7805 is from the 70s, you would be better off with 2 wall warts than wasting 7V @ 500ma of heat from a 7805.  Consider a simple USB cigarette lighter converter from ebay.  or http://www.ebay.com/itm/DC-Converter-Buck-Step-down-Module-12V-convert-to-5V-3A-USB-Car-power-adapter-/171061990530

Tom

All 280W is on the 12V rail though so don't compare with the overall capacity of the supply.

To me this is good news.  When I move house, I always relax once the first thing breaks, something has to be broken, once you find it the tension disappears and you can get on with the work at hand (this is not rational).

Thanks for your hard work BKK, we're a few weeks from chips arriving, certainly time for a re-roll or two.  Let us know if you need funds.

All you've committed to is what you've paid for, buying some chips.  As above SB is finalizing a shopping cart for chip buyers to nominate and, if necessary, pay for what they want done to their chips.  Commitment comes with payment, you've only committed for what you've paid for.  SB did send out a survey to batch 1 buyers, afaik this was just a survey to gauge interest.

Has anyone put a cro or logic analyzer on a real Avalon?  Without any of their hdl it is tough to know what the comms looks like.  Not releasing their code is annoying, they could release what they can and we could check out the comms protocol even if we can't build chips. In a few months their ip will be useless.

Holy crap, there's a photo of an assembled board on ebay and BKK is still driving to pick his parts.  This is a dog eat dog business for sure.

No mention of a heatsink.

I hope he means capability and not capacitance!

ps. lets close the thread above and keep this OT, we need to help BKK to focus.

For any board you are interested in you need to try to route a design for the chip before buying.  This will give you an idea of what you will get out of it.  It won't tell you what clock rate you can achieve though, this depends too much on the power supply.


That's a really sad story.  In 2009 the co i work for was bought out and the v5 project we were working on was abandoned.  We junked most of the boards (like 20 or so, each with 4 chips).  Imagine mining with this system since 2010, man you could retire on that.  I've only been going since March, nothing remarkable, a coin a week or so.

Take a look at the OrphanGland stratix implementation project in the open source miner code.  they just split the problem space into n and have each core working part of the same share.  This way you don't complicate the s/w and h/w multiplexing multiple jobs on the same serial port.

I have a system made of 32 v5lx220 devices using the open source HDL.  These are nice because they're big enough to fit two cores with no hand optimisation.  I get about 250MH/s per fpga before the 1.2/1.5v power supply cuts out (these are reclaimed boards).

I also have a board with 4 V5LX155 on it - I haven't bothered with this board because I can only fit a single core - ie. 125MH/s without hand optimisation (which is beyond me).

To do something good with these board I think you'll need good FPGA skills.

*edit* also without a schematic it might be hard to get serial ports to the chips (or even jtag).

I, for one, am grateful there are people putting time and money into this design, thanks Terrahash!  A lot of us are depending on this design, a board re-roll will easily eat a week or two, the earlier the better!

24V backup power, weird.

I use http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0051PGX2I/ref=oh_details_o04_s01_i03?ie=UTF8&psc=1 for my miner.  Don't think I paid $28 for it but perhaps.

Perhaps take a look at coinbase, works well for me.

Looking at the pricing it seems the only testing optional will be with the fully assembled miner.  I find this odd because most manufacturers will test a PCB assembly before fitting all the heatsinks etc to reduce the cost of rework.  They'll also use a jig to test.  I guess the issue here is that this board is hard to test without a heatsink?  Perhaps two levels of testing can be offered, a sanity test (power, trace continuity etc but no mining) and a bake in test?   Perhaps we can write some code to just mine one share and shutdown the clocks, this could be ok without a heatsink?

The best way to do this would be to roll the whole thing yourself.  The circuit will be stable long before the chips arrive.  Get a set of boards made for $25 at iteadstudio, order all the parts from Mouser or Digikey and you have a kit.  Someone might even create a BOM at one of these two so you can order in just a few clicks.  It really isn't worth the hassle of assembling kits, the large online component sellers do a much better job for much less.

I don't think anyone is going to write instructions for assembly but perhaps I'm wrong.  If you can mount the ASICs yourself, the rest is a piece of cake.

*edit* I would do this except I don't want to screw up the mounting of the ASICs.  I'm planning on making some K1s by hand with my extra chips if they aren't used up.

Wow super cool update, your timing is impeccable.  I was just getting cold feet at the meteoric rise in difficulty.  I should know better.

I saw your verification and decided that was enough for me (you you could have been working together, I only bought 32 chips in batch 1, I can still feed my family if they go missing).

Since then I've been totally convinced steamboat is legit, I think he is thinking way too much about the tiny details to not go through with this.  I also agree that he has a lot more to gain by going through with this than scamming.

This is just the start, BFL seem to be releasing chips.  These Avalon chips are fairly primitive ASICs, there will be Avalon II perhaps in something 25nm, perhaps offering 200MH/s on a AA battery, who knows.  I think this is the start of an industry, these boards will be obsolete in a year but the experience and reputations gained producing them will be very valuable.

Are we sure these chips will come off on in one piece, they're going to have to get very hot to melt the solder with all that ground plane etc attached.

Me too and my difficulty issues are still with me.

The proxy is reporting difficulty 2 and slush is configured as 1 so my reward got halved again.  There is probably a way to make them double, this is a nasty bug.


18310   2013-06-01 02:41:35   0:52:58   7941437    3183    0.00970591   238975   25.10570000    91 confirmations left
18309   2013-06-01 01:48:37   5:15:09   49659498   32145   0.00320978   238964   25.05830000    80 confirmations left
18308   2013-05-31 20:33:28   1:42:52   16633401   13142   0.02089623   238930   25.00000000    46 confirmations left
18307   2013-05-31 18:50:36   0:18:57   3010041    2271    0.01868908   238919   25.26863000    35 confirmations left
18306   2013-05-31 18:31:39   2:17:49   21231848   17015   0.01871870   238916   25.31229000    32 confirmations left
18305   2013-05-31 16:13:50   0:45:01   7410765    5670    0.01910239   238901   25.26605000    17 confirmations left
18304   2013-05-31 15:28:49   3:24:52   34544624   24506   0.01934538   238894   25.04760000    10 confirmations left


back to BTCguild for a few days.

I use one of these visors for all my work now, I have a stereo microscope but I really just prefer these.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0015IN8J6/ref=biss_dp_t_asn