Got a boost driver that'll put up about 30 watts, and I need to test the buck-boost because I like the idea of the light not getting dimmer as the battery goes down. Got a zoom housing that's pretty nice, and I have samples of a fixed reflector housing that should be good for handling heat but I haven't put a light into it yet. Been too hot here to do more than the bare minimum of work lately but I finally got AC in my workroom yesterday so progress should pick up.

Also it's like a million degrees in my shop right now so it's hard to get motivated. The list of things that I need to do but can't from inside the one air-conditioned room here is growing.

That's great but I was hoping to be able to supply my people back in May, which is why I purchased back in April. I was just denied an attempt to cancel and refund the order despite having had no real evidence that a package has even left the warehouse and it's been seven weeks since money changed hands. Don't really like buying things twice, and since the US now has a better grasp on supply chains the need has passed anyway.

Point is, "just be patient" has been going around a lot and there ain't much you can do about it since we decided to outsource basically everything.

I've had trouble with orders from China for a while. A few suppliers using DHL have been quite reliable but other suppliers and other carriers, pretty dismal. I had some flashlight housings paid for in April, tracking stopped updating May 12th, and then suddenly they landed in Chicago two days ago. That was Express shipping. Some masks purchased in April, expected delivery by May 12th (I've got family in ill-supplied medical jobs), tracking hasn't updated since May 3rd. They all just keep saying "be patient".

That 130GH happens at more like 12-14W, really. So your numbers are probably going to be even worse.

These things were unprofitable toys well before the halving. Use it to play around, use it to learn the concepts, use it as a lottery ticket with a chance at a block every 10 minutes. But if you're looking to turn a profit, yeah you'd be better off buying coin directly and waiting for it to appreciate.

There's also the option of using it to mine other SHA256 coins that may have a better return, at least in the short term. I don't care for altcoins or the trading/pump-and-dump markets but there's plenty of info around if you look for it.

I think the newest batch of chips I got are a substantial improvement over the originals. My efficiency estimations were done a year ago, after all. Maybe I should re-test.

Glad you like it!

My neighbor's windows are about 200 yards from mine, across a horse pasture. The other side neighbors are twice as far away with trees inbetween. It's nice. Quite an upgrade from the four-plex apartment on a tight cul-de-scrote where I lived for most of the last six years.

Not sure nail polish can hurt anything on the board, as long as you keep it off anything that looks like it gets hot.

Easiest thing would be to put sharpie on the LEDs. Second to that, pop off the SOT23 NFET just off the corner of the microcontroller, nexto the LEDs.

Or if you got a PIC programmer, I can conjure up a version of the firmware that doesn't flash the LED or flashes it only briefly so it's not as intense.

Or, you can tell your neighbor to stick it or hang a curtain or something because it's not your job to change your private environment to increase the comfort of his private environment. But then again, maybe you like your neighbors. I don't really even like the concept of neighbors close enough to be annoyed by anything I do.

I'm pretty sure what boards I had didn't survive the move. I did some scrounging a few months ago and didn't turn any up. Sorry.

419mining and MineFarmBuy both offer a rock-solid 8A brick alongside the GS hub. It's not included by default because the GS hub can work off an ATX supply also, and can handle higher power than an 8A brick will provide if you ask it nicely.

Yeah I wouldn't recommend Windows 10 to anyone who doesn't like paying too much for crappy bloated software that also spies on you.

Anything that is running anything other than Windows 10, you're going to get better results. These devices make a fairly intensive use of USB traffic, and both timing and packet size are particular. Win10 for some reason hoses up or in other ways abandons the standard ways of doing things so traffic patterns are a lot less deterministic and that makes things choke.

The chips have to self-balance so the reading across any one chip will vary. The factory setting is 830mV across the pair.

For that device, it means it's showing 2 functional BM1387 chips, and ASICBoost is working, and it's bearing the serial number 34928.

The two square bare pads above center on the stick will get you voltages across the two chips.

A lot of sticks now are tested at the factory using GS hubs and run for 24 hours at 200MHz, usually 7 to a hub. The fact you're running Windows 10 and it's having trouble when the hub is full, I'd bet it's an OS thing similar to the issues folks had running R606 on Windows 10. VH put in some testing options to help people with setups like that, and the diagnostic dialogue is recorded somewhere in this thread.

Oh uh, hey guys. So I finally got some test PCBs in today. Took 2 days to get from China to the depot and 5 days to get from the depot to me. Not impressed.

Anyway, technically, with this I have completed the original scope of the project. I have working right now a zoomable flashlight with a 2A buck driver, meaning it can put up around 720 lumen on max. Prototypes of the driver were tested stable down to 0.5% output, which means around 5 lumen. I have programmed it for 3 brightness modes though the hardware will support anywhere from 1 to 128. It blinks at you when battery voltage goes below 2.8 and turns off below 2.7 so it won't drain your cell. There are no strobe modes though I suppose they're technically still possible.

I have a test board for a 3A version (1000 lumen) that I'll be assembling tomorrow, and I'll also be working on a temperature sensor to make sure that it doesn't overheat the LED or driver while on max. The hardware's in place for testing this, but no code yet.

The scope of the project has grown and I'm also working on some other drivers, high-current buck, buck-boost and boost. Turns out there are multi-die LEDs which run 6V or 12V nominal instead of 3V, and they kick many butts. Additionally even in the hobby/enthusiast space there aren't a lot of decent buck-boost drivers (which have the benefit of maintaining constant brightness even under low battery conditions) with good current handling. Also my cousin and his mechanic friends want a better penlight. So now instead of making one flashlight it turns out I'm making like 8.

All I got right now is black aluminum shells to work with. Nothing rubberized, sorry.

Nothing's quite ready to be mass-produced yet but I'll keep you guys posted. I want to get some of these in local hands for field-testing in the next couple days if I can, but I haven't even started coding the temp sensor checks yet.

Unless it's a seriously badass cable, it's probably got severe voltage drop drawing that kind of power and it's choking. 650MHz could be asking for 3A so you want as low-loss power delivery as possible.

Also, since this is chipside cooling, you want a non-conductive thermal paste just in case.

If he's using a GS hub, I honestly don't know what the problem is because each port pair is supplied by a 6A-rated regulator with extra bulk capacitors for each port.

Regarding paste - I get Arctic Silver ceramic, and put a drop on each chip. I would assume HP server paste should be more than sufficient. Only thing I can say about adding a heatsink is don't overtorque. The board might flex a bit but try and keep it flat, otherwise the flexion might damage internal traces or topside components.

1TH on power level 3? That's a pretty sweet unit you got.

I'll probably fix it sometime. I tended to lean on my webserver for image hosting but the connection was fairly slow so I also used photobucket. The server's now set up in an actual data center with a solid connection so I should port everything over to it.