If can image the sdcard and send a copy to me so

I can run it on a rasp pi.  I would copy sdcards for rasp pi's. offering a sdcard /hub/stick package for a new buyer may be a good selling idea.

A real plug and play for the masses.

Fuck quotes, can I murder your soul?

Why it would be fucked up?

Bitmain just let me know they're checking stock on chips, so hopefully they have enough that we can move forward on the build. Novak's talking to a new US-based proto-etch place we'd like to have run out the next Compac PCB, but in the meantime I reckon I'll be working on getting the last batch assembled and modified, if only to have something to play with. That and all the other stuff Novak and I have to do will be keeping us pretty busy.

Did you know that I caught Jesus fucking my daughter after he mowed my lawn?

It's walking on water? Does that mean it's Jesus?

Shouldn't we be focusing more on where it is going rather than it's type?

Not a bad nine-hour day today. Actually, no it was a pretty lousy nine-hour day today. End of yesterday I had three working sticks. End of today I have four working sticks. I started building five and got two of them going, but my original stick decided to throw power issues when I plugged it back in at the end of the day. The three other non-working sticks are also giving power issues. Probably nothing too substantial, maybe pull and reseat the buck driver. I wasted a lot of time with pulled chips; I think the whole board I started pulling from must be dead because not a single stick lit up with those chips but they started behaving a lot better when I pulled chips off a previously tested (mostly) functional S5 board. One of the primary problems I was seeing (besides "whoops there's no Vcore power) is UART stuff, and after the ASIC itself one of the most finicky chips is this stupid little SC70 level shifter that's never really worked right and it's really hard to put on proper and the thing's just stupid and I hate it. But the good news is that won't be on the next version of the PCB because after learning a bit more about chip functions and such, I figured out I can actually replace that part with a couple passives and some clever wiring and it's cheaper and better and also way less annoying. The last stick I got working today was giving me worse fits than usual with this part, so I chucked it and deadbugged the new circuit onto the board and it's currently hashing away right now.

Maybe tomorrow I'll diagnose the problems with the power on the other sticks and get some more working. I need to have a few to show off, you understand. And maybe one for Novak to gank so he can work on the code.

Sample heatsinks are on the way which I'll use on the next-rev PCBs. They're not the right color but should be mechanically as-designed so I'll need to test fit those and make sure they're right when they come in next week.

I also need to figure out what's the holdup compiling cgminer on my workbench machine. The OS has never worked satisfactorily and I need to reload the thing anyway, but right now I'm stuck testing with a dodgy XP laptop that doesn't like more than one stick at a time running without errors. So y'all biscuitheads will have to wait for the latest and greatest in stickminer orgy porn until I can get some more heatsinks worked up and shift my test hub over to something that'll support five or six sticks at once. Which actually won't be that hard since the test hub already has a molex wired onto it and the fileserver has cgminer running with one of our two-chip test setups so I'll probably just use that. On another day. Right now it's about time to pass out.

Would you like me for liking it?

When I have a final manufacturable design that's independently proven to work as advertised, and when I have secured a chip source. Not before both of those conditions are met.

don't you feel ashamed by making such tower of quotes?

Do what now?

Oh yes you are not wrong Mane whpo is your sponsor on there? You been playing for ages like

If it was BGA I wouldn't be messing with it. The QFN is bad enough by itself. I wish this chip had a larger cross-section of pad at the edge, which would make checking solder jobs better because it'd wrap around a bit. I think the most problem I have right now is being able to stick the chips down reliably. The alignment is difficult because there's basically zero reference for when it's in place (and it has to be correct within a quarter millimeter on two axes) and I can't trust floatation because if there's enough solder on the belly pad to float into place the pins might not get soldered, and if I press it down to connect those the belly solder could bulge out and short across to anything, including the corner Vcore pads and short out basically anything.

I've succeeded in getting two of four sticks hashing unstably and unreliably but I have seen submitted shares. I can't say for sure what the issue is that gets the chip working haphazardly at about 10% capacity, because the breakout boards were pretty much all-or-nothing. Could be signal integrity issues, I really don't know but I hope that's not the case because if it's a result of PCB layout we got problems. The signal traces are between ground planes - at least they should be if the etch fab didn't get layers out of order.

Anyway, here's a sneak peek at the sticks.



Got ya a fully populated boar with heatsink temporarily attached. The final heatsinks will probably be that dimension but anodized green. Note that about 2/3 of the visible area is the bigass regulator, complete with external FETs and 360uF of output capacitance for handling about 20A of low-volt DC. The adjustment pot is in the bottom corner.



Here's some crap plugged into my jankety powered hub. The crapstack in the back you might recognize as a 1384 breakout board on the test regulator and running off one of Novak's USB adapters. The thing in the foreground is literally everything I just said except on one board quite a bit smaller. You might note a lot of flux crust and such around the ASIC. That's because I've pulled the thing, restuck the thing, wicked pads, pushed it around and whatever probably close to a dozen times. Ain't fun when every piece of the circuit seems to work just fine except for the core. Let's think of it as "in a vegetative state".

Well I casshed out a few but still have plenty to play with  Saving some for the new majic egg machine it sounds like a whole lotta fun

Alright, who is the funny guy who keeps deleting his posts to keep us on page 400?

Is there an avatar depicting doning vs. doing?

Compac PCB prototypes were ordered today, only about 1.5 hours behind schedule but a fair amount of that was because I spent the extra time designing a new BM1384 breakout board on which I can more effectively test parallel and string configurations. This coming week I'll be working on beefy regulator design which will end up going on the TypeZero (and probably other things that are way behind schedule), and once the new boards come in and Compacs are tested, I'll start Amita testing with the new breakout board. Hopefully there's no trouble and I can get the Amita design completed soon.

There will be no bulk discounts for the Compac. The price is the price. If you want to middleman and resell on eBay, I reckon that's fine but your inventory cost will be the same as anyone else's. I need to go back over pricing with the new design and get a bead on the actual costs so I can reevaluate the sale price, but hopefully $20 is still within reason. The Amita will have the same regulator as the Compac (I need only change two parts, I think, to get the higher voltage range out of it for a two-chip string), and then a second chip, second heatsink, 40mm more PCB and probably another dollar in support components so if the Compac sells for $20 hopefully the Amita can sell for $30.

So, question. Assuming we can get, say, 1000 chips from Bitmain, how do we want to divide them up? We could do 600x Compac and 200x Amita, or 700x Compac and 150x Amita, or something like that. Where's demand? How should we apportion things? Additionally, if Compacs cost approaching $20 to make, making 600 of them means about a $12K investment to run out the full batch. How much of this should we try to out-of-pocket, and how much should we try to gather - and by what means - before ordering materials for the batch? So basically, should we attempt a pre-order to pay for parts and get everything done in one go, or should we build as resources allow and only sell in-hand miners (at reduced and somewhat drawn-out quantities)?

Not one satoshi will be requested until after prototypes of the final design are dispersed and thoroughly tested by trusted members of the community. Do not trust anyone claiming to represent me if he acts in contradiction to this policy.

You mean 4/20?

How do you go up, how do you go down, how do you go forward or backward?
How can you live with only those 2 directions?