I don't think any miner has ever used more than one port out of the micro. Most chips are daisy-chained; ASICMiner used address-decoded chip selects on a common SPI bus (which I really like). It looks like this and the previous generation of Bitfury chips use a comm multiplexer that probably only needs one bus connection to the micro and then breaks out a couple dozen data pairs that would each go to a single chip.

My experience with embedded was writing 8-bit assembler, where I did in about 65 bytes what the C compiler wanted about 1k to accomplish. Most of what this chip will have to do are interrupt-based timer routines, and relaying data packets back and forth. The only limitation might be RAM buffering USB data packets, but the clock is plenty fast and there's probably an order of magnitude more code space than should be needed.

Not sure what you mean by tight. 50MHz with 2k RAM and 32KB code space is huge for what I need it to do.

Well this is a sub-scale Avalon-based proof of concept commissioned by Kilo, though I would like to show it off once it works. Very unlikely to become an actual product for anyone but him.

And since I'm not making any controller boards, at least for this project...

Just doing a quick check, Sunstone quickturn looks like 1oz copper and I don't see a way to change that on the online form. And for what I want we're looking at around $900 for half a dozen boards. $900 from Full-feature will get me a heavier copper, ten boards, and only a couple days later. SEEED will get me heavier copper still, and ten boards, and a couple days later, for $300. That's gonna be hard to argue with.

Yeah, by the time I'd have gotten to it was about the time it should have been delivered. The information I needed to connect the tracking number on the post office receipt to your email address is all at the shop, and I didn't get to the shop until Monday, and it should have arrived Monday or Tuesday.

We've used Sunstone for all our PCB batches that weren't the DPS2K boards (we opted for someone who specialized in heavy copper) but I've not looked into their quick-turnaround service. I did recently read something of theirs on 2-layer prototyping, but not 4-layer.

About 40 sticks in a dozen-odd small orders, and two big bulk orders, are all that remains to ship. There'll be a delay because I have to get more parts, which I probably should have done already but I've been a little busy lately.

Say, got a question. Who's the best domestic quick-turn prototype PCB fab? We've gotten prototype PCBs made by SEEED, but they're in China - which is grating for obvious patriotic reasons and because it makes shipping suck for any kind of speed.

Mine costs quite a bit more than that, but it's got a spring-loaded pin retainer and adjustable crimp depth that make things go fairly quickly, which is good when you have to make cables in batches of several hundred.

Or the not flimsy incredibly expensive molex tools.

I didn't put PCIe plugs on my boards because I don't like being limited. A good solid screw terminal, well heck you can put whatever you want on it. And cables are cheaper too. Unfortunately people really like to have things quick and easy these days, instead of good and flexible. Here in a couple weeks I'll have a batch of dual-purpose boards that work for DPS800 and the DPS1200 (HP common slot) family PSUs, which can be built with screw terminals or 6-pin jacks.

Jeez, for that kind of money you could buy the tools to do it yourself.

I've been saying it for at least a month now, but there will be no mass-produced standalone BM1384 pod. If I had one in December, maybe January it could have worked. But I didn't. So I won't.

Compacs are selling out because people want them. They're sold out and no longer available from me because I'm tired of building them. I don't know if anyone could estimate how much manual work goes into assembling one of them, but when you make them with pulled chips the amount of manual work gets tripled. Now consider how much work would go into it if it had 8 pulled chips. Now consider how much of the price would actually be profit, from which I might actually get paid a bit for that work. See why it's not worth it?

Novak chose an LPC11u23 ARM, which is USB-capable and has a variety of ports and ADCs. It's in the same family as the ARM on the Avalon Nano and Ava6 control board (which I believe is LPC11u14? Going from memory on all these part numbers). I've worked with 8051 programmed from Windows, but not ARM programmed from Linux. He had a Linux toolchain set up, and before he left I believe he shifted it over to one of the general shop machines rather than his own box. I figure on utilizing the USB bootloader supported by the chip, so I can write code to it without requiring extra hardware - that also makes firmware updates in the future more possible.

So, I reckon if someone is pretty good with ARM, and maybe also c for some cgminer drivers, and has time to work on it in the next couple weeks, let me know.

Well I haven't made any design or toolchain choices. All that was Novak's job, so I'm trusting his decisions and picking up where he left off. I do actually have degrees in embedded and programming so I'm capable, just out of practice. And either way, it's not happening for a BM1384 pod.

Just throwing this out there, but I won't use that part unless I can't find something that was actually designed for board mounting instead of spliced inline on a wiring harness. Heck of a big hassle, not worth talking about.

I won't be building ethernet directly into anything anytime soon. Maybe if I end up building a rack miner (probably using 6 or 8 TypeZero boards) it'll have built-in ethernet, but that'd be because of an internal Pi-like controller tying everything together not because I put an ethernet-capable microcontroller on anything.

Well part of the advantage is I don't have to write a driver for it, which is good since I'm already doing everything else (and probably also code work, since the guy who's supposed to be helping hasn't gotten back to me in 3 weeks) for a couple other projects right now - on top of manufacturing and hosting. If someone wants to port over S5 code to work with a USB/UART controller, this guy would hook right up to it - except you wouldn't have a temp sensor since that ties in through I2C on the 18-pin header. I had a board design about Christmas with all that stuff integrated, and I handed it to Novak for firmware but he never got around to it and then he left for a freakin' sweet rocket scientist job so it's not gonna get done in any time frame where the BM1384 is even really viable as a hobby miner, not when I have A3218 and BitFury projects already underway.

Not sure I understand that question. Please elaborate.

My scam website's "meet the upper management" stock photo would probably be a half-dozen snappily-dressed mooners slappin' their cheeks with wads of cash.

I'm guessing Eric Franklin is the one in the middle.