We will be trying to catch on the emails this weekend going maybe into Monday/Tuesday so do bear with us. Unseen by all outside of Enterpoint things are happening on the preorder build and we know more every day of how it will pan out on the time lines.

Other that the current preorder on CM1 no formal news as yet on what we will do with CM2/3/4. We are currently in the middle of what is an important major launch of an important non-bitcoin product and everyone here is involved.  Hence everything else, including email response, is on slow turn whilst kick this new product into life.

We will be trying to catch up this weekend on the preorder deposits and other enquiries so we will try and get back to everyone so do bear with us whilst we catch up.

We don't have a formal repair/replacement program as such. Outside of Bitcoin boards and something very similar I can count the number that have come back to us in one hand and that is in 10 years of making boards and hence we never had a reason to make a formal process. So anything that comes back will go into our normal rework process which is very queued at the moment. There are non-urgent things in that queue that have been there 3-6 months.

We will charge for any repairs outside of warranty but what we can do in a situation like this is have a 2 minute evaluation that we would not charge for. Carriage would be your only cost for that. Out of a 2 minute lookover we can usually tell if it is going to be a long expensive debug/repair (probably a write off board) or a short cheap one. As anyone can do the lookover we can usually do these 2 minute lookovers within 1-2 weeks of getting a board back so if you want to send back the board we will do that.

One comment is that you obviously had a short on the fan connector and have you checked that the board fuse isn't just blown. The grot on the board may cause you problems as well but cleaning can be done but only with the right materials/equipment. Outside of that there are nummerous possibilities so I would only be guessing. 

Short update. We have sent out emails with timing and asking for deposits to those who were on tne list before we put it on hold. Once we have the response to that sorted out we will at opening the preorder again. There was the odd bounce back from full mails boxes so do check them.

We are over-busy this week launching a new product into manufacture and before you ask it isn't for bitcoin. Consequently there is a large stack of emails to catch up on and that will take a few days to catch up on these. So we are not ignoring you it just a question of hours in the day. Having just done 24hr working day I won't be doing too much more today.   

There are a few possibilities and none will be as good as some of our other products with better memory interfaces. There is also a question of how much memory is actually required. I have seen a wide range of numbers from people in this forum so that is something to established.

Possibility1

CM1 contains logic only and works with a host processor that has software and memory. Bandwidth of USB will be a major limit.

Possibility2

1,2, or 3 FPGAs on CM1 are used as memory. We get about 700KB per FPGA when used as memory.

Possibility3

The up/down interface is used to support a custom memory board. There are 18 wires available to make this connection which are never going to compete with a direct DDR3 interface but the add-on board could be a very large memory size. 100GB would be possible but maybe not cheap.

Outside of these possibilites there are further hybrids of these ideas e.g. use one FPGA as a cache with larger memory as add on board.

Bear in mind the original Litecoin point was made in a different tread in the context of people thinking ASIC would kill CM1 Bitcoin mining profitability and this was something else to do with these boards it is never going to be the best solution possible. Almost any FPGA board will have Litecoin capability but not necessarily huge performance.

If you want Litecoin miner we probably already have better boards already in the product range for this purpose although prices may scare you as they never priced/designed for this market. They just happen to be possible better fits to the requirement. So far all of this conjecture. Most people have looked at what software does to do this processing and there may be entirely better ways in a FPGA than just converting a software function into FPGA hardware functions. Such radical thinking actually needs to be done by someone who knows FPGAs very well and probably software pretty well too so it is not going to be a simple or quick task to do this sort of analysis/design quickly. I am not going to promise any timelines but it is one task we are hoping to get some time on. However our design team are very loaded in the 2-3 month span and probably no way that will happen here in the short term.

We are going to temporarily close the preorder tomorrow as we are getting close to maximum numbers we can handle short term. Depending on deposit collection it may re-open in a few days. Anyone on the pre-order should get an indication of possible delivery in the next few days as we work through and confirm orders so do check you spam boxes just in case that email ends up in there.

Ok time for an update.

We are collating the pre-orders and will start to allocate boards tomorrow. We have already got some FPGAs in but the process of ensuring that we have enough FPGAs for the potential orders is still ongoing. However we can now start to contact some of you to confirm the pre-order, delivery, and take your deposits and that will start tomorrow. It is going to take us at least a few days to get through the entire list of people wanting boards and that is partially dependent on our FPGA deliveries being confirmed as well. So do have some patience whilst we work through all of this.

First to say I don't think we ever promised a timeline on doing a Litecoin implementation to run on CM1 so no one should base decisions on that. We think it is possible but that is a long way from a stating an actual performance level. At the worst case memory could be accessed vis USB or up/down connections but these may not be good enough for decent Litecoin mining performance and work needs to be done on that to understand the engineering requirement. We probably won't look at Litecoin oursleves for 2-3 months based on our existing design commitments.

Anyway the purpose of this tread is inform interested parties on our progress of make CM1 available to all that want it for whatever reason not to deviate into sidelines. There are other threads for that. We are making progress on working out what we can do in the 2-6 week target timeframe and response to the large number of emails we have to deal with will come. Please be patient on this front as more effort is going into getting the answers than answering emails.

I am watching this thread with interest and we are planning to try and do something for LTC with Cairnsmore1. However the team here is under a lot of pressure and it is going to happen soon so I would welcome someone else doing it for obvious reasons.

I will also mention that one of our plans is to consider doing a memory add-on card for CM1 if that was needed to improve performance or even just to enable the function. This would use the up/down interface which does have performance limitations but better than nothing if memory size is the issue. So if someone does get that far do talk to us about what they think is need and practical and we will do what we can to support it.

People actually said this 9 months ago and many people didn't buy a CM1 for that reason. Anyone that did has made a nice profit. Obviously the game has changed a lot with exchange rates going up a lot and you can speculate if that rise will contine or even collapse. At the moment we are just responding to demand. If people want CM1 we will try and make them.

Different resources is the answer and CM2 is still only a development project at the moment. CM1 we can build quickly and all the infrastructure to support a build is available now. Also CM3 at the moment is our next preferred potential customer release at the moment and CM2 may stay as it is merely a development platform. There is a lot of work to be done before we could ship anything and the design team are already already extremely loaded with more important things in April, May and maybe June. So promising CM2/3 deliveries in the short term isn't going to happen. If we happen to find some time and resources well yes it might come quicker but unlike others we won't promise it until we are sure.

I will also say that he ASIC competitors already launched, with public pricing, look like they may have initially set pricing too low on ASIC products and will probably increase prices to stay in business assuming they last that long of course. There are obviously some technical issues as well to be resolved. Based on that and a few other things our prediction is the network will probably stay in the 100-500 TH/s range this year and in that range we believe for most customers CM1 will remain profitable for some time to come. This board also has the capability to do Litecoin and some customers are looking at that. With the very high Bitcoin value currently it is very likely that Litecoin will be needed to fill in the gaps at lower value transactions. We need the Bitcoin equivalent of the silver coins and pennies and Bitcoin doesn't look at it will have the capability on it's own. 

Yes it quad FPGA fitted. We have dropped single and dual version options some time ago as basically we had no demand. USB lead comes with unit and bitstreams are loaded so you should just need to plug in and configure your choice of mining software.

Pillars and power jumpers and other accessories are only needed generally if you are using multiple boards.

Just to say to everyone asking that we won't have any answers on delivery until at least tomorrow and maybe later in the week if we are unlucky. Like many places it is a public holiday today. Many people also take the entire week as holiday so getting answers may be slower as a result of that.

We will look at our market strategy in a weeks or so when we have some more data on CM2. No promises on what we will offer as yet.

Can I remind everone that if you want pre-orders email on preorder2 AT enterpoint.co.uk. We are getting emails on other addresses and also PMs are likely to get missed if we are not careful here.

Grade-a which what we are talking about is 760-880 MH/s. There may also be grade-b boards after we have built the batch and we would expect 10% of boards to come out as grade-b based on previous experience. We will adjust the build numbers to account for that so that we get enough grade-a.

For Cairnsmore2 see other thread but generally we are using that as a testbed. It may or not appear as a product and we have not decided that yet. Given the huge build schedules we already have for other products in April and May it is unlikely to be available before July even if we do decide to launch it as a product.

Cost base has not changed for this and if anything it is more expensive for us to make as we are looking at a batch that is a tiny fraction of the size of the first built.

Can you direct this to preorder email account so that the team see it. We will need a full address to calculate carriage.

We are asking for a deposit on this batch of GBP £200 / USD 320€ / 240€ per unit ordered.

Preorder is now closed. Currently (11th June) we have some stock available for immediate sale.


With a background that we sold more or less every CM1 in stock we are looking at building a reasonable amount more of these with a short lead time - 2-6 weeks delivery. We already have stock of long lead time items like heatsinks which allow us up to build 375 boards. The only thing we are short of for these numbers are the actual FPGAs. We do have some FPGAs already in stock and some more on order already but would have to acquire more for larger quantities of orders. We are talking to our suppliers to see what we can acquire of these to suit these timelines and that may be the limit of what we can build.

So if you are interested in getting CM1 boards within the next 6 weeks you need to sign to our preorder. Customers that we are already talking with will get a place at the head of the queue if they tell us want to do this under the financial terms below.

As the market is very changeable we are going to do this differently to the last pre-order. The first major difference is that we will ask for a deposit of 1/3 of the single unit price (before tax) - GBP £200 / USD $320 / 240€. This will be non-refundable unless we fail to meet your promised delivery and is to cover costs we will have in starting you order. The promise date will be given before you give us the deposit and we will start to sort these out next week after the public holidays we have here today and Monday.

We will accept Bitcoins for part or all of a purchase. The actual sale will be actually in one of our supported currencies GBP, USD or Euros and in any refund situation the refund will be in one of these currencies at the nominal value shown on your invoice. The acceptance of Bitcoins is a service that we will offer our customers on this understanding that the actual sale is in those supported currencies. We will immediately covert Bitcoins received into a flat currency of our choice and this is because all of our costs are in one of supported flat currencies.

The Bitcoin rate offered will be at our sole discretion and will be only for the day that a coin transfer takes place. So if you get a number one day you can't use that on another day. You must ask again on the day you give us coins. Our coin rate will be based low to average price at MTgox but we will add approximately 15% to cover short term shift risk and conversion costs.

We won't offer credit or debit card payments due to problems with very small numbers of customers doing chargebacks having received goods. Sorry but we don't weant the admin and losses of chargebacks.

We will offer PayPal but only to customers with fully eligible seller cover. So if you have not done all the security things they want do them now if you want to use this payment mechanism. We will also surcharge PayPal payments by 4% which is our PayPal cost to process money. This is not a profit centre for us merely covering actuial costs and to put bank transfers on a level playing field financially.

For our Euro customers our bank account works with 80-90% of SEPA transfers. There are obviously some banks looking looking for an excuse not to offer SEPA.

Pricing will be as the table on http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/cairnsmore/cairnsmore1.html. Euro pricing is 1.2X GBP. EU countries there will be VAT at 20% on top of these prices unless you are a VAT registered company and we can verify your registration.

Ok so if you want to go ahead on a pre-order send us an email on preorder2 AT enterpoint.co.uk. Response should come next week once we know more on FPGA delivery.