Yeah well, I was hoping to have a lot of things by now.

I'll be starting procurement for a second batch of 2Pacs by rolling the profits from this batch forward into materials for the next one so I can pretty much shift seamlessly from one to the next. That's the kind of momentum I wish I'd been able to have with the Compac last year.

I'm looking at buying a new Pick and Place machine, something that'll automate parts placement a lot more efficiently and accurately than the one I have now. Something that'll hold precision a lot better, so the boards coming out of it will require a lot less rework afterward. That's going to be a huge step in being able to manufacture more complex miners quickly - like the Biggie. As soon as I have time I'll work up a prototype, but for now ASICs have to be hand-placed to get them right enough to be reliable. Even on the 2Pacs. But I'm eyeballing a robot with a vision system for proper centering and ball screw carriers for precision, which should help out a lot. The second batch of 2Pacs should put me over the top of buying it, or at least come close. Gonna have another batch of PSU boards to help it out.

Hopefully the Biggie prototype works without a lot of issue. If it does I'll look into batching; it'll require juggling back and forth between Biggie and 2Pac (heh) for a while. Gonna need multiple buttloads of ASICs.

Oh also and I'm pulling out an old USB hub design project. Figured out a better way to do a thing or three I thought would be cool features.

There's something like 60 orders after yours.

Because of the extra work required for bitshopper sticks (extra processing time because they're not panelized, stuff like that) I'm gonna ship every small order I can out of standing inventory after the next big order is met. It'll probably be close to 100 sticks instead of the 65 or so due. This'll mean about 3/4 of the small queue will have been met, and more than half the total sticks ordered (when bitshoppers ship).

I've worked out a solution to one of the more common issues (not solder or placement related) I've been seeing at the testbench, so that's good news also.

Chalk up another 3 for Canada. I think that makes 23 right now.

I stock Belden wire, but that one looks like the same specs.

Thanks for telling me. I usually don't find out about holidays until I go to the post office and they're closed. Well that's okay, I guess that many more orders will go out if I have an extra day to assemble and test. After the big order of 200 I'll owe about 65 sticks to the small queue before shifting to bitshoppers. At this week's pace there shouldn't be any trouble doing that if I put in at least one day this weekend.

I buy through a local electrical supply outfit. Good to support local economy, I don't mind paying a bit more because of that, and sometimes I get advice on things from the guys working there. It was nice to get a second opinion on things when I was figuring out the 400A 3ph service upgrade at the shop to expand hosting a while back.

I've got enough wire on hand for about 1100 cables of my standard 18" length, but for 24" a restock is necessary.

I was also lucky last summer to find a 30-odd year old crimp press in need of maintenance about 100 miles away. Picked it up, rebuilt the clutch and a new drive belt, bought some used tooling and have probably run 50,000 pins through it since then. Compared to hand crimping, it feels like cheating. Now if only I could find a good way to do sheathing. People keep asking for sheathed cables but putting on sheath without the ends fraying, and heatshrinking both ends, takes every bit twice as long as all the other assembly steps combined.

The first big order of 200 will be going out Monday, as well as several more small orders Monday or Tuesday. Depends on what gets done over the weekend and on Monday.

These have sold so well, and manufacture is getting smoother, that I have decided to run out a second batch. As it is, we're within about 20 of the batch cutoff anyway. This will postpone Biggie pods of course, but that's okay I was behind schedule on them anyway. Until I can work out some manufacture issues (the biggest problem I'm still having with 2Pac preparation is reliability of solder joints on ASICs; the percentage requiring rework is still too high) I won't okay that board for manufacture anyway.

Next week will start assembly of MacEntyre's bitshopper sticks. I'll get all the small orders I can out of the way with the green domestic sticks before jumping on that batch, but when it's done and shipped I'll be about halfway done with delivery. Compared to the original Compac manufacture schedule we're flat rolling. Course I have put in 70 hours in the last 6 days, but work's gotta get done. It should start getting smoother from here on out.

The DPS1200 can be pushed to 12.8V; might sag under load but it's a start.

This is another reason why unregulated string miners are a bad idea.

I don't know any cable manufacturers in Europe. I've shipped to Europe before.

A press is a machine for crimping pins. Pins come on a reel, put the wire in the right place and hit the pedal and it crimps the pin and advances to the next one on the reel. Not a small investment but definitely speeds things up. If I had enough wire on hand I could make your cables in 3 days.

Where are you located? I custom manufacture 6-pin PCIe cables using 16AWG wire (and other things - splitters, extenders, 8-pin/6+2 pin, 4-pin Molex etc with 16 and 18AWG) if you want to PM me for a bid. I'm in the US.

If you're talking about a cable with 6-pin on both ends you're looking at 12 pins per cable so 12,000 pins. Unless you buy a press, if you're just using hand crimpers that'll take weeks. Before I had a pin press I could reliably expect about 500 cables in a 40-hour week if your hand didn't cramp up and fall off first. That's if you have wire already cut and stripped; this takes much longer than pinning to do by hand.

"found 0 chips" usually means the buck tripped out. There's a RC circuit on there to try and buffer the buck chip against ripple currents from the main switching transistors but it's not foolproof. The buck resets if the input goes below 4V.

You were the second order paid, order shipped out Friday.

Leo, your sticks shipped yesterday. btckess is in the next batch of small orders.

Yours was the first paid order and shipped Friday.

Honestly I might end up having to make more of these, they're selling so fast. I gave the minion some pointers and tried a new process today that, between the two things, solve a lot of assembly problems and pretty much double the speed I can get sticks finished from the bench. If I can get it to where chips go down with near 100% reliability will be really good for Biggies. Part of the issue is paste wetting, and a lot of that is using the tail end of an old jar of paste. The new process with new paste should be pretty good.

I'm also going to dust off my beefy USB hub project. Klintay shot me some info I was having a hard time finding which should help out, and last week I came up with some ideas to simplify things while still getting the features I wanted. So that's fun. Nothing's even on paper yet, got other priorities, but it'll get there.

The link a few posts up is to a fairly extensive directory of hosting providers, with prices and reviews and such.

Sure would be handy if we had a hub thread for this kind of thing, instead of the sales thread.

Yours are going out today.

I came in over the weekend and got a bunch more sticks tested. Also tested out a new assembly procedure that should pick up the overall pace, which is definitely a good thing.

Anyways I have to go by the post office today anyway so I'm shipping out the next small orders. This makes the first 8 small orders, total of 47 sticks, shipped by day's end. The next 200 will be stashed for the first large order. By end of next week I should have that first large order done and be tearing into the next however many small orders. I'll have to retool for bitshopper sticks before long, so that'll slow up the domestic-order pace a bit.

The only miner I've paid up-front for (not counting a handful of USB BEs) was an ASICMiner Blade about August 2013. Everything since then was paid for with mining revenues or related handiwork - repairs and upgrades. I can't say all individual miners turned a profit, but mining as a whole was profitable for me until I started putting everything into buying museum stuff instead of viable gear. The only thing I've been openly burned on was a pair of BlackArrow X1 ordered from Minersource, traded up to a pair of Technobit HEX4M boards, which have yet to be delivered or refunded. Not like that's a perfect trifecta of ripoff artists or anything...

I never bought into BitFury gear back in the day, it was always way too expensive. Even before I had industrial power rates at the shop and was mining residential, my rate was below 9 cents so extreme efficiency wasn't really worth it to me - plus I kinda started with about $300. I have some boxes of Bitfury stuff on the museum shelf right now, bought a few HexFury USB miners to compare with my Compacs, got some OneString boards still new in packaging, but that's about it.