Has anyone managed to build their own version of the quad with the schematics available? I'm highly interested as I like to tinker with stuff and the best price I can find for the bare X150 is $85each.

Is anyone else worried that Avalon will not actually start shipping when they said they would? I'm starting to feel like a BFL customer with delay after delay after delay.

I'm just putting coin into this venture, so it's the designers to plan and execute the open source aspects of it.

We all internally agreed that the open way is where we want to go, but as burnin wrote above: he is working full-time on it and needs to find a way to open it but ensure that months of hard design work is not just taken over by free-riders.  We are discussing internally options to ensure compensation. In worst case, open sourcing will have to wait until the first x*1000 boards are sold - and now guess how long this would take

cant fix the fpga, its a bug in hardware ( according to xiangfu ). We are going to ditch the serial code and use direct usb. new drivers.  ckolivas and xiangfu are going to try and do that next week. That should let us work around the problem and make things much more fluid.

Yeah...umm...there is an issue with the FPGA controller board. I heard on the grapevine that they are working on a firmware workaround for it. Stay tuned to this thread.

Btw, what was your uptime before the lockup?

Well, allten is the OP and got the DIY idea rolling (after he already did the awesome BitSafe project).
........

1. I want to start a business on this to make profit by selling boards
2. My whole design was aimed to be open sourced from the start and i hope that got through in my messages.

My point on this is that if i do all Development in the open, a closed source competitor will likely profit greatly from my work and might beat me to the market.
At that point i lost time and money and will never see a penny for it.
I will happily share my insights and work on the Avalon with any developer that is
really working on an Opensource product and is going to contribute and share.
For all others i will release the sources with shipping of batch one.
Does that sound fair to you guys?  

This would be fantastic, except that Arduino probably can't handle gigs of hashes every second, it wasn't designed to handle calculations and high speed i/o.

There is no point in posting price figures since we have no clue if and when chips will be available.

As for the open source issue, I was not clear in explaining what my concern is. I'll try again.

Open source HW means everything is openly available for anyone to build the device from scratch. Arduino is a typical example, as are 3d-printers as a current hot topic. DIY with Arduino typically means you order a kit and solder it yourself to play with. The full blown open source approach is different: you take the design files (schematics), do your layout, create PCB, solder yourself or pay for assembly. The numbers I gave for EMS ramp up is what our company pays when we build new prototypes (also includes testing). It is Swiss based and therefore maybe too high, but bottom line is there are costs involved that are advantageous for the large scale producer.

With that in mind, there is one factor that makes Bitcoin mining devices unique: it imposes interdependencies between producers. Say you buy an Arduino kit, while your neighbor takes the open source design documents and ramps up mass-production to build 1000 Arduinos. You don't care, or maybe you are even happy if he can offer better retail prices. Now move over to the mining board. You buy one, while your neighbor ramps up mass-production. You won't be happy, since he reduces your mining income.

And that is exactly what will happen, driven by pure market logic - ending in mining centralization.

But this is all speculation until we have chips available, so better postpone it to the point we know it is doable.

I cashed out gradually.  One third at $71.  One third at $142.  And the rest at $236.  I cashed out because I thought the dollars were more valuable than the bitcoins.   The second sale finally made my business profitable (after two years).  The third sale is essentially a gift.  I'm using it to pay off my daughter's student loans.

I'm old and have several times in the past held assets past there bubble burst and ended up with a 90% loss.  I'm happy to have not done that again.

I would have sold much sooner than $236 but the price was going up too fast.  I have a real life and could not be watching my coins all the time.

yah.. business2business we sell ASIC to the scammers...   so i guess it is s2s

it would be good to scam them back

I just cashed out all my bitcoins.  I live in the United States and I'm going to pay taxes on them.  This is way easier than trying to hide the income.  I've been doing this for 2 years and paid taxes both years.  Because I run this as a business I get to deduct all my expenses.  So the tax hit is not as high as my personal tax rate.

I have relatives in jail and have seen how defending your self against prosecution can be very expensive.  Paying your taxes will probably give you the highest return.

I think we have enough info to set up a b2b website and take preorders from BFL, Dragon, Swedish miners, etc.

Going from $20 to $266 in 2 months is not sustainable. That draws in Wall-Street sharks and speculators who just want to do a quick FIAT profit. It's not possible to have no corrections in the prices goes x10 each 60 days, too many newborn millionaires willing to cash out their profits.

We need a very nice correction to double digits and then a reasonable and sustainable growth trends.

After yesterday i would think everyone is "thinking" about the value of btc! Both sellers and buyers in the btc community!

+1 Zefir...

Can't wait... none of us can. This is a super option hope we see this DIY ASIC happen. It would put a HUGE dent into BFL I think.

Could we raise money, kickstarter or indiegogo, then design and fab the ASIC chip? Something using older tech?

i dont think it will be open source

addressing your questions:

Im in for the groupbuy as well...

I wanted to ask if it will be possible to overclock the chip with the design. Currntly the avalons allow to change the clockrate.

Compared to the other (failed) ASIC vendors, there's only one thing BFL seems to be good at: refunds.

So the only logical choice for all BFL customers would be: Get a refund. At least that's working.