The Bitfury stick is in active development right now. It should in theory get about 30GH from stock USB 2.5W up to 130GH off 15W or so (with cooling), putting it on par for efficiency with the current top-of-the-line gear from any manufacturer. The efficiency may match, but not the cost per hashrate, due to all the support components necessary for any miner. The support parts don't really change much whether the thing has one chip or ten, so a larger miner (more of a fraction of whose cost is the chips themselves) will always beat a USB miner on cost efficiency.

I am working on larger miners using Bitfury chips as well though, whose performance and cost will be noticeably superior to the USB stick. With my gear you also get the benefit of undervolting, which can greatly increase the viable lifetime of the miner by increasing system efficiency and which no major manufacturer has implemented in two or three generations because planned obsolescence pads their bottom line.

But yeah, it's basically impossible to profit with a USB stick miner. They're lottery tickets or low-investment tools to learn the basics of mining without making a lot of noise and heat.

Shares are what you're sending to the pool. It's the result of the hashing calculation. The diff you get from the pool is a share value threshold below which cgminer doesn't bother to send that share to the pool. This keeps down traffic, since if a pool accepted every value-1 share bandwidth requirements would be through the roof with modern high-hashrate miners. Your returned shares could have a value in the millions or billions; this is statistically unlikely but it does happen on occasion. The more hashrate you have, the more likely you are to return higher shares, so the higher the pool's discard threshold gets. Every share is weighted by that threshold and summed up (that's the "A" field in cgminer's display, means Accepted), and that's what is used to determine your mining payout because it's a representation of how much work you're doing. Shares are all weighted by that diff value but every individual share could have a different value (which is reported in cgminer when a share is accepted). The only share that actually matters is the one over network difficulty, which is the one that makes a block. The rest are just used to divvy up the block payout to everyone in the pool.

So "shares" is the total number of shares you've submitted, "bestshare" would be the highest-value share you submitted in the current round (?) and bestever would be the highest-value share ever submitted under your mining account. They're not really used for any payout calculations or anything (except total shares, indirectly), but some people like to know that info.

-o is the pool, -u is the username, -p is the password. Most pools don't require a specific password but it's there just in case, so most people just use something generic like "x" or "123". Some pools use the password field to pass in additional parameters for multi-coin or leasing rigs and whatnot.

Since most pools expect you to run a multi-terahash miner but these guys are, at best, about 40GH, the initial diff threshold the pool gives will be ridiculously too high - a lot of them now start at 4000 or so. --suggest-diff tells the pool to start at a lower number so it can more quickly and accurately gauge the actual mining speed of your sticks.

Check the 2Pac sales thread for address anything.

The bitshopper sticks I'm working on now, I went with a pretty cheap board house because it's such a small batch. The silkscreen registration on them is terrible, pushing a millimeter off on both axes. Bitmain is known for maximizing profits, they probably opted for the lowest bidder who may not care so much.

Wait, what work did I do that did anything for an S7 board? Only S7 work I did was PIC firmware for volt setting.

No, because he specifically said "bitshopper Compac", not black 2Pac.

VH do you have a bitshopper Compac config? I've got one I can plug in if you want to read it.

The seconds black sticks got bench-test configs, which means the default Gekkoscience product string and an arbitrary serial number. MacEntyre had a bitshopper-specific config he used on his sticks and I'll be using it on the bitshopper proper batch. It's what gets flashed into the CP2102.

It's possible VH's driver doesn't recognize the bitshopper product string. Reckon we'll need to get that fixed here directly since I'm working on bitshopper 2Pacs right now.

I should know better than to expect much from a guy in his twelfth semester for one degree. In the same time I got two engineering, one science and almost a couple nontechnical minors. Half my senior design class had never even used a soldering iron. After two months this guy is just almost worth the $8 an hour I'm paying him. Almost.

NotFuzzyWarm, I would love to hang out in your shop for a while and just absorb. Wish I could afford to employ an old salt who knew his business but y'all always want stuff like pensions and insurance and right now I'm just trying to keep the lights on.

Kinda figured that would be the way of it. If you're in need, I have a board here that was working up until it fell off a shelf and busted some chips off, so the remaining 40 or so are probably good. I hot-air'd the chipside heatsinks off but there's still that bastard black epoxy to deal with.

I sent out a call for help and he's the only one that responded so I didn't have much choice. Yesterday's problem was he forgot to clean solderballs (coming through vias from the ASICs on the backside) off the PCBs before stenciling, so the stencil was raised off the board and paste came through incredibly gloopy. Lucky he didn't tear up the stencil any more than he already has. Unlucky that he did six of them and noticed the crap job but didn't try to figure out what was causing it. His inability or unwillingness to think through things is the biggest disappointment, especially for someone two months from graduating with an Engineering degree.

I prototyped a BM1385 Compac last year but between not knowing if the chip was any good, not having a decent driver and not really wanting to work with epoxied-on 0.4mm pitch parts it was readily abandoned.

A lot of the register and protocol info was gleaned from BM1385 datasheet, so a lot of it should work right off. If I remember right from kernel logs there's some differences in chip detection polling. Why, you thinking of rigging up a USB adapter to drive board sections for faster troubleshooting?

Don't talk to me about tombstone. About a third of the lost time I've had with 2Pac manufacture was fixing tombstoned or dry-pad 0603 parts because the minion took an unreasonably long time to figure out how to paste properly or keep the pick-and-place calibrated. And then sometimes forgot how to do things right. Yesterday's average across six panels was about 8% of the total small parts that needed manual fixing once it came out of the oven. Pretty sorry for a production line. I'll be happy if I never see another tombstone, but hey at least they're not 0402. I refuse to work with parts that small.

S7 chip, but yeah. That is an impressive price, given they wanted $2.50 for BM1384 at quantity 100k. I guess they must have a reel of old stock laying around.

Well heck, that almost makes it too easy.

Well the S3 was both very quiet and very reliable, something that people seem to have forgotten how to do since then. So why not roll back to the best design?

Using the command-line flags given in the first post.

Wow. I've never seen that before. I've seen zero, one and two but never more than the right number.

I see, that makes sense. Hopefully VH sees that and does something about it.

Might turn the voltage up a bit on the 2Pac or something. I don't know if it's a work restart thing or a power imbalance thing but sometimes they'll kick out. The only way to bring it back up is to cycle the ASICs' reset pin, which for most people means unplug/replug because there's no software control of the reset line.

As for why it kills cgminer, that I don't know.

Do the precompiled downloadable Windows executables provided in the first post and referenced in the Windows post not work on your system?

Why are you using a USB scope to look for 1572? It's something you look for with your eyes. It's written on top of the chip. Without a board in front of me I have no idea what the silkscreen label is, but I do know it's the 8-pin SOIC device with PIC12F1572 written on it. Which is all information you had.

But anyways, first thing you need to do is measure the voltage at the place you've been told to measure the voltage (I'm pretty sure there are even clearly labeled pictures in the potentiometer fix thread). If it's not in the range you've been told to look for to see if the PIC is dead, you don't need to worry about all the other information you were given because it's not the fix you need - which is also information you were given.

Sorry if my criticality comes across as dickish. I'm well aware I tend to expect more out of people than they're used to and am frequently disappointed, but I don't intend to change. It either makes people leave me alone or work to be better, which in the long run are both winning outcomes.