Zadig has never worked on both Win7 systems I've tried to put it on in the last couple years. I have the silabs driver working fine, used it on an older cgminer for TheRealSteve's block erupter competition. But Zadig installer has never worked, and it's not because of any Windows security garbage.


The U3 uses four BM1382 (same as S3/S4); the miner he's testing has a single BM1384 (same as S5) on it. The table was frequencies cgminer understands for the U3, but the listed hashrates are what the BM1384 will do with those frequencies. It's a 55-core chip, so MHz to GH/s is times 0.055

Also, if you have a Raspberry Pi, I ran five sticks off the stock cgminer in the latest Minera build without any problems. If you don't want to screw with the overly scripted and weighty web UI, just ssh into the pi and do stuff from there.

The bulk of this information is already presented in the GekkoScience BM1384 Dev thread, so don't be too surprised if it gets pared out of this review thread. But for now, there it is.

An upper-middle-class house in the US will not have 240V common circuits, no matter when it was built. DId you wire in 240V outlets specifically, or are you running it off a repurposed dedicated AC or dryer plug or something?

I've not used suggest-diff but that's probably a good idea. Eligius starts out at 128, which this stick should see about 7 instead.

The 4.9.1 compiled into the latest Minera build works fine, but I've been testing with 4.9.0 on Windows so I can verify it's good.

I think the drivers can be found external to Zadig and possibly installed manually. I've not tried. My Win7 desk machine has never taken kindly to Zadig installer.

If it enumerated as a COM port, you need to install the WinUSB driver for hotplug support and such (Zadig) which will allow cgminer to detect it natively. You'll also want to include "--au3-freq xxx" in the command line, where "xxx" is a valid operating frequency. According to the code I'm seeing (AntMiner U3 is under the Icarus driver), valid frequencies (and their associated per-chip GH/s) are:

100	5.5
125	6.88
150	8.25
175	9.63
193.75	10.66
196.88	10.83
200	11
206.25	11.34
212.5	11.69
218.75	12.03
225	12.38
237.5	13.06
243.75	13.41
250	13.75

The command line I use is "cgminer.exe -o stratum.mining.eligius.st:3334 -u 1BURGERAXHH6Yi6LRybRJK7ybEm5m5HwTr -p x --au3-volt 0 --au3-freq 150"

The --au3-volt is not really necessary, since the voltage is not software-adjustable on the Compac.

I think the Compac and Amita would still be viable with the BM1384, but certainly not the TypeZero boards. They could be run at an efficiency-competitive point but probably not price-competitively. But if people are willing to pay $20 for a 3GH stickminer with fixed voltage, would people still pay $25 for an 8GH stickminer that can be adjusted to 15GH and still come in at more power-efficient than any miner you can actually buy anytime in at least the next month? The point is a learning tool that's also potentially financially viable, and if I can make some with the 1384 right now and sell 'em instead of waiting a couple months to redesign with another chip, that revenue will help keep things rolling for redesigns later.

Stick is in? Groovy! I think everyone's should arrive today except MrTeal's, given that his shipped yesterday and is going to Canada. I'll check with Novak on when we expect the V0.4 PCBs to get here.

Well, no, because if I didn't have to take time to do everything else ever I'd have probably finalized the Compac in May. I had a full two weeks where I didn't touch the thing, and then the first day I came back to it I had it up and working within about four hours. There have been a lot of wait times for PCBs and such, but considering other losses (and especially that first failed regulator, which honestly would probably have been good enough if we had the right driver software) we're pretty far behind schedule.

I think we already have pretty good people, and a pretty good plan, but the resources part has always been the limiting factor for us. But we're solving that problem.

Speaking of resources, I just got word from Bitmain that the chips I'll be wanting are in stock and they can sell them to me. I'm wondering if I shouldn't buy more than 1000 (I also asked about 2000), partly so I have more to test with for bigger boards, and partly because I could probably sell more than 1000 chips worth of Compac and Amita sticks. I've been talking a bit with a guy in Europe that wants to license the design (once I know it's good enough) for manufacture and sales over there, which would be pretty good for Eurocustomers that don't want to pay more for international shipping and import taxes than the thing actually costs, but that means he'll also need some chips so I could probably pick up a larger pile and share them out. It's been suggested that I make up my mind in the next couple days, which if that means they want me to pay down on chips in the next couple days we're gonna be in a tight spot because 1000 chips shipped would be about 14.5BTC and I sorta don't have that available. I'm hoping I can reserve stock, because as has been stated since the beginning, I'm not willing to take in money on these until they're tested and verified, and I won't have the final PCBs until next week so the final version product won't be in the hands of testers for a week after that. I could base things off the reports from the four guys getting modified pre-final prototypes (three of which sticks should be delivered today), but that's not really the same thing.

Opinions?

Yep, Rolla. The university is still here, still part of the UM system, but they changed the name to Missouri University of Science and Technology in 2008 (only cost about $2M to do it, thanks) for mostly whoring reasons. It's a good name that does a bit better representing the school's focus, but the reasons for the name change were entirely political/advertisement-based and happened about the same time several other schools in Missouri decided to change their names (bandwagon much?) for no apparent good reason. The school's still pretty decent, if administratively inefficient, and they've recently begun dynamiting the cheap, basic and fairly sturdy dorms in favor of fragile and expensive housing which is a pretty terrible idea.

I've actually been slacking lately. Novak's putting in some long hours, but today we cut out early to play baseball instead of build stuff. As for rarely having a life, that's been my general state for years now and I'm pretty used to it.

Don't compliment how much I get done in a short time in a thread for a project that's over a month behind expectations. I was hoping to have a functional TypeZero board by now, and I don't even have Compac final-version PCBs in hand yet. Though really if I had passed on doing a stickminer and went straight into dev for the TypeZero it probably would be done already; I lost a buttload of time making those sticks work. Never would have guessed the regulator would have been that much problem, but to solve it I ended up finding a pretty sexy buck driver that I'll be using in a couple other things - including a new project we may be talking about next week if I can get enough materials together to get a plan ironed out, codenamed "aardwolf" for no real reason other than it's a pretty cool name.

Yeah maybe one of these days some of these projects can be team efforts. Between Novak and I, we've basically got three or four active design projects going, and all the manufacturing tasks, and all the hosting and maintenance and packing and inventory and consulting. So things don't always get done as quickly as folks might like.

Well, the first step will be a successful test of my 18-chip board. The next step will be a successful test of the regulator circuitry. The next step will be programming a microcontroller for voltage adjustment, fan control and temperature sensing and writing driver software to make it all work right. Then integrating all of that hardware onto a finalized 18-chip board, prototyping and testing. And probably by that point it'll be time to redesign it for a different chip because we're into the next generation already. And then test that new design. And then start gathering money to get a big fat batch of chips and a couple thousand PCBs. After that, it's pretty much coasting.

Could be, if it in fact didn't light up the controller. I can probably hook up a controller to my bench supply and see where it stops taking in juice.

Yep, the controller (unplugged from hash boards) still booted with 7V input. Not sure if it's trying to pull something from the board that isn't getting read properly at a lower voltage or not.

The controller board has I believe a 5V buck on it that's probably good for down to 6-7V input without any real problems.

Mining with a bicycle has the same problems as mining with everything else - you're turning fuel into heat, so if heat is not the primary goal of the machine you're wasting fuel. A bicycle's main goal is to transport you from one place to another using your body's stored energy. If you like the idea of a pedal-powered generator that costs more in sandwiches than you mine in coin (which may be the case if you really want exercise) then sure, that's great. But if your goal is to get from one place to another, adding a generator and bitcoin miner basically means you'll be pedalling uphill even on flat ground.

Tacking miners into everything is a wholly stupid idea.

The case should already be most of a Faraday cage, what with the metal housing and such. Kinda strange that it'd put out so much noise.

Yeah, an adjustable power supply was one of my projects too. The first prototype was pretty annoying to get together, and then failed miserably, so we shifted gears on the controller setup. I have a good plan now for one that should work, and it'll actually be pretty similar to the power system on the TypeZero board. We talked about doing a miner board, and then when we figured that wasn't likely to actually happen, we decided to work on the regulator portion instead. If we'd stuck with building a miner we'd probably already have both projects brought to market?

I'm still not sure what the holdup is on the S5 working below about 11V, which I think folks have gotten them down to 10.8V but that was pretty much the bottom end. I'll have to spend some more time with them to figure it out, but one of the things I suspect is the stringed clock line so I came up with a better way of doing it that should remove any inter-node voltage issues. It could also have to do with how their node-level LDOs are powered, which is another thing I've taken into consideration on our design.

At 0.4W/GH board-level you could be seeing closer to 15GH per chip and 110W per board. 8.2GH per chip you should expect about 0.3W/GH and under 50W per board. That's at what I hope to be a low estimate for regulator efficiency. If you ran them up to 15GH per chip you'd see 272GH per board, so almost 2.2TH and 900W from an 8-board waterblocked system. Which if those waterblocks can handle 4x S5 boards (~1200W) they can surely handle a 900W load.

Top end for the chips would be about the same as an S5, estimated 22GH (400MHz) at hopefully 10.5W board-level per chip. The overall system efficiency for top clock would actually be between 5% and 10% worse than an S5 (hopefully closer to 5%), but the overall benefit of having adjustable voltage gives you access to a lot lower efficiency ranges than the S5 is capable of doing - same as with undervolting an S1 to get from 2W/GH down to 0.8-1W/GH board-level - which greatly increases the service life of the machine without requiring hardware modification to reach the low end.

I don't have a torn-down S3 to verify, but the S5 board and S1 board have the same holes. Actually the S5 has one fewer hole (top center) but it's present on the heatsink. As far as I can tell, the heatsinks from an S1 and the S5 I'm looking at are identical.

Yeah, I hadn't even thought about using those waterblocks to build a double system. That'll be pretty dense.

Thanks, Phil, for getting that thread started. I almost asked if you'd do that since you've been pretty good about review threads and keeping things tidy, but I didn't want to impose so I left it fairly open for whoever got their stick first. The title seems a bit odd, but I guess sidehack and novak are probably more readily recognized names than GekkoScience, the business we've collectively run for about the last two years.

To the masses messaging me asking about doing a review, please stop. The first four guys know who they are, and I haven't talked to the next four guys yet but if you're not someone I already know and trust then be assured you're not on my list.

I'm dropping off some packages at the post office today, which are three of the stickminer prototypes going to my designated first-wave testers: Philipma1957, vs3 and CrazyGuy. I need to get an address from MrTeal and he'll be receiving the fourth (if he's still interested in helping out).

These guys are my first picks for testing, because between them they have a pretty good understanding of electronics, durable engineering, consumer use-case testing and marketplace conditions. I figure I can draw advice from their various knowledges to move things along where a second perspective and/or expert opinion is desired. What I'm thinking is if one of those guys (whoever gets there first, I reckon) can start a separate review/criticism thread to put up pictures, opinions, complaints and such.

I'll be getting ahold of my "top picks" for the second half of the testing bunch probably sometime today, and when I have another four guys lined up and then when I get the next revision PCBs assembled and tested, I'll be sending out a hopefully-final-version stick to all 8 for official review.

The reasons for this are manifold. In the first, as mentioned above I would like to have opinions and criticisms from people I trust to know what they are looking at regarding design and sellability. In the second, I want to make sure that there's enough solid information coming from trusted members that folks don't have to worry I'm gonna rip them off with vaporware. Third, it'd be nice to have a unified and fairly visible discussion with actual product photos and specs right at the start instead of tucked somewhere around page 50 of the thread.