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@dust
if you recall there some server problem when the site first launched, please send me a email/PM with your bitcoin order ID and payment address so I may manually check aganist the system.
The system was automatically set orders to cancel if they have not been paid, and since due to server errors some order which got paid never got the call back to mark them as completed thus were in turn canceled.
No worries though, we keep all the records so we can double check aganist this.
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Did Avalon just buy bASIC?
No. |
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I wanted to ask how can I get you guys to ship my order using EMS Expedited instead of DHL. I used DHL for some imports from China last fall and I got into all sorts of problems at customs because of them. EMS worked just fine for me back when I ordered my Icarus boards from Zhang, and they took about a week - a week and a half to arrive. I also had some questions regarding invoices. Do I need to send you a mail at the address I received updates from? Or is there some other I should use?
I've updated the thread to reflect that DHL and EMS are choices, as it stands the unit is more heavy than what we originally expected because we want to built a nice solid product, due to it's size, DHL is in fact cheaper than EMS at this moment. In the next few days, I expect to sent out a News Letter with a form which allow the users to pick their Carrier of Choice, currently all Orders are defaulted to DHL. I understand invoicing will be an issue, we are still speaking with some companies in HK/Shenzhen that specialize in exporting products from china to selected countries, I believe they will be handling the product invoices, the news letter will also address this issue. |
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Correct, if your order status does not include the word Completed in it, you should get in touch with me ASAP.
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So I've been neglecting emails a bit mostly because I am on the road and there has been tons of people recently asking when the second batch will be on sale, mixed with actual support problems I am sorting through, so I apologize in advance for any emails that should've been replied to but have yet to hear from. There's no doubt that crunch time is now and everyone inolved with Avalon is currently extremely busy. I will do my best to answer as much email as possible, once I am stationary on the 10th I suspect only then I'll be able to catch up.
Here's some notes:
1. please stop asking when Avalon will be available again for purchase, we will make an announcement when that happens.
2. We've mentioned before we will try to ship as much as possible before CNY, just exactly how many we can ship out can only be revealed when we start shipping and making estimates based on workflow. There will be another update regarding this matter once shipping starts, we at Avalon currently do not have the answer to this question unfortunately.
3. It is extremely important for our existing customer to verify that your Order's Address, Name and such shipping information is correct. In addition if your Order is still not marketed as "Completed" on our site please get in touch with me immediately, failure to do this will delay your shipping.
4. Regarding openWRT image, this is still a working progress, but I suspect in the next few days it will be ready, regardless it will and it have to be released before the actual product ships, so it is only a matter of time.
5. there's currently no problem that can cause change in delivery date, everything else is on schedule.
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Personally I'm slightly offended that bASIC used a "fake" chinese new year as an excuse. Those dates are not even close.
Don't you start too, your company have only really thrown the spitefulness back at others so far. bASIC haven't put themselves out to disparage the competition without being provoked, you should afford them the same courtesy. It's not impossible that they made a mistake on the timing of Chinese New Year, so to try and paint it as an intended offence edges you into Inaba/finger puppet territory. Remember that BFL and it's shills (largely all one "man") hounded the bASIC project so relentlessly, mercilessly and shamelessly that they have abandoned this forum altogether, and they're starting to try to do the same to your project too. You've handled it well so far, but to indulge in the same hyperbolic mud-slinging is just totally unsporting, and unnecessary. It will not: - speed your product delivery up - slow bASIC's product delivery down - win you any customers in the short term, seeing as you sold out quite some time ago and will not be accepting new customers until the 1st batch ships - achieve anything except worsen your public reputation in the eyes of those that believe in the sanctity of a fair fight Fucking stop it, the lot of you (that includes all of your multiple personalities Inaba, it will serve you right if you develop a schizophrenic disorder through your weirdo stalking) I don't disagree, but like I said. Personally I'm tired of BFL or bASIC's excuses. I'm very well aware of the fact it is probably a typo, repentance here said it best. Chinese New Year isn't some sudden, unforeseen event which throws you off schedule. It's something you know damned well is going to happen and when. Realistically, bASIC isn't likely to be delivering until at least March if "more than one aspect of the bASIC device" is going to be affected by CNY.
Every ASIC vendor on these forums needs to concentrate their energy on getting their own product shipped at the moment instead of flinging shit at their competition. It shouldn't matter a damn to any of you what your competition is doing if you're confident in your own product and your own competence.
Allow me to remind you they said they will ship in mid-Jan, how is this Chinese New Year going to effect them? Either way though, what I got a problem is how my competition announces and downplay delays. I have illustrated it here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=87934.msg1411740#msg1411740and here is how Avalon announces delays. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=120184.msg1397668#msg1397668Whatever, I'll bash more after I ship, ever since this https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=120184.msg1381739#msg1381739 I've concluded with my team that BFL and bASIC is full of shit and have no chips. Don't believe me? that's fine too. Let's speak again after this month ends. |
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Personally I'm slightly offended that bASIC used a "fake" chinese new year as an excuse. Those dates are not even close.
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Glad someone else has also taken up the hardware route for Bitcoin development and ultimately the road to adoption.
let me know if you guys need anything from China.
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I think the next official update is us shipping out a device. needless to say, we are at the end and is pretty busy at the moment, soon major team members are actually going to stay and live in the factory housing for a few days to make sure everything works out smoothly.
I do not think we will be providing any power consumption/final hashrate prior to shipping the units because we will be tweaking the numbers until we feel it's ready. Soon as we ship everything will become clear.
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How's this ElectricMucus: If we do ship before January ends, you send the entire Avalon team cookies, the soft kind, not too sweet made with coarse grains to provide texture. The conventional chocolate-chip ones are good too but the molasses and ginger chews are especially delicious with fresh cinnamon.
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Hrm, if they're aiming for 66gh per unit, and each chip does 0.75gh, its approximately 88 chips per unit. Packaging and testing cost is, what, another 50 cents per? And completing the product (PCB manuf, mounting components on PCB, etc) is another, say, ~$120 per unit? Thats only a 5x markup from the sales price, how are they staying in business? =/ I am in shock! Are people seriously running numbers on Avalon ASIC using BFL as a base of measurement? Aside from the bold statement above, everything else is false. At this point I consider these statements slander: giving the public an impression Avalon is very cheap to produce and the fact of the matter is it really isn't. To put in prospective, a decent PSU is ~$90. |
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PS: If i find a way to make proper cooling for asic unit and there is a hack (which will come with a time) so that ASIC can be plugged in regular Linux PC i will take that route personally. But this option will not be available from day one though.
Why not, take out the USB cord and plug it into your computer instead, not sure if you want to do this though considering openWRT runs the miners just fine. e.g. cgminer. not to mention there are other airflow reasons you do not want to change the unit, unless you want to run a USB cord out of the unit to an external PC for example. I have a few TL-WR703Ns around already, with their 4MB of flash. I suppose I could add USB storage if more is needed.
the openWRT controller is very similar to the TL-WR703n, you can plug in a USB storage if you want. My guess is they'll have a configuration page where you can make edits to the parameters passed to cgminer. I do hope they'll let us ssh into it. If the past firmwares for OpenWRT for Icarus mining is any indication, ngzhang has always went the "be more open" route. I wonder if xiangfu is still around, he had a custom firmware for the 1043ND I used that I really enjoyed.
We are working with xiangfu, and you are correct. We have always practiced what we preach when it comes to open source. This time will be no different. |
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Huh, only just now? I thought they taped out early as September, we actually expected them to be online and mining since November. Looks like we over estimated all of our competition. If my memory is correct, Team Avalon said, that they will release system image for their hardware at the end of December. End of Dec. is here...
Yes, work is progressing on this end, I think I'll get you guys an update within this weekend or so. If anything we will release the openWRT image first and release the updated miner later. but it is not really any different than other Atheros AR7240 CPU, Atheros AR9331 Chipset routers. |
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BFL customers are like the women that get beat by their husband and stay with them because she loves him.  Unfortunately, the world as we know it is filled with greedy individuals, and businesses like BFL will stay afloat even though they are obviously incompetent and incapable of running a business properly. This is what really irks me... these incompetent business people, freaking liars (shipping in October November December January), will be getting the most business out of all ASIC manufacturers... something is seriously not right with the world. And then Inaba has the nerve to say "Well, why don't you do it?" BECAUSE BFL MISGUIDED ALMOST THE ENTIRE COMMUNITY TO PRE-ORDER FROM THEM BECAUSE THEY THOUGHT THEY WOULD BE THE FIRST TO SHIP. It is a borderline scam (not surprising coming from Sonny's past) and at the very least unethical. You really think you have the most pre-orders because your product is so much better than the other manufacturers? Child please... It would be absolutely suicide to start an ASIC development with so many already preordered from other manufacturers. I know! BFL is so evil! They are, *gasp* 2.5 months late to ship a product! The horror! Oh the humanity! Oh my god, how can things be so horrible!? Shit, you mean I could have announced Avalon projected shipping date at Oct 2012 then announce several delays totaling 2.5 month and people would be OK with it? I should have learned from the best. *bows* I couldn't get on your level *sobs*. Anyways, after disorienting your project timeline so many times, I don't even know when is BFL going to ship is anymore, are you still scheduled to ship in Mid-Jan of 2013? I'm sure many others are interested to know also. |
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Delays. None are better. None are worse. Delays cost money. Every delay. Everyone who ordered. bASIC isn't clean of it, bitcoinsyn isn't clean of it, BFL isn't clean of it. Delays happened. Inaba didn't say theirs are worse. He said they delayed too. He noted bASIC didn't have a rendering months after BFL released something resembling a PCB with actual parts in locations. Sure it doesn't take long. Yeah I do wonder why people badger the guy that actually gives more info then bASIC. Right the delays. My order and others where marked Jan 1, 2013. Until then although not on the hoped schedule the aren't late. The date was in writing. Yes the projected hopeful date failed. The actual contractual date will now fail too. People hounded BFL far before the contractually required final delivery date was missed about the delays. So far BFL is closer to their required shipping date then bASIC is by 4 weeks. bASIC last I checked was looking at an overshoot of 6 weeks BFL was only 2 weeks unless I missed the announcement that put them past Jan 14, 2013. No ones hands are clean on this. Everyone is late. Delay? I wouldn't call these "delays" by our competitors, rather I would call them excuses. Excuses for their poor business estimations whilst being oblivious to the obvious fact: do not quote the date you get from a third company to your customers. Have Avalon had more delays before? Yes, we had. Many times internally things have not gone as planned, but this is also exactly why we announced the original shipping date at the end of Feb, 2013, and now have moved up to mid-Jan after eliminating potential and actual problems. We plan, and we set leeway for mistakes and problems.A delay is announcing a 4-7 day delay more than a month ahead of scheduled delivery date. A excuse is repeatably announcing 2 week delays one after another passing the supposed delivery date, or missing the supposed delivery date and push their new estimate more than a month later. Yes I see that you hate Inaba pointing out when the competition wasn't doing as much for "Transparency" as BFL was and BFL was the one made to look bad over it. Seems hypocritical to tout the bASIC's transparency when BFL gave far more information. Granted you don't belive BFL's information but they have given quite a lot.
Nobody qualifies for the word "transparency" in the current ASIC market, not even us. |
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We don't plan to release this information, any information regarding our unit's internal you will have to find from pictures our customers who feels like uploading. This is our trade secret as we feel we designed a truly unique and innovative unit.
Wait, it's your trade secret, but it's okay for customers to divulge? How would they even begin to prevent customers from exploring the workings of their own hardware? A "warranty void if removed" sticker isn't all that menacing to many.
It is like creativex said, I'm just delaying the inevitable, there is absolutely zero benefits for us to release this information, we will happily provide any information after release though, when it is no longer relevant to our competitors. |
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Very interesting, thanks for the update.
Do you know how many chips will be in each Avalon yet, or do you have a date for when you'll know that information?
We don't plan to release this information, any information regarding our unit's internal you will have to find from pictures our customers who feels like uploading. This is our trade secret as we feel we designed a truly unique and innovative unit. |
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Updating as promised, Let's be frank. We ran into a potential delay of 4-7 days.What does this mean? We when taped out the chips to TSMC we had a "projected out date" of Jan 3, 2013 which is on schedule with our late dec. / early jan. demonstration dates. Now however after this week's website update our "projected out date" has changed to Jan 7th, 2013 and "committed date" has been revealed to be Jan 10th, 2013. TSMC did not give us a reason for this, but as a small customer you are really at the mercy of bigger customers running higher priority lots. e.g. "super hot lot" The "committed date" is the promised date of delivery, it is very unusual for TSMC to break their "committed date", so we expect our chips to ship on or before Jan 10th, 2013. Another potential problem is Customs clearing, the packaging company Fujitsu is located in Shanghai's Export Processing Zone (EPZ), while the packaging itself will not see delays, it may take an additional 2-3 days to clear Customs. To make up for this, if it occurs, we will be flying down to Shanghai to the demonstration in the EPZ instead of waiting for the shipping to the factory for assembly. With all this happening, it has burned through the 1 week additional leeway time we originally left out. I must say it will be difficulty for us to ship on Jan 14th, we however expect to ship around Jan 18 ~ 20.
Since some people were wondering how many chips are on a wafer earlier in the thread after we posted the MT forms I'll tell you, each wafer contains 4055 chips. TSMC
TMEM91
================================================
Chip Size : X = 3.9760 ,Y = 4.0560 mm
Reticle Size : X/cell = 3 ,Y/cell = 3
Offset Value : X = -3.7668 ,Y = -2.2990 mm
Alignment Mark : (118.80,83.20),(-118.80,-83.20)
Alignment Mark Tolerant Distance : 1.6 mm
Notch Reserved Distance : 7.75 mm
Start Distance : 7.75 mm
Ring Edge : 3.0 mm
Photo Die Number: 4055 and this is the chip layout.  |
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That must be why it is so cheap. Some legwork is required at a boutique fab?
Western business people regard having good contacts as essential to success. Relationships are also a critical part of doing business in Asia. Not only do you need an agent who actually has the influence they say they have, you need an agent who will actively use that influence on your behalf unless you want your orders to be pushed aside repeatedly because another agent has a better relationship with the manufacturer than yours does. Am I the only one here who's gob-smacked by the fact that none of the project leads for any of the BTC ASIC vendors seem to have been flying to Asia on a regular basis to meet with their agents and manufacturers? eh, ngzhang is in Asia to begin with, and earlier last month, i flew in as well. every member of the Avalon team is in china at the moment. |
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@ Avalon, how that update going? Isn't it your time to shine?
Update is expected to release on Thursday, or two days from now. We are currently waiting for this round of updates from TSMC for this week which comes tomorrow. |
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