No, that just updates the controller software and shouldn't have any effect on what I did.

You know, I bet BW would sell about $50K of their 14nm ASIC. Too bad all their good info is currently behind an NDA...

Yeah, customs hangups. I got it squared away this morning but, even if it had been in time to make the truck, I wouldn't have been at the shop to receive them. Units should be in my hands tomorrow morning and going out Thursday afternoon. Sorry about the delays.

Ditto. I won't buy something you're not willing to explain until after I've bought it.

That's all more reasons why I'm not quick to jump into bed with any group, organization, third-party or "investor". I'd rather I get screwed than customers get screwed, but at the same time I really hate getting screwed. If I was fine taking in money from who-knows-where and had the resources to police it all, heck we'd have been shipping Gekkoscience-branded miners for the Christmas season.

Good advice for when things get to that point.

I have never considered the blockchain to be an irrelevant application on top of anything; nor do I consider applications on top of a blockchain to be, in general, a bad thing. I just still don't like the idea of harnessing the Bitcoin blockchain for other than its original purpose.

So, what exactly is your proposal? Let's see a detailed layout of the concepts instead of the jargon-fraught arguments which have gotten you nowhere thus far. But remember, if you're going to try and convince engineers of something you really should avoid fluff and hollow manager-speak and stick to raw details.

You could probably take apart an S7 and strap lower-volume (in both nose and CFM) fans directly to the heatsinks and quiet it down. Part of the noise problem there is power density of the boards, and part is the overall heat density (and high pressure required by the solidity of the heap of heatsinks) of the miner. One of those problems is solvable by spreading it all out.

For this project, what you're suggesting will likely not be implemented. Mechanical design and manufacturing for a secondary optional everything-except-the-hashboards seems a bit of a stretch to ask for. My goal is to make the thing as quiet as possible within the given constraints.

Anything with a monolithic heatsink should be able to mount up to a waterblock. One of my goals (separate from the project discussed in this thread) is and has been for a while to build new boards in the S1 formfactor, and those should mount up nicely to C1 waterblocks.

When I hear "design by committee" the connotation for me is "a bunch of dudes sitting around talking for countless hours". There is no attempt at implementation, or no real teamwork going into it. Just a lot of time gets wasted. Committes debate while teams do.

"Design by team", now there's something I can get behind. Find two or three people, each with a general knowledge of everything and assigned a specific module and someone approximately in charge. Spend a bit of time discussing the problems, come up with a means of solving each problem and how the modules interact, then go do it. Which is sorta what aliashraf is trying to get across; the problem is nomenclature. In America it's pretty much understood that committees never actually accomplish anything, so if you're in the world of actually getting things done you BY NO MEANS want a committee involved unless you want everything to take ten times longer, cost ten times as much to develop, and probably end up sucking anyway.

Also, in reading this (or pretty much any technical) thread, my eyes glaze over and I skip any post that starts out loaded with management-speak.

Also, this is Kilo's thread about he and I designing a mining framework, thanks for that reminder. It's probably best if you keep the "let's leverage blockchain-hijacking protocols for something something automatic money something something it's the best" (like I said, I glaze over when management-speak happens) to the thread you started specifically on the subject. It has gone on long enough here, and when the owner of the thread asks you to leave it's polite to pay attention.

Well, ideal and practical. I'm opting for a bucked string since it's by far the most efficient and least parts cost that still allows adjustable core voltage. The obvious problem with that is if one chip fails the board fails, chained comms or not.
If you look at the node-level support hardware on a Prisma versus S5, to implement parallel comms requires a lot of extra stuff.
A "lego miner" is probably not feasible, as half the cost of the thing will be in sockets. I'm not attempting to define an open standard, just some guy wants to build a miner.
If the darned USB circuit fails - I'm assuming we're using a USB-enabled microcontroller, so if the USB circuit fails that probably means all board-level control is gone. No chip comms, no temp sensors, no voltage regulation, no fan speed. But I bet you could swap on another $3 microcontroller, flash the firmware and get back up. It might be worth having a separate UART port; the only problems would be adding to the cgminer driver and micro firmware to support that transport alongside USB.

I am definitely in favor of monolithic heatsinks, but I also suggest that double-siding should get better heat transfer to air which should result in quieter fans. However, I'm not a mechanical engineer or heat transfer guy so I don't have the numbers to back that up, it's just an intuition.

As far as the spec goes, the cgminer source code will be public (as are the license terms, after all) if I have to steal and host it myself. I don't know about micro firmware source code, that'll probably remain proprietary, but I'll see about making a compiled hex available for folks in need of repair. Surely there'll be some documentation on the command structure for talking to that micro as well.

To be fair, a lot of the reason I haven't gotten a miner built is because of how I do business - I try to put as little risk as possible on the customer. Which means I've turned away pretty much everyone who's wanted to put money into my project. An ASIC vendor would likely be more willing to talk to me if I showed up with an aslo of money ready to drop on the table, but I have a profound aversion to taking in money on an unproven design.

Did the payment confirm immediately?

So it's a good thing I ordered an extra miner on the first hacked group buy. I kept one because one of the boards wouldn't run stable at or below 630mV cold, so I pushed it up to 640 and left it on my shelf. I say "good thing" partly because of that, and partly because the PSU on it started misbehaving after about two days. Now it doesn't work at all. I switched it over to my known good test S7LN and still the supply trips out as soon as it lights up.

If the boards are built about like mine they'll handle 2500W fine. Before we sold anything we pushed the PSU to about 196A and left it running for a week.
I know the rail layering with 6-pins is quite a bit different than for straight screw terminals so the thickness isn't there, but you also get 2-3 times the area, which reduces current density and improves heat radiation.

I'd have no qualms at all powering three S9 off a 4K setup. I know 2xDPS2K works well for 3xS7.

Actually, I started another thread because the subject of that thread wasn't really designing a community miner. It was designing a miner, but separate from this project and I was requesting a bit of advice and discussion from the old salt engineers who have been building stuff since before I was born. That job will probably indirectly apply to this one more or less as an enabler (via resources) but it's not the same project by any means so shouldn't be handled in the same thread.

A straightfoward solution for hacking a piece of proprietary electronics with a proprietary multi-signal data and power connection and undocumented communication protocol to work with an off-the-shelf mini computer?

I was going to scoff at the idea, but actually around here that's a reasonable request. But around here, technical competency is also a typical precondition. It shouldn't be that difficult (in fact, mostly a software problem) to run pretty much any AntMiner board off a straightforward USB adapter, provided you aren't concerned about temperature control (since sensor interfacing happens through connections independent from ASIC communication). It's probably possible to build a microcontroller interface that convolves all the sensor and chip-comm traffic into a single connection to be relayed to a generic computer.

Yeah, that's about the only issue with a hot/cold cycle with the cold-running voltage that close to bottom threshold, is you really have to already be mining stably by the time it drops to cold. Cgminer restarting at cold voltage will probably drop out one or both boards so a power cycle is recommended (very likely required) after setting pools.

It is an ISP header. I pulled firmware off the PIC and had the chip identified within about half an hour of one coming in the building. But I was not allowed to make modifications, nor dismantle enough to take direct measurements, so I don't know hex/volt pairs or anything for it. I also can pretty much guarantee that my S7 hex files won't work on it.

A USB dongle for wifi support is acceptable, since it's optional and would just plug into the controller's external USB jack. A USB dongle being required for base functionality of the machine, that's when dongles are unacceptable.

I would prefer a miner in the 400-500W topend size, but it's not up to me. Like I said, those attributes are fixed.

I have no interest in enabling thievery, so telling me what will make it easier for you activates my contrary nature and makes me want to oppose your suggestions.

I ordered out two batches of seven S7LN last week, one via UPS and one via DHL. The UPS arrived on Tuesday and I haven't heard a thing about fees of any kind. The DHL order, shipped a day earlier and also scheduled to have arrived on Tuesday, got hung up in China about customs, got Ohio because they needed more info for customs, and now it's hung up in St Louis waiting for payment of customs fees. I might get them on Monday.

I'm pretty disappointed; it was sort of a test and I expected more from DHL given that I've received packages from China via DHL in under 30 hours total transit time. Both orders were identical in size and merchandise cost, the only differences being carrier and the resulting slight variation in cost of shipping.

Back when the S7 was new and expensive, I got probably a dozen FedEx invoices for customs duties due because of hosting customers direct-shipping.

That is handy, depending on how easy it is to interface to. But do we really need a quad-core? (hint - the answer is "no").

What specific model of what devboard computer gets picked is important to the overall discussion, but I wouldn't mind deferring it for a bit. If enough people want wifi, that certainly adds weight to one supporting it natively.