Not sure exactly what you mean by "fail the first test". Sticks that completely bomb out get tossed in a box to figure out later, sticks that don't run well enough to ship as stock get re-tested as seconds, and sticks that fail seconds testing get their chips stripped and replaced and run again.

I have not, because that's lame. The point of a cheap basic controller is you won't need a screen and keyboard.

People have suggested miners "need to be" something you plug in power and ethernet and it "just works", and that's all well and good if you like expensive proprietary parts that cost you like $200 to replace when they crap out. But I think that sucks, so I'm not going to do it, ever. The fewer proprietary parts, the better for everyone.

But in the interest of simplicity, I would like to have a basic option available for kit purchase. These are meant to be n00b miners, but they're also meant to be learning miners. I don't want something super easy because you don't learn anything when it's all just handed to you. So I figured a Pi with Minera would be handy, because you can run it headless and configure everything web if you want, or SSH in and play around with stuff like that if you want to learn a bit more. With, you know, off-the-shelf parts that are easy to replace when something craps out.

So plugging in a monitor would be an option, sure, but not really a good option for very many people. I want something with long-term stability in its most basic form. If there's a better option than Minera that still allows basic non-SSH cgminer configuration options (maybe something with fewer buttloads of massively unnecessary scripting all over the darn place; what does Avalon use? That's simple and effective) I'd probably go with that. But first I'll probably just try better hardware than a who-knows-how-old Pi with a probably-even-older SD card.

People seem to like the Pi3, so I'll fetch one of those for starters.

Also, no, overloading the USB port isn't happening. The pod draws on the order of 0.1mA from the USB port, just enough for the USB chip to know it's plugged into something.

So I've got some more 2Pac seconds available. Not a final count right now, but I'll get more tested over the weekend.

BTC's boom has driven up the cost of ASICs to ridiculous levels. My general sales price has gone up, and the minimum selling price for seconds will go up the same amount. The new minimum is $32.

We're going to change things up a bit. I am employing Laura, the recipient of donated funds, to handle customer communication for small orders of things. We're still ironing out the kinks so gonna start off small, just 2Pac Seconds for now.

So instead of messaging or emailing me, you'll be contacting her - email address Laura at Gekkoscience dot com

Be polite, and don't forget to let her know the essentials:
0) that you specifically want 2Pac Seconds
1) desired quantity
2) expected payment amount
3) preferred payment method (BTC or PayPal)
4) shipping address

I'll update the first post with these changes as well.

(this is a USB device you can plug into a common consumer computer running anything cgminer works on, but it also has a 5V USB power jack for running a small SBC controller like a Pi without needing anything extra)

Are those enabled in Minera by default? Do those cause a Pi to lock up entirely and stop responding on SSH?

The first thing I need to do is get a new Pi. Not really sure how old is the one I'm using. What's the one everybody likes right now? Version 3?

Oh no, it's much smaller than that. Fans are about 50mm. The whole thing is 100mm square. One of these days I'll post a quick sketch of dimensions with corner screw sizes and locations, height with fans, jack positions and the like.

Right now my little guy keeps dropping out, but it's because my Pi locks up. Not sure exactly why and there's a lot of info on here how to prevent that. It's not exactly a new unit and my SD card might be lousy. Gonna talk to Phil about a good reliable setup, he's pretty good at Pi stuff. If we (and the Minera guy) can figure out something decent I'll try and make a Pi controller a kit option.

7.5W sounds about right for 200MHz. 100MHz is more like 4W. In the absence of a frequency-setting command, the chips default to 200MHz. That's probably what happened - either cgminer didn't send the right speed command, or it got lost, or got screwed up.

"raise the voltage to 200MHz" makes no sense.

If you want to repeat having your sticks hash at 200MHz instead of 100MHz, you need to set the frequency to 200MHz in your cgminer command line, as described in the first post.

I'm gonna guess the stick somehow got lost and defaulted to 200MHz. If you want that speed again, just tell it to run 200MHz in your command line.

According to the charts, 250MHz optimal should run more like 10W.

Only way to resurrect is a power cycle. Unless you want to start modifying the hardware.

It's got the pinout and a decent description of what everything does. That's pretty much enough.

With the exception of liquid cooling, that sounds a lot like the specs I was thinking of for a rack miner around the middle of 2015. I've been slowly hammering on a project to make new boards that fit on an S1/S3/S5 chassis (practical limit of about 250W per board air-cooled) and was thinking about a rackable case design that could integrate about 8 of them, possibly with external PSUs. I'm looking at USB interconnectivity, which removes the need for a lot of proprietary control hardware.

Of course, with S1 formfactor boards that opens up C1 waterblocks for a liquid-cooling solution where you could fit about 16 of them in a case without a lot of custom work.

The 2Pac uses BM1384, which has an available datasheet. The designer *cough* might also have poked around an S5 board for an hour or two checking connections as a reference.

You're asking about S9 chips, for which there is no public datasheet. Big difference.

I know a good wallet will allow assembling transactions like that. Do all the popular online wallets support it, or is that function easily accessible?

Additionally, what happens when you aren't able to juggle multiple transactions into a single payload? What if you're only using BTC for something every couple days, or weeks, and don't have several spends that come up all at once?

Bitmain designed the chip for their own use. All the major miner manufacturers do.

As far as I know, Bitmain has never published schematics or layouts for their miners. The last chip I saw with a public datasheet was the S7's BM1385.

I certainly wouldn't mind a BM1387 datasheet, but have yet to see one in the wild.

http://kano.is/worker.php?a=1BURGERAXHH6Yi6LRybRJK7ybEm5m5HwTr_TerminusPI

250MHz, 110GH, 4.5 amps (54 watts DC). Hopefully it stays up for a while.


(world's worst photograph from world's cheapest camera, will do better soon)

The logic regarding who sets transaction fees may be flawed, but the idea that potential users will be turned away by the ridiculous fees is a good point. I donate to a missionary friend every month, and this month's transaction's fee (straight from Coinbase) added 8.5% of the total. It'd probably be even worse now.

If blocks are now allowed to be bigger, by whatever mechanism, why aren't they? Is it a user issue? Is it a pool issue? How many of the more popular online wallet services aren't compatible with whatever system allows for more transactions per block?

Also, miners don't set the price of coin. Maybe to some extent the large players generating fresh coins have a bit of say, but the vast majority of available bitcoins existed before this week's minting so that's not a big factor. Hype and speculation, and to an unfortunately lesser extent utility as a means of exchange for goods and services, carry the day. And if transaction fees (for whatever reason, with availability of transaction space within a block being the only logical factor at present) continue to burn a large percentage of "normal purchases" sized transactions, utility as a currency is greatly diminished.

Also Phil, looks like "13000 to 15000" for Jan 2018 no longer applies. I'm seeing about a 20% dive since last night, friggin' speculators.

I currently have one self-sufficient miner operating.

That means I've got a Pi (Minera with cgminer-vthoang compiled) powered off the Terminus aux USB jack, running cgminer for the Terminus itself. Only running 200MHz for 88GH, drawing 12V 3.6A so right around 0.5J/GH including the power to drive the Pi. I could turn down the voltage if I wanted, but eh.

If it keeps running well, that should be pretty much everything I need to know. I've already got an updated PCB layout and I'll be ordering a bunch of those later today.

And will probably make some with the existing layout and the jumper hack just a little bit so's we can get these in a few hands. VH will get one pretty much immediately so he can improve software support, specifically handling trip recovery.

Once we get to doling out full kits, I'll see about having an optional Pi with Minera and custom cgminer already installed.

And with that, BM1384 product development is pretty much officially closed. The next miner will use better and faster chips for, hopefully, a much more reasonable price efficiency.

And don't tell anyone I said so, but I'm going to look into compressing some of the onboard features to a future stickminer - trip recovery should greatly reduce "zombie" states, and if we can figure out communication maybe an onboard temp sensor will give readouts in cgminer?

So, looks like I may need to make a change to the board after all. Having trouble driving one of the lines I need to be able to toggle to force shutdown/reset on overtemp or string lockup. I have a clever workaround in mind that'd mean a slight PCB change, but for the ones I already have a bunch of it'd mostly mean about a one-inch jumper wire on top. If everything works as expected.

Should be testing on that this afternoon.

If it works, maybe I'll start making some of these.

White light means you've probably got a chip that shot craps.