Not like I can dev fast enough to cramp their sales anyway. If I had the go-ahead for chips right now, I might be prototyping a refit by Christmas. The primary focus is the 2- and 11-chip things, since the control set will be pretty much the same for all 3 and the refit will basically be three 11-chips on a single board I really need to make that work first.

I just sent this message to punin at Bitfury. Hopefully it gets his attention; the last 4 emails got no response. He's my only point of contact, so if anyone knows someone else I maybe should be talking to as well I wouldn't mind hearing about it.

--------------------------------------------

Punin,

In order to help raise money for initial funding of a Bitfury-based miner
project, and as an indicator of the community's readiness to have more
miner options, I'm working on a 2-chip USB stick miner and a 15-chip "pod"
miner using outdated BM1384 ASICs. These two miners will meet the same
market sector as two of the miners I'm designing around Bitfury chips.

I've just started talking about it in the last few days, and already have
a customer list totalling over 200 units of the USB stick; it looks like a
lot of people would rather buy the pod, as nothing on that order of
magnitude (for power consumption or noise level) has been offered in about
three ASIC generations. People are lining up for these products, in part
because they are the only things available in a niche market and in part
because they know the profits will be put toward the design and
manufacture of better miners using your ASICs.

Think about how good sales would be for the same product with three times
the performance? That's what I want to bring to market, and that's what
I'm working on.

If I build a 2-chip USB miner with Bitfury chips and it sells the same
quantity as my BM1384 Compac (which, 14 months after the initial batch,
are still in demand and being produced) would take 7000 ASICs. If I make
half as many pod miners (and I've already had requests to license the
design once it's ready) is 20,000 ASICs. And I've already had interest in
my S5 refit boards (which I know others are making, but I will integrate
desirable features others overlook) to the tune of another 12,000 ASICs -
and that's without advertising.

In the last two weeks I've had 0.66BTC donated from half a dozen sources
just to help with development expenses.

I very much appreciate that you sent me sample chips and datasheets. I
very much appreciate the shows of good faith that you've put forward so
far, especially claims to support community endeavors and
decentralization.

However, I'm stuck in limbo right now. I am unwilling to take in customer
money on an unproven product, especially one I don't know I can
manufacture in bulk. I can either continue to devote my limited resources
to a project with zero indication of a future, or I can put them into
something which, while not as good, has a known chance of bearing fruit.

I really want, and the community really wants, to see a variety of good
miners built with your chips. I really want to bring that to them. If I
can do what I'm trying to do, the result would be tens of thousands,
possibly hundreds of thousands of ASICs in additional sales and a buttload
of positive PR for you.

I would really appreciate, and the community would really appreciate, some
word back about whether you're willing to make good on the offer to sell
me some chips. Just that confirmation right there is enough to re-ignite
quite a bit of support for my project and, ultimately, your sales and
public image.

So, please let me know what's up.

Thanks.

Matt Hercules
'sidehack'
GekkoScience

Well it looks like there are a couple other outfits already building Bitfury-based S5 miners, but from what I've seen none of them are as good as what I want to build. Now that's just my opinion, but there are features I really like to see on a miner which most everyone has ignored for the last couple years. I do kinda like that Novak and I started talking about S-series refits and bucked strings just almost two years ago and now both are becoming standard things, too bad we didn't have any money to build 'em then.

I wonder what would get Bitfury's attention? Community petition or something?

I don't know about anyone else, but that's getting a little old. This here is the bitcoin mining hardware board, not the "everything else" mining hardware board. If we wanted anything else we'd be over there.

GPUs don't get you bitcoins, they get you something else.

And yes I know you can trade that something else for bitcoins, but by doing so you're promoting the something else at least as much as you are bitcoin. And if you don't want to promote something else, you just mine bitcoins directly - with, get this, Bitcoin Mining Hardware - and a better variety of those is what we want.

Oh. Well I'm in a holding pattern with Bitfury (and by that I mean I've got concepts and layouts and some proto PCBs on the way, and asked them about bulk sales and additional samples three or four times but haven't heard a word back since the end of September) so to help raise money to keep the lights on and get some dev funding for Bitfury projects if they'd ever get back to me I'm working on a couple quick-and-dirty BM1384 ideas - a 2-chip Compac and a 15-chip pod.

The 2-chip Compac should see 22GH around 7W, and the 15-chip pod would see about 165GH off 60W. A 2-chip Bitfury should be more like 70GH at 7W and an 11-chip pod would see about 500GH off 60W. But until I can get some dev funding for prototypes, and more sample chips so I can build more than one of everything, those are gonna have to wait.

In short - the conversation shifted from Bitfury projects to holdover projects while I'm waiting for Bitfury to wake up and make good on everything they've said about chip sales.

I wouldn't mind getting at least $350 out of the miner and PSU.

I'll update with proper specs and conditions, but for now let's start with a list. Gonna do some housecleaning. I'm pretty sure the two rack SP units are one 30 and one 31 but I'll verify that before promising anything.

I have for sale:

1x Avalon6 with RPi controller
1x Antminer S4
1x Spondoolies SP30
1x Spondoolies SP31
6x Spondoolies SP20

1x Bitmain APW3 PSU
100x Dell 750W server PSU (no boards or cables, just the supplies)
4x Dell 750W server PSU with 4x 18" PCIe (hard-soldered) and on/off jumper
4x DPS1200 PSU
3x DPS800 PSU
5x DPS812 breakout boards for above PSUs (12x PCIe jacks)
30x Riser Power boards with cables (provides 5V/12V Molex power for GPU risers from 12V PCIe)

11x 120mm PFC1212DE fans (PWM lime snipped; Prisma pulls)
12x 140mm 0.45A fan (look new, intended for AMV2 blade rigs)
12x Antminer S5 I/O board
5x Antminer S5 Beaglebone
12x Dell monitor-mount speaker bars of various styles

30x Avalon A3218 ASICs (pulls)
30x Bitmain BM1385 ASICs (pulls)
100x 0.47uH >30A inductors (pulls)

Got projects to fund and some of this stuff is just taking up space. Make offers.

Sent out a quote for 2pac and pod heatsinks today.

Just finished 2pac layout. Of course it'll need to be gone back over to verify everything before sending off for prototypes. I've got an idea how I want to lay out the 15-pod but that'll be another day. I'll probably start on it sometime and finish it up during forced downtime over Thanksgiving.

Now all I need is a go-ahead from vh about the driver. Setting up a testbench will be trivial. Prototyping probably won't; I've got all the parts in enough quantity to build a few, but even cheap proto PCBs is like a hundred bucks.

Next couple days will be mostly burning through a manufacture backlog so probably not a lot of dev news. Unless Bitfury calls me up or something, which would be pretty cool.

Posted a sales thread with a bunch of miners and miner-related stuff and miner-unrelated stuff from around the shop if anyone's interested. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1684735.0

Yeah, and pretty much the last miner with adjustable core voltage. S4 is easily my favorite rack-case miner.

Yeah well, almost literally every time I offered advice the guy did the exact opposite - which included actually paying for miners he intended to purchase.

I had an S4 here running for a year or so with zero trouble; the only one with issues was one that I was told had issues when it came in. Actually, that might have been yours. Heated my apartment last winter. I was also given an S4+ that didn't work because the owner got tired of jacking with it, but after a complete disassembly and reassembly it worked just fine for me for a year or so. But I've built PSUs for about 20 of them for a data center because the stock ones kept blowing up.

I was consulting for a guy around when the S4+ came out, and I advised him not to buy them because they were overpriced and under-efficient, and I doubted the reliability. So the guy went and bought about 35 of them. Within a month or so half a dozen of them were down for repairs.

I believe the S5+ was three modules of 3 boards but I could be wrong.

S4+ I don't think had anything to do with S5 release. It came about four months after the S5, had a worse efficiency because it still used BM1382, and had a worse $/GH than S5 because Bitmain is greedy. The S4+ has four boards, each with I believe a 3x17 unregulated string for 204 chips total. Stock clock 200MHz, hashrate 2570GH at about 0.6J/GH

I'll need to scrounge one up for the museum someday.

My favorite monitor I've ever run was a 20" CRT I got for $5 used, that would run 2048x1536 and I could crank it down to about 16" diagonal. Widescreen doesn't annoy me because it's too wide, it annoys me because it's not tall enough. 1440 or 1536 vertical would be really nice. I do like that a lot of monitors now are running high density; it's about time someone realized 96ppi sucks noodles.  My 9-year-old laptop has a 15.4" 1920x1200 and it's great. The computer I'm using right now has three screens, custom-made 1920x1200 17" LCDs, which is a perfect fit for my desk setup and enough pixel space to be efficient, and it cost me $200 in parts two years ago; it's a project I'd pondered since 2009. Affordable consumer tech is finally catching up.

A pair of about 30-inch 3480x2400 would be nice, but I'd have to modify my desk's overhead shelf height to hold 'em. Not that that's difficult, just annoying.

It would probably be less stable and harder to design for, and also use a heck of a lot more node-level support and data components and PCB space. Basically, it's worse enough that I didn't even consider doing it.

Comparing the top-clock efficiency of this pod to an S5 is comparing an S5 to an S5, since it's basically the same setpoint (800mV). Please also note that I specifically said it would only achieve that hashrate with modification to cooling and risks blowing up the regulator. I will probably never run one that fast.

At stock, you'd be seeing S5 hashrate at 400W. At bottom clock, you'd get it from 320W. And that's assuming your brick efficiency kinda sucks. Bottom clock is almost on par with 135-chip S7.

And yes, the efficiency is not impressive because the chips are two generations old. If I could do better, I'd be doing better. In fact, this whole thread is specifically about all the effort being put into trying to do better. If you want something better, it's way more constructive to try and help than to whine about what's common knowledge.

(sorry, that was rude. I'm kinda grumpy right now.)

Does anyone actually make a 3840x2400? Besides the 15-year-old IBM T221, I mean. 16x9 kinda sucks.

I'd probably build the pod with barrel jack and 6-pin. I mean I definitely will do barrel jack, and because it can be pushed past the 60W typical for bricks (12V5A is incredibly common) the 6-pin would be handy. Also since, as someone mentioned, a customer could run one or more pods off 12V ATX and use 5V for a Pi controller.

If you want more performance or features, you're gonna need to wait for the Bitfury gear. Or someone find out how to work Avalon6 chips, or convince BW to sell. Honestly BW chips are no harder to work with than BM1384, except the pads are flippin' tiny.

So what do we think? $30 for the stick and $75 for the pod be more better?

Adding more performance (GH, especially J/GH) is going to mean more chips which means more support components and probably more PCB area. Adding more features mostly takes more time and complexity. As this is a fundraiser to help bolster support for a project which will likely prove to be fairly time-consuming because of its complexity, I'd rather keep it fairly functionally simple. Thinking about stuff like the U3 and New R-Box, neither of those had adjustable voltage or fans so we're technically ahead of the curve already.

Probably wouldn't be as bright, and likely a different color, but I was planning on using the same flash-on-share system as on the Compac. As fast as they strobe at 20GH, imagine the blinking at 165GH!

Even the new Bitfury stuff with a microcontroller, I've set up provision for a blinking LED and planned on coding it to flash on share. As you said, it's good to know they are working. That flashing LED is really handy during bulk testing to identify the one stick in a block of 25 that has dropped out.

Thinking about it, I should put on an adjustable fan drive circuit good for 2/3-wire fans (that pulse the power line). I can base it off the PWM driver setup on the new Dell 750W boards (much improved fan speed control) and will add about a buck fifty in parts. On the Bitfury pod down the line, fan speed will be integrated into software.

I likely will also put a thermal shutoff on there that disables the core buck if it sees over 80C (or somewhere safe; maybe 90C if I'm taking a more direct-at-chips reading) and resets after cooldown. It'll be a hardware thermostat, no user changing. The Bitfury will have temp sensing and, if it's done in the driver, user-implementable cutoff setpoints.

Also - just sent off for heatsink bids for both sticks and pods. I'll design the BM gear to take the same heatsinks as the corresponding BF gear so I can use 'em for testing and to save tooling costs. How handy is that? The 2-chip Compac heatsink is the same size as the old one, but drilled differently to mount up a longer PCB with two ASICs.

Bottom clock, let's say 150MHz 3.2V (minimum stable voltage for chips)
Let's call top clock 325MHz 4.0V (safe current limit of the buck, may require buck heatsink)

That puts us in a range from 120GH/32W up to 270GH/110W at the chips. Adding fan, buck and PSU losses say 20%.

Final estimate 120GH/40W to 270GH/140W

Please note that to achieve that top-end setting will undoubtedly require modification to heatsinking and possibly input power jacks. Likely I'll stick with a "stock" setting of 200MHz 3.4V for 165GH/60W or thereabouts, but again everything will be adjustable.