it out.

Ehh... I'm pretty sure your friend doesn't have what he thinks he has. ASIC chips need to be designed for Bitcoin mining, they need to be manufactured for it and can only be mass-produced in the hundreds of thousands, you can't just go out and buy any ASIC and reprogram it, in fact, you can't program them at all outside of writing software to support it.

Perhaps your friend has an FPGA and needs a bitstream programmed for it?

Why do you not let "your friend" come here to the forums to ask for help? It sounds like "your friend" is incredibly resourceful and lucky if he managed to get his hands on "ASIC chips", to design a PCB, and even has cosmetic details like the casing done, but yet he is incredibly bad at knowing where to reach for help (this community / forum) to finish the "programming"?

No company sells mining ASIC chips yet (maybe ASICminer in the future, but not today). I think you are a con artist who invented a ridiculous and implausible story to hope to attract developers and con them to pay to get a "development board" to "finish the programming"  ::)

You accuse me of being con artist? Go read any of my previous posts, does ANY of them seem to be of a con artist or someone trying to scam anyone? Also, I never asked for anything. All I was going to do was forward my friends contact information to whoever could program the hardware. My friend is willing to pay for the programming and would give a free miner/unit to the programmer. How in the world could this ever be a con? What, some programmer is just going to work for nothing or something? Sorry bud, you are way off the mark here.

Your friend is into electronics and doesn't know the difference between an ASIC and an FPGA. This is very obviously several FPGA chips he has. It sounds like he bought 20 FPGA chips and needs help programming them. He better hope they are Spartan-6 LX150 chips or he is going to be very disappointed with the hashrate. If they are, though, he should be able to achieve over 4GH/s. This means he better hurry to get them online before the hashrate jumps as larger companies roll out the ASICs they have been developing for months.

Anyway, I personally can't help him but I'm sure many on the forum can. FPGA mining has been around for a while.


For your friend's information, an ASIC is an application specific integrated circuit. It is build to do one thing. In other words, it is "programmed" in hardware and created already able to do what it needs to do. The advantages are low power and die size and they are often used in lower power applications or in markets where competition on power efficiency is important.
FPGAs are designed to be flexible. They can't do anything. They need to be programmed in order to be able to execute the code given to them properly. This wastes space and makes them inefficient.
Do not confuse general-purpose CPUs and GPUs as FPGAs. They are ASICs. They cannot be reprogrammed. This doesn't mean that they aren't designed to be able to do a broad amount of things.
That is the extent of my own knowledge. If you are actually interested, consult wikipedia or ask someone else.

Edit: @DeepCeleron: Don't be a smartass. Especially if you have nothing useful to add.
I've edited this post to say this instead of posting new because I don't want to interrupt the now back on topic later posts.

I'm mining using an ASIC. Code name Juniper. It is an Application Specific Integrated Circuit manufactured at TMSC Taiwan using their 40nm process, and includes 1 GB of memory on it's custom-designed circuit board too.

Relax man... He is entitled to his opinion, that does not mean he is right, and it's certainly no reason to get all worked up about....

Send me a PM with a photo or parts list and I can tell you or your friend what is needed as regards programming.

opentoe: true, your history is not suspicious. But there have been reports by forum moderators of random bitcointalk.org accounts getting hijacked (via password bruteforcing, etc) and used by scammers in any way to run their scams. Bottom line, I do not trust your (or your friend's) claims. Perhaps you simply misunderstood the technical details of what your friend is doing (eg. as others pointed out he may have FPGAs, not ASICs).


Obviously, "ASIC" in the context of this thread means a Bitcoin ASIC, not any ASIC such as GPUs, CPUs, etc.

Yup... i think my toaster has an asic inside :)

I'm supposed to meet up with my friend soon, as he is going to lend me his project/hardware. I'll take some pictures of these chips he has and send them to the few people that asked to see them who could possibly help. Hey, I can't lose here and neither can the person who would be able to help him out. He/she would get a free ASIC miner out of the deal AND paid for programming it. This all sits on the fence right now until I can confirm what really those chips are. I'm sure the chips will have some identifiable marks on them and I'll snap close up pictures of them. I know many people said it is impossible to get or buy ASIC chips for this purpose, but it is also hard for me to believe that someone could know EVERY possible manufacturer and way to get those chips. Hey, I'm hoping for the best and wish it true but if it is all the wrong hardware and just old FPGA chips then so be it. From the looks of it Butterfly won't deliver anything for a very long time and Avalon well, is just a one timer right now from what I've seen. I'll take. I'll let you guys know when I get the hardware.

Please send me photos of the hardware.  The photos of the chips themselves must clearly show that markings (letters and numbers) on the top of the chips. 

I definitely will. I spoke to him today and he's getting all their notes and stuff together. I'm waiting eagerly myself on seeing this first hand.

1 GB Ram? Hmmh...that should be good enough for a litecoin miner, too...

He is talking about a GPU, AMD uses ASIC's in their Graphic Cards ;)

http://www.microcare-systems.co.uk/images/juniper_m_series_router.png

;)

I received the board with the chip on it and some notes that came along with it. Says ASIC right on the board and it looks like there was a heat sink on the chip at one point but looks like a little glue on there. I want to remove the glue without destroying the chip. I know Acetone works great with removing just about anything but will that affect the chip itself? Several people did email indicating they may be able to help with this project and I'm this much closer to maybe getting something done. If you are a good programmer, can make/create drivers so we can interface with this let me know. I'll respond to the people who already messaged me. Of course once it is complete you'll get a free miner. NOT a scam here. Willing to pay and very serious about this. This is NOT a big operation like Avalon or others. We are just a few tech guys that wanted to give this a try and are stuck at the programming/interface portion here.

I will take some hi-res pictures.

Thanks

Oh, so now you are one of the founders, and a tech guy at it?
Strange, because you claimed to be a bystander having no clue what your friends were up to just a few posts ago...

If you find a method of convincing devs to write you a free usb/wifi/rs232/etc module. Let me know how you did it since you will have just convinced someone to put in a whole lot of time into your project for free. Just sayin.

god i hope opentoe is not BFL... lol

I predict that opentoe will ask whoever is interested in a board to "just pay for shipping" to get the "free" board and then somehow not receive it or receive something that turns out is not a Bitcoin mining board ::)

Actually this could be a plug from BFL to make people hope a bit longer. Now, the guy is going to post photos of a board full of chips with "BFL ASIC" written on top, and everybody will be like "woah, BFL ASICs are ready, OMG, let's preorder more".

Just because it is an "ASIC", does NOT mean it is a "bitcoin ASIC".  As someone pointed out earlier, a GPU is a type of ASIC.  Yes, it can be programmed to mine bitcoins, but that was not its original purpose.  Given any random "ASIC" it may or (more likely) may NOT be able to effectively mine bitcoins. 

Let's see a photo!

I'm not involved in this in anyway besides helping my friend find someone to help with the programming, that is it. I'm the middle man right now. Just taking what they have, trying to find someone to help if even possible and that's it. Man, you guys are paranoid as hell on here.

Yea, I hear you on that. I truly hope that it is made to mine away. I'll admit, I know ZERO (0) on what the chip is, or anything hardware at all. I'll be taking some photos tonight and putting them up here. Charging my camera battery right now. It is an old Nikon D70 so I barely use it and the battery was dead. Sorry. Give me a couple of hours or less.

This was the best I could get right now. This is one of many boards that will be put together I'm guessing. I was told this is about 5 GH/s. It is a very small board.

http://www.photopiks.com/asic_board.jpg

opentoe: this an Actel ProASIC3 chip. And despite the marketing name, this is an FPGA, not an ASIC (so I was right, again): http://www.actel.com/products/pa3/default.aspx Based on the VQFP-100 package it has got to be an A3P030, A3P060, A3P125, or A3P250.

It is absolutely not made specifically for Bitcoin mining. There is no way whatsoever that this generic 130nm FPGA beats the power efficiency of the 40nm Arria II FPGA (BFL Mini Rig) or 45nm Spartan6 FPGA (in pretty much all other Bitcoin miners).

Sorry for the false accusation of attempting to scam. It turns out you were merely ignorant of what hardware type you had.

I agree.  5MH/s maybe, but not 5GH/s.  In my opinion, this is probably not worth investigating further.  Of course, it would be great to be proven wrong.  But I'm doubtful.

As I said, I was merely the middleman trying to give a helping hand to my friend. I've already said I have no idea on what the chips are or anything about them, but I do appreciate the fact that you guys do know what they are. I'll break the bad news to my friends and tell them their little ASIC mining project is over. Thank you guys for letting me know what the chip is. That's why I went to this forum first, I knew some people here are so damn smart technically they would know exactly what that board was.

Thanks again!

Glad to see this was legit. Apologies for the questionning earlier: there have been so many scam cases on this forum that now, any new project is perceived by default as a scam until proven legit. Sad but necessary. Thanks for sharing what you have got.

I am building a homebrew FPGA miner. I know after ASICs this won't be a big deal  :-\ but, hey I've really discovered FPGA's just soon after disovering Bitcoin and it would be nice to tinker with it and they don't cost much. I've seen couple of people pushing around 400 Mhash/s from XILINX based boards costing under $200.

Be smart, do it right and you may end up deciding you want to build an ASIC miner also. You may even have a very good chance of beating BFL to the punch.