Update

Ok today was basically a good one and we think we have the in-built programmer sorted. We have a couple of tweeks to go in mainly related to us getting our unique sub-ID today for the USB from FTDI but it's basically working with the default ID. That tidy up should be done over the weekend. In parallel with this we are going to test the entire set of boards with this before we let them our of our clutches and send to those expecting them. Ok so that means they didn't ship today but we do want to be as sure as we can that there no bugs with a feature as important as this.

Our new bench and test kit was fitted into place today and we did a pile of testing today with boards. It will still take a few weeks to full refine the processes but it was working well today and doing everything we wanted out of this part of the process.

Bitstream - No progress today due to all the other things going on.

Packaging for the first 100 boards arrived late yesterday so we are ready to go on that front.

Stacking kit - We have not fully decided on what to offer as standard in the kit. Obvious will be pillars and an up/down cable. What we have not decided on are things like power linkages or r/a brackets for push pull fans.

UP/DOWN - Our structure and use of the UP/DOWN is now fairly well defined and a single USB cable should support an entire stack of boards with CGminer. MUltiple USB cable, multiple stack, combinations are also possible. There are a pile of commands we are putting in for extended CGminer facilities.

Some of you have asked about power linkages and input power. Using the PCIe power connector as input 1 board could be chained using the disk drive connector as those are simply hard wired together. I wouldn't recommend 2  but that might work. 2 units will take a greater current than the disk drive connector is technically rated for. The pheonix and jack are fed in through a diode to protect against bad polarity on the jack and bad wiring on the pheonix. That diode stops output power feeding on those 2.

For the ultimate of power routing the phenoix connector offers the ability to use heavy, low loss, wire gauges over 3 strands of 12V and 3 strands of GND so a heavy power distribution for a high current supply is possible and power bussing for a board stack is very practical. We talk a bit more of the options here as we get to the point of shipping large orders of Cairnsmore1.

Yohan

It's an interesting business model and it will suit a lot of people. I don't have a problem with that approach. someone has done some work and they get rewarded for it. We do think these hashing rates can be achieved if not more in a Spartan-6. We will have a look at this although maybe not for next week or two while we are smoothing out the assembly line.

On languages both VHDL and Verilog have similarities and relationships to C. VHDL probably is now the closest although the more advanced System Verilog is in there too. VHDL tends to have a bigger base in Europe and in the FPGA community. Verilog is strong in the US and in ASIC teams. We work with both but strongly biased to VHDL which is 80-90% of what we do. Things like "types" and "overloading" are used in VHDL and a very familiar concept to a C programmer. C programmers tend to have most difficulty dealing with the parallelism. It's a bit different handling 10000 things happening on a clock edge to 1 thing happeing in most CPUs.

If an ASIC is the answer we will consider it. However I have my doubts about the economic viabilty of an ASIC approach. As has been discussed elsewhere I would consider if the Bitcoin market will remain stable. Hardware costs are actually part of Bitcoin stability and if you get an ASIC at low cost I suspect instability and maybe collapse might be the result.

A lot of this depends whether there really is a proper ASIC, what technology it uses, and what BFL sell it at. I won't add to the debate about how they fund that. They may of course be going for a last big bang, make big money quick, approach where Bitcoin ends up being the casuality.

I would also not rule out that we could put together a serious challenge using FPGAs. Cairnsmore1 is our initial product and we have played very safe with the technology so that we could deliver on schedule. That was an engineering and management decision. It also doesn't mean we have showed our best techology yet. That's not to in any way suggest Cairnsmore1 isn't a good product. I am very happy with what we have done now on at 6 weeks into the project and it will be a good for the customers that use it.

I think for the moment we wait to see what BFL actual releases. There is definate an element of trying to spoil the market with lots of bluster about what they are bringing. Enterpoint won't enter into silly games like that and we will concentrate on actual designing and producing good products. When we are ready we will talk about what is coming. For the moment our main concentration is getting Cairnsmore1 to customers as the best solution today and the team are working hard to achieve that.

Yohan

Time will tell if it is as good as the spec but the F12 has a 6 year warranty and I am sure I saw a operation lifetime spec of 100K or 150K hours lifetime which is believeable given the type of bearing it has. The one thing they could use to improve is their website.

Yohan

If the build in programming is working you won't need a programming cable and that is our no1 aim to have that working this week. That makes it easier for everyone and we can then update bitstreams as we have better ones. Secondary aim is to have a working bitstream at the same time. We have held the main ship until Friday not only to try and achieve these things but also because our main packaging does not arrive until then. This small delay makes some sense for us to get these things right. However if any of our customers are proficient in FPGA programming and have the tools we can ship them tomorrow in adhoc packaging. Anyone who has their early ship notification and that feels that they are in that category just let us know.

The few people that have boards already for development have cables with them so we can keep them up to date in the short until the in-built programmer takes over.

We have some customisations to CGminer in hand for our own bitstream but if we get the Icarus bitstream hack working first then it should just look like 2 x Icarus. The Icarus way is a temporary solution and was always planned that way. We have thought from the beginning that we can offer something much better in performance and you can all speculate what that might be. Until it works I won't say much more. It could be a bad idea and big damp squib after all. The team are working hard on all of these things and just a little patience is needed whilst we get them right.

Production wise it is shaping up nicely. Our new Cairnsmore1 final assembly and test area gets fitted and kitted out tomorrow and after that it gets a bit easier for us to push large numbers of boards through these stages.

Update

Ok first units are out. The first few days will be a very slow build up so a little patience is required. We are aiming for most units to ship with at least with at least in-built programming if not some level of bitstream so we will take 1 or 2 days to try and get that right. This also happens to tie up with our proper packaging that arrives hopefully on Friday. If we miss shipping on Friday for any reason there won't be any shipping until next Wednesday because of the Queen's 60th jubilee public holidays on Monday and Tuesday. Virtually nothing, except having a good time, will happen in the UK on the 4th and 5th of June. So we will do our best to get a pile of units out on Friday.

We are also doing other activities at the moment which whilst mundane also that tie in with efficient shipping, product quality, and how fast our shipping ramp is. Those include designing and manufacturing some simple custom test equipment and even physically constructing the programming and test line in an organised fashion as opposed to a hap hazard bench usage. This includes the arrival and assembly of some new work benches which cross fingers actually turn up today. All of this will make our test much more reliable and less labour intensive and allow us to achieve the necessary throughput.

We are also going through the process of refining the test proceedure and training staff on how to run it.

So please bear with us through this short transition stage. We know that you are all impatient to get mining with the Cairnsmore1 and I think it will meet your expectations when your order actually arrives. After all it's only 40 days since we announced the concept and started work on the design.

If your order was initially indicated as mid-June, or earlier, you probably should have had a first unit shipment offer. If you didn't get that either contact us or/and check your spam folder.

For those of you further down the pre-order list we should a better idea on shipping dates in a week or so once we have bedded down the test and shipping line a bit. That put togther with assembly data and expected arrival of parts will let us define the delivery schedule more accurately. We will update everyone then accordingly.

Yohan

Let's clarify the position.

First there is no up/down problem. No one outside of Enterpoint really knows the whole picture of what we are doing with this interface and all I will say at this point is that I think you will like what we are doing here.

On carriage you have the choice to go and buy elsewhere if you don't like our prices. We are not making profit in this area. It's easy to compare what big shipping operations like say Amazon can do but they get a hugh discount over what we can get. They also have specialist packing and shipping operations that are very cost effective. That's not the same for a smaller business running on a tiny fraction of the shipping volume.

On the TX/RX between the 2 FPGAs we won't change the PCB. The Icarus bitstream compatibility was only ever a "get going" solution to give us time to work on our way of tackling this. To respin PCBs would be expensive in money and shipping schedule and it is better to move directly to our planned second stage of having our own build of bitstream which costs us a few days of work but not necessarily in the shipping schedule. We don't need the TX/RX link at all for this and it was our plan not to use these ourselves. Outside of this minor issue the board design is holding up well in our testing and we are very pleased with the results.

We are working on the in-field reprogramability features as well as a back up to having a working bitstream and for any bug fixes needed. If those features work we don't have to load a working bitstream at shipping at all and it can be done in a simple fashion when a customer receives the product. It won't need a programming cable just the normal USB data cable.

At software level we are still looking ok for Icarus type interface compatibility. We understand a lot of this interface already and learning more every day we work on it.

We are not supplying power adaptors. These are add 60-100% more weight to a shipment and the shipping costs more than the adaptors. I am sure someone will complain if we jack up shipping more than the power brick cost. However we are going to try and obtain samples and recommend a few e.g. we can see one we think suitable at Walmart for our US customers. There are also others in Ebay that come from China but ship worldwide. You also can use ATX (needs switch on mod) or anything with the PCIe or HD Drive power connectors and these can be easy options. We are looking at doing a ATX adaptor that will give the ability to use ATX power supplies standalone and give the switch on feature that is the biggest barrier.

Yohan

A lot of this depends on the contract we have with individual couriers and they price based on your profile. Taking FEDEX as a case we can actually send more cheaply on International Priority than International Economy and that is peculiar to us. DHL is getting a lot of our business currently but they are being competitive and wanted our business. We are talking to the courier companies to see if we can do better based on a raised volume.

For those of you within the first 50 orders you should have got an email today asking if you wanted your first board on an early shipping slot i.e. this week or next week depending on how things here work. We are now taking payments for people that want the early shipment. After this first week of shipping and a bit of the next we will revert to shipping purely in order we received orders. It is then all down to how fast we ramp up output and when those large amounts of heatsinks arrive.

Yohan

Warranty is 1 year.

Postal charges have gone up significantly here and it is not much cheaper by postal service. It also means someone has spend 30 minutes going to a Post Office that costs us and that is way more than the difference to a courier who picks up at our shipping dept. never mind the disruption to the flow of orders out of the door. Tracking on postal services is also very poor and on an item of this value we need to ensure that something actual arrives.

We will be using a mixture of couriers DHL, FEDEX and probably UPS depending on where they are going to. Depending on the service we use most places in Canada would normally be delivered anything from next day to 3-4 days.

There is a benefit drawing air over the rear surface of the board so back to back possibly isn't a great idea. We made some special provisions in the PCB design to improve heatflow to the back surface from the chips. That effect is additive to the more conventional top side heatsink and fan and would benefit for air over the back of the board or even water cooling. However the side blow push-pull option should work fairly well and keeps the stack height down to 39mm on the first release of boards and possibly 29mm on the boards with a smaller height heatsink although on the latter a bit higher might be better for rear cooling. There is experimentation still to be done there. We also have some other ideas as well to play with although they may not make an appearance until Cairnsmore2 where we have bunch of new ideas to show you all.

We are looking at brackets now for the side blow option and more on that in the next week or so. As that is a retrofit option it is not high on our list to sort out in the very short timeframe.

Yohan

Push pull fans will allow a lower stack height and the pillars normally used for the fan could be used as stacker pillars instead. That would get a stacking distance of about 39mm on the current heatsink.

We have not bothered looking at efficiency and thermals as yet. Until the bitstreams are running in all devices there is not much point doing formal measurements. That said early informal observation is showing good results.

The pillars we use are a custom height already and made by a company local to us. We can get pretty much any reasonable height made in a few days subject to a minimum order quantity which I think is about 100 pieces. The curent stacking pillar shown will be available as part of an optional stacking kit which will have the 4 pillars (75mm), an up/down cable and still to be decided maybe a linking power cable.

The simple stacking arrangement with fans in normal place and not to be confused with the side blow push pull fan option.

Manufacturers of regulator chips usually headline the highest efficiency achieveable which is usually at the smallest input/output difference. It's not unusual for a 12V to 1.2V regulator circuit to be around 75-80% even if the headline says 90%+. Best efficiency is rarely at maximum current either.

Yohan

That is exactly one our problems starting to use Bitcoin as a payment in a hurry. All of our bills are in USD or GBP so we would have to do that conversion. Then there is the admin on that multiplied by a couple of hundred customers.

Ok there wasn't much progress yesterday as expected although we nearly have our own first FPGA build yesterday. It has a few routes to complete and we might get to that later today. There will be limited progress today for various reasons but after that we will be back on full strength.

Fans, mounting pillars, stacking pillars, and pillar feet have now arrived in large numbers and we will show a picture of a pair of boards stacked, using the optional stacking pillars, hopefully later today. If we can make today's shipping cut-off a handful of boards will leave today to some of you who have requested developer status. If not these will go Monday.

The plan is currently that the main ship will start Monday or Tuesday. The first couple of days it will be relatively small numbers as we bed down the final assembly, testing, boxing and shipping processes. As with most projects this should gain momentum day on day probably for 2-3 weeks before we actually hit output and then things really start to shift.

The answer another question we are currently playing with CGMiner and that recognises the first chip in each of our pairs. The TX/RX issue is stopping the action of the second chip of the pair and we are awaiting our first build to complete so that can cease being an issue.

Proper benchmarks will need the second FPGAs up to be totally meaningful and that is coming but not for few days yet. Our main focus is to have a Cairnsmore1 boards loaded with a basic operational build. Higher performance bitstreams will come later.

Yohan

Nothing formalised yet on the UP/DOWN but there will be and I will talk a bit more about planned functionality of this interface in a few days time. It will be a simple straight forward 1-1 wiring in the main up/down configuration but many other things are possible.

We got first results today using one of the standard Icarus bitstreams and we do have a small problem using the standard bitstream in that we appear to have TX and RX crossed over incorrectly between the 2 FPGAs in the chain so we believe the second FPGA was not getting commands correctly. We will modify one board to check if this is correct over the next few days.

On the one half of pair that was working it was running at the 190MH/s that was expected of that particular bitstream using a standard clocking arrangement. We can sort out the TX/RX issue in a number of ways - a bitstream hack to swap TX/RX, a straight rebuild, or a whole new virgin bitstream option. We are working on all 3 of these options. It's more annoying than a major problem as it would have been nice for an Icarus bitstream just to drop in and work as a demo.

Todays test was purely about getting the bitstream and comms working and not in any way a performance test and it just ran at standard settings. We didn't do any serious measurements today on heat and power but the FPGA we were working with appeared to be in a good state and wasn't too hot.

There won't be any work on this tomorrow and probably a limited amount on Friday so don't expect much more until early next week.

Yohan

This is how the first 100 complete units will look. After then it 10mm lower.

Update Time

Ok the machines have started and the first Issue 1.1 boards came of the line on Friday. We have been doing basic testing on them and doing work on our Controller design. That basic testing is now complete and our line has been given the green light to continue with the rest of this week's planned build of 50 boards.

We have now started to look at the bitstream solution and software interface. We are going to try and complete this within a few days but as it is a development there is always a chance of a problem. However during these few days we are looking to ship a few boards to developers of bitsreams/software and anyone that feels that they are in that category, and have not already flagged that to our sale team, should do so if they want a very early board. Early access developers should be happy to programming FPGAs with programming cables as that will be the way for at least a few days to program these boards. I am expecting the first boards to ship on Friday/Monday to Developers.

We are now in a good position on component supplies and we will be looking at the finer detail of the schedule in about 1-2 weeks time when we have a clearer view of how the assembly and test lines cope with the new board. We should start updating you all on when your boards are likely to arrive.

Our order book for July is nearly full and I expect that to close before Friday and we will quote September or later thereafter. There is a possibility of pulling some time back but we won't make any promises at this stage. We are not promising anything production wise for August currently as it is a major UK holiday time and our production levels will be substantially lower. However there is likely to be some August production but we need to do a proper calculation of the holiday effect and that will take some time to do. Some staff have not booked holidays yet and that is a moving effect as well that we are not certain of as yet. I may revise this delivery advice once we see how the lines cope with the Cairnsmore1 in numbers but that is a bedding in and learning process that we still have to do.

Generally we are meeting our aggressive design and production start up schedule and I hope everyone is happy on that. It is a bit rough and ready at the moment but I did say it was likely to be that way at the beginning less than 5 weeks ago when we announced the board concept and that will improve over the coming few weeks.

Email response times will be slow on the 24th May as we are running a major training event in conjunction with our partners on our general product lines.

We should start asking some of you for your initial payments late this week or early next.

Yohan