I had one of those 49-port hubs I got damaged off CrazyGuy sometime last year but I fixed and sold it 'cause bills were due. I'm kinda wishing I'd hung onto it instead. I mean my little 10-port is nice but it's not that nice. Maybe I should build more. Or get a forty-niner. I still have some 30A power supplies, and if that's not good enough it's not like I can't build one better. I mean a slight change to the TypeZero power systems as designed would get me upward of 50A of 5VDC. That'd run a lot of sticks. I could fill the hub with 250MHz sticks and get about 670GH off that 50A. I wonder when was the last time someone had 670GH worth of stick miners running together? That would have taken 2000 Block Erupters. Dang. Actually, let me do some checkin' and see if I can't scrounge one of those up.

Speaking of, I should probably post pictures of the thing full-up with proper green-heatsink Compacs running on Novak's cgminer. I think we had about 8 plugged in when I left the shop this afternoon. They'll be swapped out with more in the next couple days.

Apparently Monday is some sort of labor holiday ("Labor Day is observed in the United States on the first Monday of September to celebrate the achievements of workers and the labor movement") which means the post office is closed and, I dunno, people are supposed to take a day off work? Yeah like that'll happen, dangit I got sticks to make. So it looks like shipping will resume Tuesday.

I only know of fusion power in experimental stages, but would be interested to see if someone had a viable over-unity fusion power generation process even in limited deployment.

Also on the subject of fusion having nothing to do with bombs... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

Also on the subject of the Antminer S9... actually wait I have nothing to contribute there. But Bitmain's apparently working on a full-custom 16nm chip we'll probably see on it.

Big news, folks. The first ten small orders (that aren't going overseas, sorry TheRealSteve you'll have to wait for Monday) are heading to the post office right now.

I'll be out this evening and most of the day tomorrow, but between Sunday and Monday I hope to get another at least 30 sticks going. That coupled with the ones we still have will catch me up through the first big lot and all the pending international orders.

Yeah, I definitely forgot to send you updated files. In my defense I spent all of twenty minutes in the office today, and the other twelve hours going between the robot and the workbench. I'll take care of it first thing in the morning - likely within ten hours from now.

If by "cheap victory" you mean ending the war without requring a ground invasion of the Japanese mainland which would have cost millions of lives for both sides - and ripped up the country even worse than it already was - then yeah it was cheap.

Orders are confirmed and sales are updated.

I'm having some issues with the QFN parts going down reliably. I'm guessing a lot of it is poor adhesion because the solder paste is basically shot. Solder paste is basically powdered solder and flux in a liquid binder that evaporates when hot, so it gets shipped overnight with an ice pack. UPS beat me to the shop by about 45 minutes last Saturday, and apparently the office is closed Saturday even when there are trucks running because the 800 number customer service people couldn't get ahold of anyone at the office or any drivers to let them know our $100 thing we paid an extra $50 to get overnighted because it was perishable needed to get here sometime when we're actually open instead of letting it sit and get ruined all weekend and arrive on Monday having wasted not only the cost of the product but the extra money on expedited shipping. Not too happy about that. So now I'm having to manually go back over pretty much every stick and make sure the buck, USB, ASIC and the big FETs are stuck down right. The ASIC is especially temperamental.

As of right now I have 21 completed sticks which need a bit of Novaking and a quick test and they'll be ready to ship. Tomorrow I'll be cutting out of work early (3PM instead of 10-11PM like the last 5 days straight) so I might not get a lot more done. But we'll see. If I can run up about half a dozen more tomorrow I can ship the first 8 small orders.

The picture of 9 sticks running in the first post, the 10th port is powering a Pi with Minera and they're all running off the stock cgminer on it (as U3). It'll be better when Novak's cgminer driver is done, but it does work. Not sure if the latest version has U3 support.

Breakeven hasn't really been a thing with stickminers in what, a year and a half? The point of this guy isn't to make bank. Really it was a dev step on the road to bigger things, but enough people wanted it to be an actual product that now it's an actual product. The price is as good as I can make it. By manufacturing in-house (and nobody's really getting paid to do that) we're saving a lot so the price is basically materials and some margin to keep the lights on at the shop. That said, I understand it's still not low enough to get ahead (with the best efficiency, highest hashrate and lowest $/GH of any stickminer ever) but it's priced to be fun. The feature set of variable voltage and variable clock makes it probably the least boring stickminer ever, and it's intended to be good for n00bs who want to get a taste for mining without an expensive or cumbersome setup. You get to play with cgminer integration, learn about voltage setpoints and how they affect your error rate and overall hashrate, see some flashy lights and maybe decide if you want to move on to bigger better machines now that you've gotten your feet wet.

So, if you want to break profit you shouldn't be looking at stickminers. But if you want a lottery ticket or a gift to get a friend hooked on mining, this'll do.

EU pricing is higher because it's not the same stick. I licensed the design to a guy in EU who is building sticks in Germany and selling there. His price is his own to set. It's higher for a couple reasons which I think he explains in his sales thread - including VAT on parts, assembly labor, stuff like that. If I wasn't building Compacs myself but had them done in a regular fab house our sticks would be a lot more expensive. But I prefer to do things myself, and we bought that fancy pick-and-place so that we wouldn't have to rely on (or more specifically, pay for) someone else to do assembly for us. Not everyone has that option, or is willing to take that option. Novak and I are just a special kind of different.

Ew.



Also,


Well you're in luck, because that's not actually what our business is about. We're not doing any retrofitting of boards, but building new boards which can be retrofit onto existing machinery. A strict parsing of your sentence leads me to believe you misunderstood that point, but I could be wrong. Additionally, the boards are one of several ongoing projects within and without Bitcoin. It's mostly my focus, really, and Novak's working on nifty stuff for completely different markets.


Right, but starting a farm helps literally nobody but ourselves. I don't know if you've noticed or not, but most of the things Novak and I have been doing on the forum over the last, um, slightly longer than two years has been centered around not being greedy and working to help other folks who are getting the short end of things on account of all the people running big farms. You're basically telling us that a good business to be in is the exact opposite business we're in.


True on both counts. Neither of us want to be businessmen, and neither of us really like businessmen. Right now I hold a deep respect for exactly one businessman, which is my uncle who, in partner with about five other people, quit working at a factor and started their own because upper management wouldn't let them make required changes that would get their product quality up and better serve the customer. Surprise, within two years the old place was almost out of business and his company was building an addition to double the workspace. I respect the kind of businessman whose decisions center around doing the best job possible because perfection has its own merits, not because perfection is optimal on your price/profit curves.
You might have noticed we're not giving bulk discounts on Compacs, and probably won't have bulk discounts on any miners going forward. That's because I don't want to be the kind of business that does favors to rich people. By not favoring the rich, we're respecting regular folks. In the bitcoin economy, the rich and the regular folks are in direct competition for a finitely scarce resource, except everyone from power companies to mining manufacturers are giving rich guys help and nobody's doing jack squat for the guys at the bottom. As a guy at the bottom myself, why the heck should I be in business to favor the rich, or to become the rich myself (by first incurring massive debt, of course, to build up the business you recommend - which is pretty stupid already, since the only debts my business has right now are monthly bills like rent and electric) by ignoring and, by merit of simply existing, screwing over all of my peers? That actually does sound a lot like how businesses get run in America, but another thing you might notice about Novak and I is we don't really care how things are done elsewhere or by other people. We have our standards of "right" and we operate by those standards. Terrible businessmen? Yes. Operate a farm and build machinery only for ourselves? Hell no. Never.

You mean like what those German guys were supposed to be doing for the last year?

I mentioned that to Novak. He implemented the same ID thing in his cgminer driver and it's working fine. We haven't looked at the new BFG yet but I'll make sure it gets done tomorrow and let you know.

Three of them are mining. One of those three is the first off the line and I'm gonna keep it forever. The other two, well Novak needed something to test his driver with multiple devices. Yeah it's a bit cheating, but we aren't stressing them I promise. The one we pushed to 450MHz this afternoon was one of my old V0.3 test sticks.

Funny story. Novak used to live in Ferguson. Ain't that far from here.

I'm definitely looking forward to hearing what you find out. They're probably more likely to talk to someone that wants 1000 than someone that wants 50. Our parts order arrived today which includes everything I need to get a 4-chip BM1384 pod figured out, and about half the stuff I need for a TypeZero. I'll get back to it as soon as Compacs are caught up. We've almost sold as many as we have parts for up-front. Hopefully I can scrounge up some more bucks to get a standing stock of at least a hundred sticks or so.

Well, it just took 31 minutes to place 5 boards. Admittedly I had to stop it quite often to splice tape. I don't have full reels of everything so I didn't have the foot and a half of blank tape and the end this thing needs to start out with for the auto peelers to work, so I ended up scrounging up spent tape and, well, taping it together. I think I have it ironed out now where I shouldn't have any more breaks, but I ended up burning a lot of time.

Of the five individual test placements (with refined calibration on each one) four of them work and three are currently mining on the Burger address using Novak's custom cgminer driver (still experimental of course). The fifth, well it was giving me fits. I could get either power or data but not both. Not sure what's up. But the most recent two sticks took all of five minutes each to touch up, verify and install heatsinks. It's bedtime so I'm not going to snap apart and test the next five sticks coming out of the oven. Been here long enough already.

I don't know how many we'll be shipping tomorrow. If all 5 work, I'll have nine working which knocks off the first three orders. I'll immediately start working on the remaining 20 on the board, which knocks off the next six. After that is the first bulk purchase, which the next panel will cover (it'll also hit the next 4 individuals. I need to update my queue with recent sales. Anyone that's purchased in the last day, my wallet has to reindex (grumble grumble power outage) so I can't confirm purchases until it's caught up. There are at least two pending.

You mean Android OS, the least-secure and most spyware-ridden phone OS in the world?
Please note you're talking to someone who's been using the same flip-phone since 2008.

I've posted all the news I have about BM1385 purchases. Heard no more from them since then.

Also there's at least three or four S6 threads already in the speculation forum. This didn't really need a new thread.

I should have seen it. I made a few changes and sent it off to manufacture before getting test boards because I didn't have an extra two weeks or couple hundred bucks. The changes were entirely cosmetic (like getting the reset cap out from under the heatsink, or aligning the Tx resistors properly, or labeling the backside test pads) and that pot was the only one appears to have not worked right. Friggin' silkscreen layer.

The worst of it is, I bet it wasn't caught on German Guy's fab either so his sticks will probably have the same problem. I've already emailed him about it and hopefully it's easy to take care of.

Yeah, the green heatsinks are pretty darn sexy. I can't wait to get nine of these little suckers lined up in my test hub and see 'em flashing away.

I had to touch this guy up by hand a bit, since I don't have all the component rotations set right on the robot - first time and all, you know. I caught most everything and flipped it manually, but I didn't notice that one of my FETs was on backward. In my defense they're pretty symmetrical. In any case, the body diode conducted 5V into the ASIC and it's probably dead now. The FET itself was also damaged, which damaged the buck controller so power didn't work even when the FET was put back on right. So replaced FETs, buck controller and ASIC and now I have a fully working Compac - first one off the line!

I need to do a bit of firmware jiggling on it (with data courtesy Luke-Jr) and make sure it works properly on BFG and cgminer. It's working on Novak's Compac test build of cgminer right now - pictured above, it's running 200MHz.

I need to run out a second stick after correcting rotations (and hopefully teaching the robot how to handle the pot), and that'll also learn me how to set up paneled boards. If the second one comes out working without manual intervention, I'll run out the full panel.

I did notice one small issue with the PCB, which is slightly embarassing. When I changed stuff around the pot to give us clockwise-increase adjustments, there was a single small trace that got left over, hidden underneath the silkscreen, which basically shorts the whole pot to ground and forces the regulator to minimum 550mV output. It'll just take a minute with a good knife to sever said little quarter-millimeter-sqaure piece of aberrant copper and get things back to right. So far that's the only issue I've found.

I had assumed a flathead screw in countersunk hole. If we go dimple recessing, there should still be plenty of clearance between the cards and the top of the case.

I know a lot of folks shelf miners, but there's not really a good reason to make it not rack-mountable just in case.