I've got at least a dozen here. But when you consider the mountup is the same for S1, S3, S5 and C1 waterblocks that becomes multiple buttloads. That being the case has been kinda central to the point of the project since it started.

I can probably hook you up with power supplies if you need 'em.

And you don't have to with altcoins, but it helps to ignore ethics. Considerations like who's left holding the bag when the short (for most coins) burst of profitability you capitalized on has ended, stuff like that, though I'd be surprised if the choices weren't as plentiful and terrible as they were a couple years ago when alt mining was literally a "coin of the day" game.

Course, most anyone looking solely at short-term profits is probably ignoring a lot of ethical considerations anyway; that's just human nature.

What's the ROI math for a $250 S7 doing 4TH at 950W on $0.04 versus an S9 on the same? With cheap and plentiful power it's not always a bad idea to run a generation behind and undervolt the crap out of 'em. Saves a lot of upfront cost.

I've got a bunch of cables from them laying around. Also, the controller has an internal regulator that should be good up to about 15VDC input so it's not too worried there, it'll work off whatever you're feeding it.

I'm gonna shoot for 220W stock, but like everything I intend to design, it'll be adjustable up and down.

Also...

Should we bring the 1BURGER address back into play?

Cut the PIC out of the loop and hardwire the buck on high? Hack the PIC to a fixed voltage and hope the controller doesn't mind?

Probably the PIC samples the voltage to calibrate the adjustment, so if it's off because of a resistor mod it'll just dial in the DPOT setting to where it wants to be instead of where you want it to be.

I refuse to make anything with fixed specs, so a USB miner would be downvoltable and downclockable to run on a stock USB port. Because of buck losses and control overhead it won't be at its most efficient operating point down there, but it should still run. The BM1384 Compac could run off a 500mA port, or it could be pushed to 2.5A if you wanted.

Yeah I'd shoot for a stock power draw of about 220W DC per S1 board. When you figure in the fan and stuff, and PSU losses, you're looking at a bit over 500W wall. So not as quiet as an S3 but certainly quieter than an S5. I also intend to put PCIe jacks in the right place to still be compatible with an S3 housing. USB cabling internally will be the only worry there.

Nobody ever said a 250W board doing 10TH. That kind of thing is probably two years away at best.

I'll be working up a test board which is effectively a 2-chip USB miner. If it works well enough (and can be cost-effective) I'll look into paring it down to a usable stickminer size, ideally same as the BM1384 Compac. Two chips would put it in the same power range but with probably 3-5 times the hashrate.

No, the auction sticks are a real thing and will go out in the next couple weeks.

Yep, you've been pessimistic about it for months. Noted. I, however, choose the other route because it's simultaneously gonna be awesome for the community and I don't go bankrupt if I'm right.

So anyway. The stickminer question. Let's discuss that instead of everything else that's already been rolled over a couple times.

Sorry, I'm just one guy and I've already discussed three distinct design projects for miners, on top of everything else I've got going on.

Now if I end up able to make the S1 refit boards, four of those on a C1 chassis would probably hit 1000W. Or pack 'em in a rack case and hub 'em together for like 2KW. You know, whatever. But a standalone 1000W miner is not on my list.

I don't have solid numbers for the chip yet, but if we assume 0.1J/GH and 5W you're looking at 100-150GH.

I will not build a 1000W miner.

Would anyone be terribly upset if I did not build a stickminer around this chip? Interfacing to the ASIC directly kinda sucks, and the minimum buck voltage is at the top end of what's likely the practical range for the chip.

It'd be better to use a proper interface chip, but that's kinda wasteful without multiple ASICs. Of course, multiple ASICs also adds to the cost. Doesn't double the cost of course. I don't know how much it'd add.

So, what's a general consensus - a two- or three-chip stickminer (for, say, nominally $35 or $40 versus the original Compac's $25) or no stickminer at all?

I got one I would gladly sell for that.

Hopefully everything else cooperates and I actually get past prototyping. Right now I only have enough sample chips to build one; it'd be nice to get enough to make several and send them out for testing and review like I did with the BM1384 Compacs. It'd be really great if I could have 'em out in time for Christmas, but even if I had a working design now it'd be two weeks before I could build one and at least five weeks before production started.

So I finished up the power and basic layout of a new Bitfury-based Compac and handed it off to Novak to add controls. Looks like he's become a lot busier than expected and I haven't heard anything in a while. The suck part of the stickminer is interfacing to the chip directly, as it uses a quasi-SPI comm with multiplexing and weird voltage levels so there'd be a lot of bit-banging.

I plan to focus on the pod miner, which shouldn't take much hardware dev since the power system has already been messed with a lot in previous versions. Bitfury has their 250nm comm multiplexer chip that takes in pretty much stock-standard SPI and handles all the chip-level comms by itself, so the microcontroller programming end shouldn't be too difficult. That's handy because I'm out of practice on embedded, but I have been getting back into it with various projects the last few months.

So my focus for the next week, when I'm not required for manufacturing, will be to work on the layout for the pod miner and get some sample PCBs sent out for testing.

Here's what I'm hoping for out of the pod miner. It's got a practical power-draw upperbound of 70 to 80 watts, probably more like 50W in normal use. Board dimensions 8x12cm, the chip field will mount up an 80mm fan and heatsink. Power in from a barrel jack or PCIe, signal from USB B or mini. The hardware will include temperature sensing, dynamic voltage control, fan speed control and I'd like to see an input power monitor. An automatic autotune would have to be implemented in the driver (which is not my job) but if we had a reading of input power you'd be able to specify how much heat you could afford (like if you had a 12V 4A brick you could tell it not to exceed 40W draw or something) and it'd dial up the frequency (and fans if necessary) until the overall power draw was maintained at your desired level, kinda like Spondoolies did with their PSU limits.

Once this is done, it should be fairly trivial to extend everything to a larger board. I know someone's already putting out an S5-compatible board, or at least claims to be, but I'm gonna keep working on mine because I think it'll be better. In any case theirs is lacking some features I really want to see, and judging by the 3x power jacks it's going to run hot and loud (possibly incompatible with S1 open-chassis single fan) and won't be compatible with S3 housings at all, so probably not a universal upgrade or necessarily good for at home.

Also, regarding the auction, we brought in some decent money so thanks everyone because it'll really help get this project going. We also got 0.66BTC for vh for all the driver work he did on the failed BW stick project, so that's pretty cool.

Yeah, the DPS1200 can be internally volt-adjusted from about 11.8 to 13.0V which means a 54-chip S7 can be taken up above 5TH (I've got one in hosting that pulls more like 5.3-5.4) or down to about 0.22J/GH (about 4TH/900W) without any real hacking.

Been running S7 and S9 (and even some S4+) off this PSU for a year with no issues. I've also just assembled the first test board of a new improved layout and it seems to work fine, so I may end up getting a fresh batch started sometime soon.

CrazyGuy might have more available sometime. Yeah I'm really hoping to have a new version (new chip) sometime soon.