And my own USB stud hub. Not 19 ports and not with a built-in PSU though, this one Phil's looking at is pretty slick.

It's a good thing I don't actually have a personal life.

Pick a lane, dude.

Because it costs me about the same to ship 40 to Valkir as it does to ship 1 to you, so you save money. Because I don't like paperwork and if I only have to fill out 1 customs form instead of a dozen it makes me a lot happier and when I'm happy you get timelier service. And for those reasons, because if you're from Canada and you try to buy from me I'll tell you to talk to valkir anyway.

Oh hey guess what, there's an entire thread discussing hubs for these sticks.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1779423.0

Oh by the way, every small-queue order placed before I started telling people their order would go on the second batch has been shipped. So if you bought 2Pacs more than a week or two ago and you haven't received them by the middle of next week, get in touch with me and we'll figure out what's up.

Let it be known, every order placed now will go on the second batch.

You want some more SP20s? I've got some gathering dust.

Anything with USB that can run cgminer. Minimum specs to keep up with the workload are of course TBD.

Would it be possible to shift discussion back to more pod-specific considerations? The S1 refit project has been discussed and documented up the butt for right around two years and very little that isn't chip-specific has changed in that time so the answer to almost every possible question can be found in at least three other places.

As has been mentioned repeatedly over the last couple years, there will be no proprietary controller required. If everything works as planned we'll be running USB to the boards so just about anything with USB will do. Since S1, S3 and S5 all use different controllers that's the best way to support all 3.

If you have a question with the 2Pac, look for answers in the 2Pac thread. It's also got power charts that tell you how much current you'd expect to draw at various frequencies. 1A is nowhere near sufficient for 200MHz.

The pod has identical heatsinks above and below. The top one will mate directly onto the chips, the bottom will have a thermal pad between itself and the PCB to avoid shorting local ground planes (like jumping heatsinks on an S7).

I'll put up mechanical specs on the heatsinks and screw positions at some point so y'all can start playing. The entire bottom side of the PCB is empty except where through-hole components (jacks and whatnot) protrude as necessary, but the topside clearance is pretty specific. The heatsink is 1.813 inches (1 13/16) wide and there's at most 1/8 inch clearance between the heatsink edge and parts you really don't want the heatsink to touch.

As for prepay, I'd really rather you didn't. If the current prototype were up to par I'd say go for it, but since I've had to redesign (and new proto PCBs have been ordered) I won't take any money until the design is proven. The general size, shape and jack placement won't change though so you can start planning around that if you want.

By the way, the hacked-up prototype is now running 300MHz/132GH. In the morning another one will be in the mail to VH so he can improve driver support locally.

Thanks everyone who bought 2Pacs and provided miscellaneous support because that's what's allowed the current pace of product development. Just think what it'd been like if I had VH code and today's resources back in 2015.

From the first post:


As for the rest - no. Terminus R808 needs more work as stated previously; BF16 anything is dependent on solving problems and that can't be predicted. Best I can say is, "as soon as VH and I possibly can".

Here's a breakdown of my "product families":

Compac - USB stick miner, basic control system
Terminus - half-scale basic pod, same basic control system
Amita - full-scale pod, advanced control system
TypeZero - S1/3/5 refit board, same advanced control system

BM1384 Compac and 2Pac are a thing, Terminus is about to be a thing. I don't plan on making anything bigger with BM1384. I should have one of each product made with Bitfury chips, and development will progress from smaller to larger scale since each step builds on the progress from the previous step. The Amita will be the feature-rich pod, with software voltage setting and daisychain power and all the trimmings.

Not sure exactly what you're asking for. If you want the PCB layout, no because I make and sell these things for a living and I'm not giving that away. If you want a 3D mechanical something-or-other, I don't have that. I'm very pencil-and-paper. I can tell you it's a four-inch-square 1/16" thick slab.

Oh, in that case yeah I and several others have done that. Phil posted a thread a while back about hub options for 2Pacs, and I think someone in there linked to a thread AJRGale (maybe?) did about rebuilding a hub for stick miners.

I wasn't sure if you meant rebuilt an existing hub, or built a new hub from scratch. I've done the one and am working on doing the other, but wasn't sure how to answer your question accurately.

First off, I just said I'd make one with 16nm chips. Second, spamming me isn't going to get anything done any faster. I have the chips, just we're not yet able to make them work. It doesn't help that the guy doing the hardware and the guy doing the software are two time zones apart. As soon as we figure out the last bits to talking to the chips we'll be in business. But since I've been working on designing and redesigning this pod, and manufacturing over a thousand 2Pacs, and doing everything else around here, I'm a shade behind on ironing out the remaining kinks for Bitfury communication. But believe me, once that hurdle is leapt we'll be in business. THEN we can work on getting Bitfury's attention, which shouldn't be much of a problem since they've sworn up and down I'll be able to buy chips.

There isn't a lot of room for mounting holes. You can't really see it from the picture but the board's fairly busy. Maybe we can do something clever with stick-on rubber feet?

For anyone wondering, this is a half-scale pod kept intentionally simple. The fancy stuff like fan throttling and software voltage and six-pin jacks and screwholes for legs or cases or whatever are all gonna be there on the big one. So don't ask if such-and-such feature is gonna be on this, because it isn't.

Do you see one in the picture?

Unfortunately you're right, too wide to fit two. If you cut a slice in the side of the case such that you could slide it in with the heatsinked side inside and the connector side sticking out, you could put two in there back-to-back (mirrored, more or less, with one hanging out the left and one hanging out the right side) and still use the fans. But you couldn't just put two whole pods in there.

Of course it has blinky lights! Who do you think I am, a guy who doesn't put blinky lights on miners? Pfft.
But yes, the power LED is blue and there's a white flash when it returns a share. I didn't use the same RGB LED as on the Compacs because it's apparently not balanced, everyone sees the flash as a different color (some white, some blue, some purple) so this just uses a blue LED and white LEDs.

When you say "build" what exactly do you mean?

Straight from me, I'm thinking $65. Resellers will get volume discounts as my way of saying thanks for handling all the customers I don't want to spend time on.

There'll also be the option to trade S5 parts, like I had set up in hopes of the Biggie pod. There'll be no Biggie pod, but there will be this guy. The Amita full-size pod line, for which the Biggie would have been a form-factor flagship and the Bitfury version will have 11 chips, is still planned but won't see the light of day until Bitfury chips cooperate.

I changed my original design a bit because the ability to run 100GH passively cooled was specifically requested; this enlarged the topside heatsink and added the bottom sink. The original plan was to have the heatsink topside only and smaller with a mounted 50mm fan. As it is, a fan will be optional. My test unit has a single about 60mm CPU cooler fan and only the topside heatsink and it's comfortable at top speed (300MHz). The board does have a fan header (12V only, no throttling) but it's not populated on the one photographed, guess I forgot.

The core voltage is intended to allow up to 300MHz stable, which should about max out a 60W brick. I could build it to push more power if you had a higher-current brick, but above about 300MHz the BM1384's efficiency curve gets pretty steep so your heat per additional hash gets crazy - note the difference from 100 to 140GH is already almost doubling the power use.

I probably won't sell directly on eBay. I really don't like dealing with people, I like designing and building and not being bothered. I'll sell on here where people tend to be more intelligent and articulate than the average internet hooligan and let CrazyGuy, HolyScott, MacEntyre and their colleagues take on the grumbling masses.

Also, I intend to keep this formfactor around. If we can ever get Bitfury stuff working, there'll be a 6-chip Bitfury Terminus R606. It'll be orange.