18AWG? Gross. Though 1600W at 12 cables is only about 4A per wire... That'd be good enough for most things. I'd like to see one of these hooked up to some Neptune cubes and watch the entire setup burst into flames though.

Also, Phil, how does my DPS-2000BB breakout board and PSU stack up to your criteria? The efficiency might not be quite as good, but the board holds 12 cables natively (I've run 16 without issue, pushing two Prismas per PSU) and a kit costs less than $155. We don't 1-year the PSU (90 days typical for used equipment) but lifetime on the board and cables.

By the numbers this is a nice-lookin' PSU. I hope Dogie's right about the fan not sounding terrible, because every 1U fan I've listened to (for example DPS800, DPS1200 and all SP rackables) are super annoying. It'd be nice to have user-defined cabling too.

What I meant was, BFL kept getting sales a year after the whole world should have known not to trust them because of their marketing team. Their ads were very visible and any n00b looking for a miner would probably find their stuff first. Of course if you followed up on literally any claim they pushed about their product line you'd find it was an outright lie, and I'm still impressed they weren't called to account on that a lot sooner. But the only advertising we've ever done for anything we've ever made was posting here on the forums. No SEO optimization, no banner ads, just building stuff that doesn't suck and trusting the numbers to speak for themselves (and also satisfied customers, that helped too). I've done exactly zero advertising for our miner line as well. I've mentioned it to a few people when they ask me what I'm up to, and then this forum thread. That's it.

Also, I recall a study someone did where they interviewed a bunch of people entering the job market and asked why they went into their respective fields - because it was fun and interesting, or because they sought wealth. 20 years later they tracked down the same people and measured their financial successes. Of the original sample, I believe there were 300 millionaires in the group; of them, 299 went into their jobs based on a genuine interest and only one because it was a path to riches. I like those numbers. Tells you a lot about human nature - you're a heck of a lot more likely to be successful if you enjoy what you're doing than if you're doing it specifically to be successful. Novak and I are both pretty much constantly broke, but we're definitely enjoying the work. I'm hoping that, between his project and mine (these miners), we can start snowballing bigger, but what matters most (beyond "being able to pay the bills") is that we keep being entertained by the job - and that we don't compromise quality or integrity for the sake of short-term profits. With what we want to do, there's literally no good reason to go down that road.

Also, we've got about a dozen old S1s running around already. Thanks though. I wouldn't turn down more smoked-out S5... heh heh...

I think right now our tagline would be something along the lines of "we don't suck and neither does our stuff". Neither of us is really into marketing - we're engineers, which means we prefer honesty and accuracy to flashy slogans and crap. Let the numbers speak for themselves, and you tend to get customers who understand numbers. BFL was really really good at marketing and it didn't take long for people who understood numbers to see through to the lies.

I assumed the BTCS merger was already a done thing. Saw news about it a couple weeks ago.

Hey, don't forget about Novak. He doesn't talk much (as this is primarily my project) but he's actually supposed to be the head honcho - though neither of us really like being a "boss". In any case, it's a partnership and neither of us would be doing much of anything if we weren't both in on it. So don't glorify Sidehack and ignore Novak. He's actually got credentials.

Also, I like "GekkoScience - The art of self reliance". That has a good roll to it. I might have to steal it.

Valkir asked if I could set up some kind of "VIP purchasing" first-shot thing for folks what bought the shirt, but I like too much the first-come first-serve no-playing-favorites kind of thing we try to do which means there would ideally be no VIP treatment for any customer. Or something, blah blah blah feel-good marketing blah blah blah.

Anyway, here's what we're thinking. It looks like $4 from a shirt purchase goes to us. So if you buy a shirt, and then later buy stickminers, I'll drop $4 off your order since you already paid us that in advance or something. Novak suggested we could do VIP shipping. Since we'd have to meet batch quantity to be able to make the sticks anyways and orders would be shipped out on a first-placed basis, we could ship an early stick to someone that bought a shirt regardless where in the order queue the person's actual order is, in lieu of getting the $4 discount.

So I guess, if you buy a shirt and then later you want some stick miners once sales are open, you can either get a $4 discount on your order or get one stick shipped immediately instead of waiting in line (the rest of your order will ship in queue order however).

Any complaints or arguments?

Just checked again, somehow it got jumped to international shipping as being that price. Domestic US still says four bucks.

I probably won't buy one. How weird is it to buy a t-shirt with your own name on it so you can get the profits? I'll just support the project in a more... direct way.

But sure.

If anyone wants to make a GekkoScience t-shirt (http://gekkoscience.com/header.png) I might buy that. We've been needing to get t-shirts made one of these days anyway. Not like we've been thinking about it for a year. Not like one of our former minions got a job at a local screen-printing business either. Nope, not at all.

I'm told $12.50 for shipping. Coulda swore when I looked at that page a couple hours ago it said about $4 for shipping.

Huh. Nifty. Those printed in the USA?

Too bad nothing ever came from ASICMiner's BE300, which tested below 0.2W/GH five months ago. The BM1384 will do 0.3W/GH pretty easily, but chip density to get high hashrates with it means increased cost.

Thanks.

Novak was just commenting, the burger donation is actually not too far away from our actual total budget for the dev so far.

If you really want to, but I probably won't wear one.

If I hadn't burned about a week and a half on the first regulator design we'd be a lot closer to "on schedule". That stupid thing never worked right, but the prototype for the current version, Novak had me a board etched before the parts arrived and it worked perfectly on the first shot. Stupid cut-up QFN monolithic junk.

I had a week off when I was waiting for the PCBs to come in. Then I jacked with 'em until midnight and worked on 'em all the next day. I did relax the whole weekend though, sat on the couch all Saturday and Sunday reading comics and pretty much didn't leave the house. So now I have to be dilligent and work hard for the next 20 days or so again.

The hub is not the limiter. 5V is driven directly off my bench supply, and it worked fine running a U2 and my crapstack prototype. I built that hub to run half a dozen overclocked USB BEs. The CP2102 enumerates fine.

Stencil? Yeah a stencil would be nice but we've never had stencils for anything. It'd sure be nice. Also, every board we've sold in the last 9 months or so is one that I hand-placed and soldered (I can do about 12 DPS2000 boards start-to-finish in 100 minutes including cook time). We're budgeting an actual pick-and-place and reflow oven for when the Compac moves into production (we need it for other builds, not just miners - yes, we do other things too...). I'll look into that link for cheap stencils, that might come in handy. The ASIC is the only part giving me grief right now with soldering, but since that's the only part that really matters (and also about 20% of the total parts cost) it matters the most by far.

I'm not the hero - I'm sidehack, the hero's hacker sidekick. That's literally what the name means.

Yeah, you see us designing stuff specifically to educate. I don't really blame under-educated consumers nearly as much as I do lazy consumers - the guys for whom answers are readily available if they'd take the 30 seconds to look for them instead of crying for help on everything. People who appear stupid sometimes genuinely are, but for most people being stupid is a willing act they've been allowed to continue. I'm constantly annoyed by stupid customers but we sell to 'em anyway. Then we hand them enough resources to solve 90% of their problems themselves if they wanted to not be lazy and that's it. But not everyone can get away with that, especially with diverse and complex product lines.

Especially because a lot of customers are, themselves, no-brainers.

Yes, behind. I was hoping to be on TypeZero design by now, and I haven't even gotten working Compac prototypes distributed for testing. Just because I'm not racing other independents doesn't mean it's not a race. I'm also racing new chip generations, and the network as a whole, and my own opinions about how long a thing should take to get done.

If by "on a roll" you mean "several weeks behind ideal projection and frustrated these things didn't work last Thursday", then yes I'm on a roll.

At least the LED works. Some people won't really care if it mines or not so long as the LED works right.

If it was BGA I wouldn't be messing with it. The QFN is bad enough by itself. I wish this chip had a larger cross-section of pad at the edge, which would make checking solder jobs better because it'd wrap around a bit. I think the most problem I have right now is being able to stick the chips down reliably. The alignment is difficult because there's basically zero reference for when it's in place (and it has to be correct within a quarter millimeter on two axes) and I can't trust floatation because if there's enough solder on the belly pad to float into place the pins might not get soldered, and if I press it down to connect those the belly solder could bulge out and short across to anything, including the corner Vcore pads and short out basically anything.

I've succeeded in getting two of four sticks hashing unstably and unreliably but I have seen submitted shares. I can't say for sure what the issue is that gets the chip working haphazardly at about 10% capacity, because the breakout boards were pretty much all-or-nothing. Could be signal integrity issues, I really don't know but I hope that's not the case because if it's a result of PCB layout we got problems. The signal traces are between ground planes - at least they should be if the etch fab didn't get layers out of order.

Anyway, here's a sneak peek at the sticks.



Got ya a fully populated boar with heatsink temporarily attached. The final heatsinks will probably be that dimension but anodized green. Note that about 2/3 of the visible area is the bigass regulator, complete with external FETs and 360uF of output capacitance for handling about 20A of low-volt DC. The adjustment pot is in the bottom corner.



Here's some crap plugged into my jankety powered hub. The crapstack in the back you might recognize as a 1384 breakout board on the test regulator and running off one of Novak's USB adapters. The thing in the foreground is literally everything I just said except on one board quite a bit smaller. You might note a lot of flux crust and such around the ASIC. That's because I've pulled the thing, restuck the thing, wicked pads, pushed it around and whatever probably close to a dozen times. Ain't fun when every piece of the circuit seems to work just fine except for the core. Let's think of it as "in a vegetative state".

If you're wanting over 20GH from 10W you'll need to wait for the two-chip stick. It should actually hit slightly better efficiency than the one-chip.

The TypeZero will have 4-wire fan headers. How they operate and/or are configured is in Novak's domain right now.

Bluetooth? Not on anything I ever run, which probably means not on anything I ever build. Our boards are USB tethered, so you can hook them to anything you want and run that wirelessly if you feel like. But I'm not going to limit people artificially to "you have to use this type of networking" because nobody wants the same thing. Slap a cheapo USB-enabled controller on it and do whatever you want from there. Sure I know people seem to like having things they can plug in an ignore forever, but building something that you can only plug in and ignore is stupid. Flexibility and configurability are not. That's where the fun comes from, and most of the learning.

Well, so far the prototypes are tickin' me off. I have two fully populated and neither works properly. One seems to be powering the chip properly, but the chip's never really lighting up. It's getting serial data but not responding at all.
The other, I honestly don't know what's up. Sometimes it enumerates in cgminer and starts to hash around 300MH/s, usually craps out after a few seconds but a couple times it's run for minutes and once or twice I briefly saw the hashrate over a few GH/s. If you look at the 1BURGER stats on Eligius you'll see a slight lump recently; most of that is from a U2 I was using to test the powered hub setup but the lone share about 19:00 was one single 128-diff that got submitted while the thing was temporarily approximately working. So TECHNICALLY a success. A stupid one.

I'll keep working over the weekend and see if I can't get things ironed out. Those BM1384 are really hard to get stuck down right, and since the pads don't wrap at all there's no good way to inspect them for proper solder joints. I need to get a friggin' microscope or something.