Klintay here actually is the one who provided the datasheet for that hub chip. Thanks again.

It's not a bad idea to keep a stock of bricks. That option will make things easier for the customer.

I'm using a single high-current buck, but out in the field pretty much the entire top layer is power rail to keep trace resistance down. The buck is also set to 5.1V to help compensate for loading. The hub has a 2x4 grid of ports, not 8 in a single row, so there's a lot less issue with voltage drop down a long narrow line. Long narrow hubs are bad for stickminers for a variety of reasons, mostly involving stability, ease of cooling and comfortable current handling.

No big white G, but it would have the CGOL-style logo as seen above. More likely it's a GigaMPZ board.

I see an email from 2/28 from you, but it's for DPS2000 breakout boards which have 12x terminal pairs. My first prototype HPCS boards were being tested on hosted S7 in December 2015 and didn't see manufacture until early 2016.

I do not. I've got Compacs, 2Pacs and decent collection of older sticks - NanoFury 2, NF6, Red Fury, Yellowjacket and the like, some U1 and U2, some Avalon Nano and them ones with a Greedseed chip. Those are all on the museum shelf. I haven't bought quantity of stickminers to actually mine with since USB Block Erupters were "cutting-edge" and most of those got hacked and sold ages ago.

I didn't start making a common-slot breakout until 2015. The PCB has gone through three revisions: one with 4x 4-position terminals and 10x PCIe (Novak's first prototype) and two with 4x 4-postion terminals and 12x PCIe (Novak's production version and a revision). I built a DPS2000 breakout with 4x 6-position terminals and that's the only thing that didn't have either 2x (Dell 750W) or 4x (DPS800/HPCS) 4-position terminals. The only thing I was making in mid-2014 was the Dell 750W board. We tested DPS2000 prototypes in July but didn't start batching until later in the year.

All my breakout boards are also the same width as the PSUs they connect to. No way to match a 3.5" supply with 18 terminals in a row unless they're crappy and small, and I don't use crappy small terminals.

Check your breakout again. I bet it doesn't say GekkoScience.

8 powered ports is comfortable for the amount of power going through the regulator. It also allows me to use the comfortable and affordable FE2.1 7-port USB hub chip that's in both the hub I use for bench testing all sticks and the Eyeboot 49-port that I'm using for burn-in testing. I believe it's a good chip because that bench test hub has been abused since I first started jacking with USB Block Erupters back around June 2013. It's also a good number of ports to keep track of with a microcontroller that'll need three different IO lines per port, without needing a humorously big chip or port multiplexers. Everyone's gonna want something different, and I do have to pay attention to what people want, but at the end of the day I make the decisions about what I design with my time and budget and the 7+1 powered hub is what I want to make. If it works well enough I might look into a bigger one, with the added complexities that will require. But for now the description and feature set I've given are exactly what it'll be.

Running a Pi off the power port is a good idea. That allows you to feed the Pi without having to remove a stick. I really only added the 8th port for symmetry in a 2x4 port configuration because I like two short rows more than one long row, but I think it'll end up being well worth it to have an extra port there just for power.

For anyone wondering, the internal 5V and upstream-USB 5V are not connected. The upstream 5V is only used for bus detection on the controller chip; nothing draws current from it at all. So there won't be any backfeed issues.

Also, I was really hoping to have this PCB layout done tonight but it's not looking likely. I've got all ports with meter and switching, and the whole power section, and the main limit switch and the per-port knob, but I haven't even started figuring out what micro pins will perform what functions, or even what ISP requirements will be. So I probably won't finish it until tomorrow. Oh well, no big loss but it would have been pretty sweet to say the whole thing was done over a weekend.

The HP common slot board can be made with 12x PCIe jacks or four 4-position screw terminas, two per rail, so only 8 pairs - probably just a typo. With a 1500W PSU you could actually drive 12 hubs at full power. That'd be like 3TH of 2Pacs. Or 11TH of the Bitfury stick.

The thing about doing that is, every add-on "unit" would have a hub controller chip, regulator, current sensors, the works. It'd be internally an entire hub, except with a proprietary upstream connector, which makes it less useful than just a hub. To get more lanes, just buy more hubs and cable them together. USB is already modular.

No need to assume, all of that's been stated repeatedly. There will definitely be a barrel jack and PCIe, hence why I have a switch on there for the user to let the hub know how much power is available - 60W, 96W, 120+W for 5A brick, 8A brick, or high-current PCIe respectively.

I'd like to make one that'd run off 20+ volt so a laptop brick could be used for full power at barrel currents, but that'd require a substantial redesign of the regulator. Maybe someday. Before that happens I'd probably build this guy a big brother like a 20-port that takes in power from 2x PCIe and quite possibly a couple screw terminals. In a bigger hub there'd be more room for options like that.

8 ports, seven with data and one power-only which can be used for a fan. I'll probably build it fairly open like the Eyeboot 49-port, where it's got a top and bottom panel but no solid sides so innards can get some airflow. The regulator circuit will need to push at most 24A, and I've already tested the circuit I'll be using to higher current draw than that. So yeah you should be able to run a high-power miner from each port. Oh yeah and each port has a big bypass capacitor to help out with load transients.

Not sure yet. Somewhere between free and a million dollars.

Actually I haven't put a lot of thought into pricing yet. I did put a lot of thought into design, which is how I'm going from "literally nothing down on paper" to ordering prototypes in only two days or so. Once I have it all drawn up and I have an actual parts list I'll run out an estimated price. What would y'all pay for a hub with those features?

Regarding the on-board power meter feature, it doesn't have a display to read out power use or anything. It'll read total power draw and trip out if it exceeds the source threshold it's given. It'll read the per-port power draw and trip any port that exceeds the user-set threshold. I'm planning on doing the port indicator LED in stoplight fashion - green for something plugged in and working, amber at 90% threshold power, and red when the port has tripped.

Gonna be sending out for some PCBs early next week. I just put most of today on USB hub design; got the general layout, the hub controller, port LEDs and switches and meters wired in. Tomorrow I'll tackle the sensor controller layout and slot in the main 5V buck. I'll be using basically same buck circuit I laid out for the pod miner so that should mostly be copy-paste. I should be able to get it all ironed out tomorrow for ordering on Monday. So that's interesting.

I also heard back from one of my bulk BM1384 sources, as well as a few individuals. If everything works out I'll have enough chips to finish out the current batch of 2Pacs and get a bit of a start on the next batch, but there's always room for more.

Also I'll be taking a day or two next week to build a batch of my DPS812 PSU breakout boards, if anyone's in need of a good PSU kit for an S9 or anything I can hook you up.

If you're worried about noise, try to find an S7-LN and then volt-mod it down to 2TH/440W. They run pretty quiet and it'd be more efficient than anything else you can buy under 1KW.

I am currently shipping a USB miner that runs 11GH/3.6W at stock and can pretty easily be pushed to 33GH/14W if you have a good hub and cooling. Price $30 apiece, flat $10 shipping within the US.
The next thing will be a better USB miner that should see more like 20GH/2.5W pushed to 120GH/15W, and a ~550GH/60W (up to 700GH/100W) pod miner and refit boards for S1/S3/S5 chassis to make them 4TH home-scale miners.

They're worth a bit more as the whole thing, because the mechanics can be used for upgrade boards in future. Right now all I really need is the chips, so if I had just PCBs would be fine. Also a lot cheaper to ship. If I do make upgrade boards (and I really do hate that I still have to say "if", but I prefer honesty to optimism) the cores can be traded in.

So, updates.

The Biggie project is currently on hold. Most of the people I was leaning on to source S5 boards are not responding so chip supply is not what I'd hoped.  Couple that with all the problems I'm having with sticking ASICs reliably on 2Pacs and the Biggie is going to cause more headaches than it's probably worth.

There will be a second batch of 2Pacs. I'm gonna go right into it once the current batch is completed because I already have the toolchain in place and the process is getting much smoother already.

Not burning time on Biggies will help lead into the Bitfury stick. I'll be using 2Pac profits to pay for Bitfury chips if at all possible. Once the Bitfury stick works, it's not much additional effort to make a Bitfury pod work. I really want to move some pods, and sidelining the Biggie will get Bitfury pods in the timeline that much faster.

Since I'll be moving a lot of sticks first, both 2Pacs and Bitfury sticks, I'm also working on a USB hub (project "Aardwolf"). Here's the plan at present: 8 ports, seven active and one power only (fan maybe?). Takes in 12V through either a barrel or PCIe jack. There'll be a 3-position selector switch for 60W, 96W and 120+W input power, so if you're using a 12V5A brick, 12V8A brick, or high-current PCIe there'll be a safety limit how much power the hub will draw before kicking out. There'll also be a knob for adjusting available per-port output current between 0.5A and 3A. There'll be an internal monitor on each port and when a port exceeds the limit it'll be turned off (and the status LED will go red). A global reset button will re-enable all ports with one press. That's the plan so far anyway.

Also, I could really use some S5 boards. See the note above about some of the folks I was planning around being bulk chip sources disappearing on me. Like the guy I'd been coordinating with since November with about 3k chips, who hasn't responded in over a month. So yeah, S5 boards. I could use a couple thousand chips in the next month or so.

Sorry, I'll get to it. All the manual 2Pac work is really kicking my butt but I'm trying to juggle. I picked up a lot of the minion's slack in the last week (I did at least half the assembly and testing) to get the first big-queue order out (I shipped 238 2Pacs today, got about 60 left to ship out but I ran out of boxes) but that won't be the case from here on. That'll invariably mean a slower pace of output but also mean I'll have more time for dev instead of manufacture - gotta polish the BW sticks, assemble a couple prototypes (Biggie, BFPac), do some BFPac firmware work and design a stout USB hub.

Regarding shares, I'm not okay with that idea in any way. Buying shares tends to mean you're buying the right to make decisions without putting in any real work, and that sucks. It also tends to shift priorities away from satisfying/not screwing over the customer in an attempt to satisfy shareholders. I really prefer to limit my debts as much as possible.

Thanks for mentioning the 2PacLoan address. It hasn't been used yet by anyone, but that's okay.

Actually, I tend to blow people off who stroke my ego because they tend to be yes-men and I prefer men of action. Speaking of action, I took Sunday off because I worked 80 hours in the 7 days prior getting 300 2Pacs out the door.
I also appreciate correctness and don't like to operate on assumption. Correctness states nobody has ever put money into BF sticks, but assumption would have me understand you actually meant BW sticks - a mistake I'm getting tired of correcting. BW sticks are assembled, but they require both hardware testing and some driver work from VH and it's not like I haven't been busy lately.

No, it's pretty much a factory order part. $7 apiece is quite a bit more than I typically spent but then we bought several hundred at a time.

For a big order like that I can give a pretty good discount. Message me if you want to talk details.

If they were S5 that'd be alright, but not S5+. Friggin' individual heatsinks.