Avalon's confirmed orders of chips ALONE are going to quadruple the network hashrate. Add in the other ASICs, difficulty will be between 6x and 10x+ higher, and prices seem to be dropping down Yes, understood. That's why I specified "at current difficulty" I did forget to change the exchange rate to current exchange though. At any rate, I think anybody who has seriously run the numbers with the intent of buying these chips knows that we're looking at a difficulty of 40-80million by the time we all get up and running. Even so, if you presume a difficulty of 80Million, and an exchange rate of $90/BTC, 500 chips still generates $2500/month. I'm guessing that both those numbers are on the upper end of 'bad-case' scenario, and we're probabaly more likely to jump in at about 40Million when these things start coming online, which should give a window to recover initial investment costs relatively quickly. But time is of the essence. Realistically, if we don't fund this thing by this time next week, we're DOA. So hope for some more big investors, or that BTC temporarily drops to $10, and I'll be in for 48BTC per day until it funds.  Instead of "at current difficulty" you might as well say "In fantasy land" |
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Any PPS pools?
PPNLS are awful and giving me nowhere near what i should
like, a fucking order of magnitude lower than i should, @ fc.dontmine.me
http://fc.ltcoin.net/weird, even here i get about 1/2th of what mining calculators say i should get.. (120/day with 2600khash) nm, just seems to be fluctuations. |
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You guys do realize not everything that is FCC certified has a sticker on it stating so?? Look at your cell phone, where is the sticker? Look at a cordless phone, where is the sticker??? Computer motherboard? Video Card? Generally you'll hunt in the book and lo-and behold there is the FCC compliance statement. Just saying...
And as far as the UL label on the power-supply, unless BFL is making that (and it looks like a fairly standard switching power supply brick, probably for a laptop) that's the manufacturer of said product.
Look under the battery, that's where my cell phone hides the FCC logo. Feel free to post a link verifying the FCC approval of any BFL product at www.fcc.gov. Okay, So it does get a sticker, fair enough, from the sounds of it it's hidden usually. Seeing as I don't have one, and apparently you don't have one either no way to verify whether it does or don't have said compliance. Uh, What about the "Coding in my sleep" dismantling of the device. You can see every square inch of the darn thing. (in 1080P no less) Okay, I watched that video, I didn't see a sticker, you know what? At this point I don't really care anymore. I get it you hate BFL, Josh is a liar. If you think a law has been broken report it, I'm sure the authorities have nothing better to do then chase down some random complaint about some random device that may or may not be certified by some other government authority. If you think there is provable fraud that will stand up to a jury and result in jail time, then take your evidence to the proper authorities for the full formal investigation and arrests. Centove, you do realize that your thinking is all screwed, right? You do understand the issue of non-FCC certification (or any other kind of certifications) are there for more than one reason, right? ------------------- Lets assume you don't actually know. Shipping to international countries requires some of these certifications. Without it, it gets sent back to it's origin or held for a VERY long time. Basic point you'd understand right? Okay. Good. What do you think happens if someone does actually report BFL to the FCC (and no, it won't be me)? Yeah, they get fined, their shipment may also stop going out, and in the most extreme cases the fines may crush their business. Relevant [to you] right? I could go on, but you need to realize it is not all about me. Who gives what I think. It is just plain common sense. Ignoring the certifications brings alot of different problems to the table. I am not one of them. Edit: BFL risks opening themselves up to a can of worms if one (or many) vengeful customer(s) get angry. You know there are plenty of those all over the place. There is massive, massive financial incentive for anyone big in mining who did NOT order BFL to report them to the FCC/etc and try and get their product jeprodized I think it's safe to assume BFL has already been reported dozens if not hundreds of times to the FCC, and they simply do not care. if by some miracle this fact has missed everyone : well, whoops, i guess the cats out of the bag. but i'm sure everyone knows this |
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46 pages in under one month? boy i wonder if this is a scam
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Any PPS pools?
PPNLS are awful and giving me nowhere near what i should
like, a fucking order of magnitude lower than i should, @ fc.dontmine.me
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They still have to make up the cost of the mask.
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I believe BKKcoin has mentioned about wanting to make a test board either with the avalon sample chips or a "dummy" that emulates their functioning?
I certainly want to do this as well, the way i see it there are two major things to test
1. Board functionality - Ideally done with a sample chip, but you can test a lot of things (uC, interface, layout/assembly, power supply [dummy load the QFN pads with their DC current draw - although you can't test Vcc noise]) even without the chip.
2. QFN Heat dissipation - this is the tricky part. I haven't been able to look but i was considering the possibility of getting another QFN chip that produces the same TDP and testing out the thermal resistance. of course if we can get our hands on the sample chips, this makes it easier to test everything.
to be honest though i wouldn't expect it to cost in 1000$. the most expensive part would be the 4 layer PCB and the annoyance of assembling the boards (or the price if you get someone to pick&place + reflow them)
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so yeah - saving a few cents here and there won't really matter.
Why not? I'm not saying the board design should prioritize price over quality, but there's also no point in spending more money than what is needed. 10 cents saved on a $150 purchase has the same value as 10 cents saved on a $1 purchase. Your time would be much better served trying to buy BTC cheap then, since it's the majority of the cost. what i mean is it's not worth trying to penny pinch, time is the #1 most important factor here, I would say design a PCB Assembly that you know will work (over engineer it where possible) and test it as throughally as possible prior to the actual chips arriving. And these will be running for a long time, 24/7. sort of like shipping costs, do you pay 4$ rush shipping for a 10$ product? Do you pay 4$ rush shipping for a 5,000$ product? also what is far more important is heat dissipation. |
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one more dumb question - [Ann] meaning announcement right? Just curious
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hi bkk
so you mean total cost for a pcb with 16 chips will be less than 200 usd?
chip included and speed will 275x16=4.4 gigahash/sec?
Those prices do not include, at the least *Heatsinks *Fans *The actual work of putting it together (if you go to a normal assembly house with only a few boards this could be damn expensive) *Shipping & Handling *Taxes *Import Tarrifs |
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I think the first chipbatches will arrive in some months. And in this month avalon will provide a free miner design. That means its possible that no developers are needed at all to create a miner. But the miners created by the developers can only be tested once they can run the miner with a chip to test it out. In 4 weeks test-chips are sent out so that miner-developers can test their miner.
What i mean... it takes some time until the chips arrive anyway. And when they arrive the miners will be ready to be created. A ETA isnt needed because of that i think.
But maybe i misunderstood you.
right - they said they would provide a reference design. But even if you use that you still have to get the PCBs ordered and the boards assembled. |
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played around with the BOM for about 5 minutes
Assuming BTC = 100$ and you buy chips at 0.08BTC/chip (aka 8$/chip)
Power Inductors $3.53
Caps $10.621
Resistors $1.61
Connectors $1.43
Regulators $8.75
Avalon ASIC chip $128.00
4 Layer PCB $5.00
Misc electronics $4.14
Avalon is 78% the cost of the PCB assembly with 16x of them
but this is of course without the heatsink/fan/etc
and that is very cheap for a 4 layer board.. very, very cheap. For many it will be more.
I have a nice piechart. can you not upload images here?
Cool. Yes, upload it to imgur.com and paste the image or link here. Assuming 8$/Avalon ASIC chip (1 BTC = 100$)  so yeah - saving a few cents here and there won't really matter. |
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Do the Avalon chips have the ability to adjust clock frequency / core voltage / etc?
I may make a fork(does that make sense for hardware?) of the board that adds the ability to do that.
It wouldn't be needed for a standard board but it'd be interesting to add
* Thermal sensors near each ASIC or heatsink that feed back over USB.
* Ability to adjust core voltage (probably by hand)
* Ability to adjust frequency (maybe digitally with a DDS, - really need the Avalon design docs to figure the best way to do this)
Edit : We will need to make sure the decoupling and board step down regulator is capable of driving 16 chips. it looks like the standard avalon board only runs 10 chips per VRM. Just really need the documentation from Avalon
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Smaller is harder but I'm not sure it matters. One of those magnifying circular light dealies is recommended. Parts count is the killer. I just finished the prelim parts list and pushed it to github. There's 320 parts on that 10x10cm board. Ouch!
(Someone please send me a Pick n Place machine)
70% of those parts are decoupling caps for the ASICs. Is it really necessary to have 14 per ASIC? As a back-of-the-envelope calculation, I get about 5 nC of charge per clock cycle (based on 1.5 A @ 282 MHz). With 0.8 uF of lumped capacitance, neglecting ESR/ESL, that's about a 7 mV drop, which is small. Maybe you can get away with less? Maybe you can use larger capacitance values but fewer caps overall? I suppose the only way to know is to do some in-circuit testing on actual ASICs. When you add an SMT capacitor to a circuit, what you're really adding is a series RLC circuit. R for the ESR of the capacitor and the traces, L for the parasitic inductance of the capacitor and the traces, and the C you actually want If you look at it on a network analyzer you'll see indeed the impedance has a minimum at a given frequency based on the ESL and Capacitance. You can add more capacitance but you will shift this frequency lower, and the minimum impedance will increase somewhat. Generally start with one say, 0.1uF capacitance, and if it doesn't work, try changing the value lower or higher (depending on the frequency you need decoupling at) - once that is ideal, the best thing to do is add more of the exact same value capacitor in parallel. this increases the capacitance but also DECREASES the paraistic inductance, so it gets BETTER and has more decoupling capacitance. note : People used to add say, 0.1uF, 10nF, 100pF caps in parallel because in theory this would give a wide range of decoupling the problem is it produces anti-resonance where the coupling gets worse. it's a very, very tricky thing to try and fine tune, and should be avoided in 95% of cases. my suggestion - put pads for lots of 0603 0.1uF capacitances, but only populate the reference PCB amount. if you need more or have to tweak, the pads are right there for it. It's standard practice to have pads for parts you don't actually populate going into production. |
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Do you know what the packaging of the QFN chips themselves is? (e.g. Tape & Reel, Cut Tape, Tray)
I do not. That question would best be directed to one of the board developers. Yeah, they haven't really been.. around have they? I think design documentation and reference PCB were expected in may sometime? |
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played around with the BOM for about 5 minutes
Assuming BTC = 100$ and you buy chips at 0.08BTC/chip (aka 8$/chip)
Power Inductors $3.53
Caps $10.621
Resistors $1.61
Connectors $1.43
Regulators $8.75
Avalon ASIC chip $128.00
4 Layer PCB $5.00
Misc electronics $4.14
Avalon is 78% the cost of the PCB assembly with 16x of them
but this is of course without the heatsink/fan/etc
and that is very cheap for a 4 layer board.. very, very cheap. For many it will be more.
I have a nice piechart. can you not upload images here?
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Smaller is harder but I'm not sure it matters. One of those magnifying circular light dealies is recommended. Parts count is the killer. I just finished the prelim parts list and pushed it to github. There's 320 parts on that 10x10cm board. Ouch!
What are all those caps for?, 128 + 96? (No schematic there yet to peruse.. ) Probably power supply decoupling on the VCC pins for the 0.1uF (8 per QFN), and possibly for the data lines for the 0.01uF (6 per QFN) sometimes people parallel multiple capacitors with different values (e.g. 100nF, 10nF, 1nF) but the practice is.. controversial. That doesn't appear to be the case here though since it's only 6 per QFN instead of 8 for the 0.01uF |
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I gues using 0402, 0603, 0805 doesnt make too much difference to the design, other than the bigger, the easier for the DIY'er?
Yeah, I was thinking this too - any reason those can't be all 0603 or larger? Also, what supplier is ES? I'm not familiar with that abbreviation. man i can't wait to get my hands on the cad files.. i'm going to have to play around with kicad in the mean time to get used to it |
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Do you know what the packaging of the QFN chips themselves is? (e.g. Tape & Reel, Cut Tape, Tray)
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Shipping/Contact information for my (previously atcsecure's) 252 chips -- sent via email. as described in this thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=192491.msg2006359#msg2006359Sent 20.164 BTC for the 252 chips remaining on ragingazn628's 1st group by to atsecure @ his address 1KZqvEDfxN7ciANDTeJqrkRdVyY983KwiD
transaction ID : b68098d0d438c68f9334685da8419e2c8aeae6de2a975b43caf8ea2f1f2ed5ad
confirmed!!! thanks - atcsecure |
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