Everyone that had a June delivery indication should have had a request for payment now. If you didn't get one check your spam and contact us if you didn't find a request. Depending on how this weeks production goes we will start requesting payment for early July deliveries about the middle of this week.

Yohan

Ok guy's lets not get too overheated. Here we are not worried about ***. In the main our customer base either does not believe the claims for whatever reason or simply don't want to support such an operation. I have given you the percentage and it's barely noticeable. We don't get worried about fair competition and remember our business is not entirely based on Bitcoin equipment. We have been doing other things for 23 years and still here in business. It's not a make or break market for us and that is good for all as we can be more reasoned and rational about what we do. I, like many of you, just don't like unfair tactics.

Do read what I said carefully. If there is actually something to worry about from *** and if an ASIC is the way we will look and see if that is viable to do. That's for later. There is a much bigger plan here and I have not shown our entire hand yet and I won't until we are ready to do so. I think we might still have an ACE or maybe even two let in the pack that might be a nice surprise for you all but I'm not promising anything yet. We have to make it all work and it's only our 9th week of working seriously in the Bitcoin market. We are still just at walking pace and warming up for the longer more difficult technical activities ahead.

Yohan

Thanks. The more info we have the better.

That's what I thought. Hopefully this will be week we move on and show real perfomance at least at about the 800MH/s level if not something more.

Is that 2 FPGAs or 4?

State of the Nation Time (What again!!!)

It's 8 weeks, 1 day and about 6hrs since I announced the Cairnsmore1 concept and the Enterpoint team started work on it so please do remember that in reading this. I don't believe there is any other team in the world capable of achieving what we have already done in that timescale never mind what we are continuing to deliver. It wasn't easy do this and I am glad many of you have recognised that and there should be a big handclap for team who have worked hard and still are to try and achieve this.

Doff we do have your email. Not seen any others yet though. If there are any problems please do email as requested. That could help us close down issues more quickly. I don't think we have anything that is a major problem we just need to make better documentation and support materials available. Unlikely to be Monday but hopefully Tuesday/Wednesday we will try and sort our way through at least some of these issues.

Shipping - Production took a big step forward and daily output doubled this week. There are nearly 200 units now in the field today and we are pulling in as much feedback from them as people will give us on these units. Generally it's all good but of course we need to advance the state of the bitstream and more on that in a minute. Going back to orders this week has seen us catch up and everyone that was indicated as a June delivery will either have already had a request for payment or will get one today. We do have a few days possibly in the first week of July where production may stop whilst we await our next delivery of Spartan-6 parts but that might pull forward and then that doesn't happen. Either way it won't have too much of an effect on July ship. At current daily delivery rates our line is capable of delivering 2.5X what we have promised so a a few days downtime we can live with.

Hardware - Thanks to all you that reported that the cooling system was working exceptionally well albeit maybe only working on half the power at the moment. That's very key to what we want finally achieve on this product and a lot of time did go into what might seem a very simple thing. Some people that had planned extreme cooling methods have indicated that they are going to drop these and stay with the standard setup such is the performance of it. Other than that I think we have a great platform to hash on.

Software - We will continue to try and improve this side but won't be our priority for a few days, or a week or whatever, that it takes to get a better performance bitstream.

Bitstream - We believe that 3rd party developers are now close to releasing a solution for Cairnsmore1. Our own bitstream solution we think has the potential to very good and might even be able to compete with *** claims once there some real numbers, and experience is available, for their unit. I know that is a matter of faith for all of you but do remember there is more FPGA knowledge and experience concentrated here in one place and one office than you will probably find vendor A or X's offices and remember that we specialise in doing the near impossible and have done so for very many years.

Our competitors *** have dropped what might be nuclear bomb into Bitcoin and it might well destroy Bitcoin. We will see if it actually happens. It still doesn't financially stack up to me or any way make sense what they are doing other than to destroy Bitcoin. However in Cairnsmore1 we might well have a second strike available to let loose and we won't unless we have to. What's for certain is that GPU miners are going to find it hard to justify switching on their rig if it all goes the way I think it will. I was hoping that this could be a controlled process and not a step change and everyone would win out of that but *** have more or less ensured that people lose money especially if you are a GPU miner and probably even if you are one of their own customers.

Anyway enough of the gloomy bit. We have lost a tiny percentage (0.4%) of orders due to ***'s claims and I believe we gained more orders than we lost and thank you to all that still believe and have faith in the Enterpoint way (I'll get my white collar out for next time and do this properly). We still think Cairnsmore1 is going to be an excellent product for all of our customers and that you will all be happy with your purchases from Enterpoint and that you will all have a sensible return on your investment. We will continue to strive to make that a good experience and will continue in our professional business manner in our engagement with you all. What's for certain if there is a Bitcoin market for what we do we will still be there with competing products.

Yohan

Can anyone that has a problem email the new support email with the following:

Board serial number

What revision you think the controller is in. If you didn't touch it just say that.

A description of the problem you have.

What OS your host is running.

What your host is, if you know processor etc. that is all useful to know.

We will try and understand or even try and replicate the problems so that they can debugged. We probably won't do much on that until early next week so please be patient. The better bitstream is our priority for the next few days and as a lot of this stuff will change , hopefully for the better, once that is in place.
We don't want to put a lot of time on the "get going" unless that is strictly necessary as it will delay the better stuff. It would be far better for us to move the whole of the software and firmware side forward so that's the effort for the next few days.

I would also like to know who has a unit working ok is with the currently limited bitstreams. This might get us some insight to where problems actually are as much as the problem unit data. I suspect we don't have a major issue and it's all about recognising any weaknesses in combinations of different things and make even as simple as better docs.

We are starting a Cairnsmore1 specific support email address where we can route problems to the best engineer to be able to sort them out. We will also start a FAQ page in the next few days and try and cover common problems there so hopefully whatever you encounter that there is an answer already waiting for most of you. The support email is bitcoin.support AT enterpoint.co.uk.

Yohan

It is all too easy to get dip switches wrong. Our slightly longer term aim will be to eliminate most, if not all, dip switch settings and use something a bit more intelligent but more on that when we have it.

Hopefully it will get better as we get more time on the tools and documentation. I'm hoping to have the Linux version for the controller updater tomorrow but can't promise that given the way development sometimes goes.

After we get this sorted we would like to an idea of who isn't on the latest firmware. Whilst I anticipate this being updated again once or maybe more it's going to be our standard working level for 1or 2 weeks whilst we will then be concentrating more on improving the bitstream side. The twin build is an Icarus derivative so does have the twin clock weakness so it is possible that is causing the dropouts one or two of you are seeing. I would like to get a more formal feedback from you once we have a bitstream build that we are much happier about in terms of stability. The current "twin FPGA" running is very much a temporary bitstream as far as we are concerned.

Once we have a better bitstream (almost certainly not the final one but reasonable) we will look to bring in the up/down functionality and that will definately be a controller update again.

Yohan

Shipping Update

Ok if you are on a June delivery indication you should either have received a request for payment or you will do so in the next 3 days. Please look out for the payment requests including the good old spam box.

We are now nearly back on our original schedule and the catch up is happening very quickly. For July it looks like we will be on schedule if not running ahead. We may have a few droops in production through July as well may have a couple of small periods of waiting for components but these won't cause anything other than a small variation in deliveries.

For the moment we are still running August as a non-production month but it is likely we will have some pulling in some September deliveries. September delivery promise is about to close and October will become the promise probably tomorrow.

Yohan

Have you checked the DIP switches are in the requisit positions.

Have you got the serial number?

If you are a Windows user the stuff for updating your controller is now on the support webpage. Linux version coming soon. This is only worth doing if you have board 0026 or earlier. Take care not to lose power during this process and check it asy that it verify's ok. If it does not verify properly and provided you don't power cycle you can have another go. If it does go horribly wrong it will be possible to recover the units using a standalone programming cable.

That looks very nice yohan!

Would I be able to do a similar thing with a ~120W "wall wart" power brick adapter instead of PCI-e?
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I would not recommend it as the 2.5mm jack is only rated to 5A which is enough for one board but not 2 running full load.

Hopefully some more on the programmer later. Meanwhile first sight of the power jumper allowing a PCIE power cable to power 2 boards in a simple fashion. This is also showing the lower profile heatsink configuration.




Side blow stacking pillar is also now available.

@yohan: If you don't want that your files uploaded on other sides, please give me a message, i will delete it  
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No problem doing that as far I am concerned. If it makes it easier I am all for it.

We will try and do a sweep through the issues later and see if we can improve things.

Dip switches are these same setting for both controller versions. There is some extra stuff to come to allow update of the controller using the same tools. Bitstream is already available if you have a programming cable and the tool can work that way as well to update the controller. If you are a power FPGA user and have it available ISE Impact can be used as well.

I'll have to take all the queries back to the engineer working on these bits so probably tomorrow before I have any response. Anything else anyone notices that needs fixing do let me know and I will try and get it all tidied up quickly. I wasn't expecting this to be a perfect process so it will probably be a bit buggy for a few days whilst we iron out the silly stuff. There is nothing better that the Microsoft way of debugging software. We are running a lot of this stuff in our line now so we might also suffer from being too familiar with the tools as well so we might have to add some things to the manuals.

Programming utilities now available on http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/cairnsmore/cairnsmore1_support_materials.html "twin_test.bit" is bitstream to run 2 FPGAs at high performance level and will give the biggest mining returns currently.

You will usually get a reply within a day. So send again. We have occasionally had an email go astray.