I remember people said that about MySpace. Or was it AOL. Or NetNews.

Go figure.

Keep in mind that the "rich" people tend to be more visible than the "not rich" ones. I went through the dot.com thing in the late 80's, and the late 90's. A few of my friends are "rich", but most are *not* even though they put in every bit as much time and effort.

One of the rich ones is a complete moron, BLAST (Butt like a steel trap). However he did something I would not do; he quit his job, lived in his car, and answered the fucking telephone at one of the first ISP's. Yes, that is worth millions oddly enough because his chances of success at the time were flat-assed zero.

Me? I'm not rich, but I'm comfortable. What makes someone rich, or comfortable, or whatnot is a matter of debate and personal opinion. But keep in mind that the nature of something like bitcoin as a zero-sum game means that for someone to be filthy rich, there are plenty of early adopters who have nothing. The 10,000 btc pizza sounds like a big loss, but if it didn't happen then maybe bitcoin would never have made a newspaper and it would all be worthless. In which case the 10k pizza was the greatest investment of all time.

Go ahead and build something new. But way more than 99% of those new things fail, so do it for something other than money. Like for fun.

C

Thank you for the Molex information. I think a stock corsair power supply will be able to handle 12 chips which is what I will go for this weekend; if it works I'll order some edge connectors and start moving to 16gh or so.

Speaking of which, I need another fan. Oh great, totally forgot that....

C

Think of it this way: More people to confirm transactions. Which is always a good thing. But yeah the optimal solution would be if every to be delivered miner failed in a spectacular fashion so I was the only one in the world with an ASIC. :-)

Or something like that.

And worth more shares of course. As long as the time is not anywhere near the 10 minutes to find a block (at which point your work in progress goes down drain) it should be fine. As in many things, life is a balance; the more time your hashing engines spend hashing and not reporting things is more money.

Even on a diff 32 system overall (my 50gh unit) the two block erupters keep up with minimal rejects.

C

It probably will not make a diff to you; higher difficulty will affect the block erupters and GPU miners mostly. Technically higher difficulty is good; you spend more time bashing away at the problem and less time sending the results and such.

C

On the other hand I have figured out how to mount them to the board after reballing:

1) Set the heat under the unit to as high as possible (370f)
2) Walk away for awhile
3) Turn off heat.

The bottom heat is enough to melt lead solder, slowly. However I would have to just touch the chip while it was cooling and squish a bit of solder out, which of course means it's shorted again and needs to be reballed.

I. Hate. This. Junk. Board.

(This is the "danger board" that I am trying to get working. Was a completely baked nightmare, I have been trying out junker chips with mixed success)

Possibly, however I have never had anything like this happen with the new chips (I have literally baked them at 450c and they still work); these can't take a few seconds before going "pop" and spitting solder out the side. Annoying.

Need to think about another method; I think I'm going to try just preheat for 10 minutes (I'm using lead solder on the reballs) and if that doesn't stick go to the microwave oven. Ok, the toaster oven. :-)

C

Sort of. Here is one of the chips with the top... Removed.



And here is a closeup with a 6x loupe in front of the camera:



Note that the curled up thing on the top is the chip itself, with little tiny solder dots on it. Also note the mask that connects it to the BGA and the smaller than hair *wires* that go from the chip to the BGA board.

What's happening here is that heat from the top does not flow through the chip carrier; it gets stuck in the top chip. And heats the solder balls under it to the point where they expand and explode out the sides of the chip (seriously I had a little ball of solder on top of the chip). I can't believe that most BGA chips have lots of little wires in there; maybe they do.

The new model seems to be the chip right on top of the BGA bottom. Heat flows through, there doesn't seem to be solder inside, and they never give me a problem.

I think I need to do this with a home-made reflow oven and not air heat. I can only get the bottom up to 375 or so; one option would be to direct the 400c air heat to the bottom of the board under the chip and try to bring that region to 400+. Or something. But man is it a problem to work with these chips.

C

Wrecked another old-style chip in testing; even with a completely perfect reballing and placement, the board was shorted out, and the problem was the chip. I could see a tiny amount of solder around the top of the chip. So I broke the chip open.

These chips are way, way different from what I thought. I was expecting a simple interface, but there are tiny little wires in there going to a chip assembly that is even *smaller* than the BGA. It's like a pico-BGA or something.

I have no idea anymore what BFL was thinking. But a warning: It is not possible to drop the chips into place by using heat from the top; I will have to explore using heat from the bottom if even possible.

Very interesting.

C

I'm amazed it worked, need to do little_single or jalapeno.



That's really weird, how many chips are reported in bfgminer (use D, then M to show the chips)

C

Just bought another (25gh) miner. With a combination of bitcoins and my fees for fixing things (also collected in bitcoins)

I've been thinking: I repair watches (1860-1930 pocket watches especially) and a cleaning is normally $150 (where I take it apart and everything). Jewelers charge $500+ and send the thing out to a chop shop. So I will do this for bitcoin; where is a good place to advertise this (say .15btc for a cleaning and service)?

C

Hm. I may try this on my 5 chip jally (the one I just can't seem to add chips to). What types of resistors are those little things (soic or something); I feel weird wiring a 1/4 watt axial resistor in there. :-)

C

Speaking of which, what resistor are you swapping out to boost the power, and do you have a digikey/mouser part number? My 8 chip jally is actually humming at 32gh/45c due to the water block and now I'm thinking..... Just a bit.

C

Hm. Does boosting the voltage boost the temps of the FETs on the jalapeno? I wonder because it's usually amps that cause the heat, and if you drive the chips at a higher voltage then the amps should go down or stay the same (maybe). I could see the chip temps going up more, but do the FETs?

I think if I tried this on my 8 chip jalapeno it would catch fire.

And... I took apart the box again and took a look at the existing FETs. Good thing I did because this board has some differences.

First, the driver is not an 1850; it's an ADP 1877. Looks to be a higher power version, which is good since those are taxed. Likewise the FETs are IRFH 5250's and what appear to be 16404's from TI. Both heavier duty components than the little singles.

I also verified that the chokes are the gateways between the power supplies and the 1 volt main lines. So I'm going to order six of each type of FET, and a controller chip. I'll get the 4.7uf electrolytics from my dead jally, and will get the 470uf ones as well, although I think this board has plenty of them.

Then I will try adding 4 chips and see what happens. It's going to be slower going; I have to map out the chips by adding them one at a time and then testing, which requires a lot of heat sinking. Maybe I'll get myself a good temporary sink to run for a few minutes for testing each chip. Once I have 4 I can put on an AL heat sink or something like that.

TO be honest I was temped to toss a chip on there and see what happens. But at the same time I knew I couldn't sink it, so I will wait...

In the meantime, what is the part number for the PCI-e sockets and the fan sockets on this board? I'm probably going to need another fan, and more power input on the 12 volt side rather soon. :-)

Found the other one at Digikey. Not quite sure why they did two totally different models, but I'll give it a go and wait a few days for the chips. I do have the ones from this trashed jally unit here, but since the power supplied blew up I have no idea what kind of shape it is in. Then again I could test them with a 2 volt power supply and a light bulb circuit like I do with my IGBTs; hook it up with the light bulb between source and drain, (a LED would be safer actually) then touch source to gate and the light should go on. Drain to gate should keep the light off. Or maybe you don't need to do that with FETs; with IGBTs the residual charge on the gate is enough to keep it on.

C

Not to mention the downfall of organized religion: How will a person drop bitcoins into the collection plate? And how will the Church know who to shake down?

C

Oddly enough I am bored after getting jallies to 8 chips. So I found a new challenge:

Get a BFL Single/25 to 60gh. This will be interesting... I'm keeping a thread over here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=424604.msg4624265#msg4624265

What's the worst that can happen?

C

Sounds good. I just posted the pics on the other thread. I think this might be possible to do, at least to 4 more chips. This is going to be fun; I'm going to screw up a perfectly working single.

Anyone from BFL still read this; if so are there any schematics for the bigger single boards around?

C