My single got the new bitstream, but doesn't seem to be going any faster. I dunno if cgminer has an indicator for the number of times it has throttled, but it is currently at 826/803 5s/avg speed. The test went through without a hitch, but it sure isn't going at 860+ mhash/s.

Not to claim I'm a professional user, but I'm a Linux only one. Any chance to also get the FW-upload command sequence documented?

Would be great not to have a spare Windows machine available just to update the Single's firmware. Or would that work from within a VM?

Did BFL answer this or am I just blind?

When do you expect the different speed firmware to become available for download?

Do the speed changes done by Easyminer shown here:  http://www.butterflylabs.com/drivers/ "stick"? In other words, can I use Easyminer to change the speed of the device and then go back to cgminer and run at that speed? 

Inaba has a reputation for being abusive and abrasive in these forums. I have no desire to being forced to mine on his pool. (He's called me stupid before just for voicing my opinions).

When i download the EasyMIner i get virus a warning from Aviar   

If they had I'm sure there'd be a thread from BFL here stating they have a new feature available along with some CAD drawings or something 

Could you then add a "wait for end of work" command (with an optional timeout) that could be used alternatively to asking "are we there yet" repeatedly ?

What I mean is that: if I see a temp (ZLX) of 49C is that the same number tested by the throttling firmware that decides to throttle the BFL?
So whatever the first throttling temperate is inside a BFL (when it first drops below 832MH/s), I should see (ZLX) close to that "throttling temperature" just before it decides to throttle?

My unit normally shows 52-62C. The absolute highest I have seen myself was 62C. I am not sure it is throttling. The LED never blinks. The grating on the side shows 69.4F. The only thing that makes me think something is wrong is a 24 hour average under speed. I have stared at the LED for more then an hour at a time. Would the throttling be short enough that if I blink I would miss it? It flashes the 2 internal LED's every about 10 seconds. The single rearward LED stay lit. The front only blinks on start up. I will move the unit to a location that I can check the lower heatsink tomorrow. I have already pushed both pins down to check their seating but both are fully down. Unless I missed some clips it is properly held down.

Thank You for the suggestions. I will post more when I know more.

Whatever you do, try to avoid having the host poll the BFL device like crazy, try to be somewhat asynchronous if you can.

As you may know, the BFL single, while being a great mining asset, cannot be used efficiently with P2Pool. The reason for this is that P2Pool has a share time of 10 seconds, on average, and the BFL single scans a whole 2^32 nonce range before reporting results. This means it constantly ends up doing stale work. Scanning a whole nonce range on a BFL single takes about 5 seconds.

Here are the firmware modifications that would be required to use BFL singles on P2Pool:

• Add a new "ZDX"-like command that accepts a nonce range to scan, this would add communication overhead, but would allow the mining software to control the maximum work change latency. This would work pretty much like the cgminer -I "intensity" to control the work batch size. This would also allow splitting a single getwork across multiple devices. While not perfect in isolation, this modification should be simple enough and would make mining on P2Pool at least possible.
• Make the new "do work" command abort and replace the current work. This would lower the reaction time to a longpoll significantly. Somewhat harder to implement than the previous change, but should still feasible with the current hardware (taking a guess here).
• Once a nonce that hashes to an acceptable value, report the finding to the host immediately instead of waiting for the end of the work batch. This change is much harder than the others, since it requires modifying the hashing inner-loop and would break the current protocol. This would reduce stales significantly.

I would greatly appreciate if someone from BFL can ring in on this and tell us if it is at all possible.

These changes would preferably only require a firmware change, but I don't know if this is possible as the BFL hardware is a black box (pun intended).

Any and all comments welcome.

So will a linuxcoin or bamt run on a ras pi(or does it need to be ported for arm arch.) and then we can run the mini rig off that?  Is BFL going to release their own os for this including easy miner? This sounds awesome but i am curious.

I really don't know if the singles will ever be 'In stock'. 


BFL what kind of power supply will this use?  Can it be located in the chassis?  It doesn't look like it, probably external. 

So nobody in the EU has ordered anything yet from you ?

Or are you doing a sort of group EU buy / export without taxes ?

Thanks !

Has ANYONE in the UK received their unit ?

Anybody in the EU ?

What are the costs of import.

BFL, any news on that plan of yours to avoid duty for EU customers ?

Thank you !

If 'time is of the essence' as you seem to suggest, you would be better off going down the street and buying up a whackload of GPUs (setting up a few mining rigs takes a week) rather than waiting 2, 3, 4 months for a BFL product. That 2,3,4 months of time can be earning you BTC, and the GPUs will break even sooner than a delayed Single or Rig/Mini if you start the clock now. Different story long-term, but if you are concerned with maximizing your profit before December than GPUs may be the best way of achieving that.

I have a different theory: when the reward is halved, I agree that it will have little impact on the BTC exchange rate. Most of that is buoyed by speculation, and speculators don't care (and/or are oblivious) about block reward or mining profitability. But miners are not; marginal miners (stealing DeathAndTaxes's terminology here) will become non-profitable and will stop mining. What we will see is not a BTC price increase, but rather a significant reduction in difficulty over the 2 or 3 months following the reward drop. Not a 50% reduction, but significant nonetheless. Marginal miners (those with inefficient GPU setups and/or high electricity costs) will be forced out, leaving the high-efficiency GPU miners and the FPGA crowd.

OK I'll risk joining this discussion before it turns into a brawl... I was one of the northern Europe customers who ordered a Wicked Lasers Arctic when they announced them. Now Wicked Lasers are rather good at marketing, and the hype was great. The emails reached the right people, the right forums went viral, etc. and WL stood looking at a monstrous number of orders - a hell of a lot of them from the USA.

Of course, the original product was, IIRC, illegal in the USA for virtually any contrived reason. It looked like a light sabre toy but put out 1W of laser light - it was weapons grade and shipping with a nice set of goggles wasn't going to cut it. So a complete design respin was required to follow US weapons regs (which, for lasers, were being thought up on the fly). On top of that, the original production process (rip the diodes out of projectors and rebuild into fancy cases) wasn't scalable to the necessary level and the source of diodes wasn't enough.

Product didn't ship, customers got angry, WL themselves lost control of their own order management system (I received three Arctics for some reason - and yes, I offered to pay in full for all unexpected, unordered product). But product eventually shipped. I still have an Arctic and it works well. Product quality didn't disintegrate (at least in my tiny sample).

The difference with BFL is that time risk isn't a matter of 'I WANT MY PONY!' - this isn't a puerile desire to have the latest cool kit before everyone else has. If BFL were the only players in the market for orders-of-magnitude-superior-to-GPUs mining kit, then everyone would be in the same boat (apart from those leet enough to design their own bitstreams and commission their own FPGA big-boxes). But they're not. And there's a time limit before the block reward halves, and we don't have an historical analogue of *this* event (re: money supply singularity) so we can't easily predict how the BTC economy will respond to it, whether by raising BTC/xxx FX rates or wiping out mining capacity.

So most miners are looking to ensure their investments pay off *before* this event. And I'll admit I've got a dog in this fight, as I'm an FPGA miner too, but not in the USA so not a BFL customer. So call me biased, I don't mind. I like their 'plug and play' approach, but you can be sure that I'm hoping they take their time as *long* as possible to 'get the product right' After all, if anyone with a few tens of thousands of dollars and a decent electrical supply can buy a box, plug it in and become a 'player' in the mining world, it removes the current technical barrier to entry, which is the only advantage people in high-power-cost locations (like both of mine) have right now. Mass mining centralisation to a few players with free power and unlimited capital is *not* good for the Bitcoin economy.


(and I would normally say, 'BFL - get an EU distributor for your products FFS', and then be polite and say 'please'... but it very much sounds like they're far too overstretched as it is to accept MORE customers and orders. This is a USA thing, and I desperately hope they don't revisit the Wicked Lasers scenario and get quagmired by US customs / export regs - after all, IIRC, the US is touchy about cryptographic equipment being exported without limitations and full disclosure... and will BFL tell the government *exactly* how it works if they're not telling us?)