The bulk of things can be done with a standard soldering iron and a careful hand. The oscillator, having four pads, will be the only iffy part. I used a hot air station to swap that out - did some oscillator swaps on BEs and had trouble removing them with just an iron. The pads on this one are larger and more accessible, so it should be easier.

I would recommend a hot air station for sure, but it should be possible for a well-practiced person to do with a basic iron. You'll probably want both fine and heavy tips though, because some of the pads tie directly to voltage/ground planes and take a lot of heat to flow, where some are very small and precision is needed.

All the work on mine was done over several stages with various tests inbetween, but to do one fresh start-to-finish would be the work of less than an hour even being careful.

This equates to a shy 150W

Here's my test rig with all modifications in place. Running a core clock of 16.384MHz at 1.25V. The oscillator is a temp pulled from what I had on hand, and will be replaced by a proper-fitting part (of the same specifications) in the actual kit. The VRM switching transistors and inductor aren't warm to the touch and don't seem to have any trouble handling the drive current. The total board metered out at 12.35A consumption off the 12V rail, which is actually less than predicted.



Also notice the added components on the VRM power rails - this reduced line ripple and parasitic switching noise substantially, which should improve the reliability of the ASIC chips.
I also added topside chip heatsinks, but it's up to experimentation to determine if that's actually necessary since by design the majority of heat dissipation is through the board. I noted the ASIC chips were warmer running overstock voltage than standard and I added chip heatsinks, but the main heatsink is mostly cooled with indirect air so better direct cooling might negate the need for these. I will not be including advanced heatsinking parts in the kit because I don't know what each person will need to fit their existing setups.


Here's a screencap of the configuration page after running overnight. It had been functional for ~20 hours steady before starting this "session". The converged data rate reported is a little higher than I had been getting in steady-state, but is within acceptable margins for accuracy.



I mine at Ozcoin; the .1 and .2 workers are overclocked USB Block Eruptors. The blade is on a Stratum proxy credentialed under sidehack.0 and is the only device on this worker. Reported hashrates have ranged between about 12GH and 18GH depending on luck.



I haven't considered overmuch the requirements for doing the upgrade as a service - it's possible for a nominal fee. I know folks aren't going to want their machines out of service for long, so depending on location high-speed shipping options and turnaround guarantees will have to be worked out with cost in mind.

My first overclocked BE, using scrounge parts - that's a 16.2MHz oscillator I found on some 20+ year old not-sure-what-it-used-to-be in a miscellaneous box.




My current little garden of OC'd BEs - this collectively converges on just shy of 6GH. It's powered off the 5V rail of an old 350W ATX supply. I didn't notice any overall increase in reliability from adding the chip heatsinks - HW errors didn't decrease. Got a few more coming in but I probably won't overclock them until I get another hub - or start removing the chip heatsinks.




I beefed up the hub rails and capacitors but was still having power delivery issues, so I wired all the hot pins straight to the 5V input. I don't trust barrel connectors for high current, so I'd also already hardwired the hub boards to power supply connectors.

If the inline panel meter is in any way accurate, they pull in the neighborhood (probably higher) of 1A off the 5V line at 16.384MHz
I took the generic 10-port hubs and ran new power wires from the 5V input to the 5V terminal on the USB jack in a star configuration, so there wouldn't be excessive current loading (and associated heat and voltage drop) on the traces, works pretty well.

Pushing very far past that operating frequency will require more power than the onboard regulator can source reliably, so either replacing the drive chip and inductor with a 5A (vs 3A) is necessary, or wiring around it with an external high-current regulator. I forget the name but someone a few pages back did a full range power test with these guys, up to above 24MHz. Good data.

Stuff should be ready to ship on Friday. I'll have some pictures and screenshots up later so's to verify the numbers I'm seeing. Definitely keep you guys in the loop. Had a lot of fun hacking on the USB Block Erupters, was a bit worried at the scale of the blade but everything's working well, especially with the added VRM filtering. Might have been a fluke, but taking out some line ripple and HF noise (the added filtering quartered noise and ripple) I saw about a 100-200MH increase in steady-state hashrate, and that should also reduce strain on the chips which is nice with an overvolt.

As a note, this kit is a fixed-voltage overvolt and fixed-frequency overclock (of about 35%). But I will be working on an adjustable clock source and see just how far these things can be pushed at a given voltage, which should be fun.

Got a baker's dozen of these guys running 16.384MHz (~460MH/s) off 1.35V - probably a little higher than it needs to be, but the first ones done have been running solid for about a month. Few more coming in the mail, but they won't get overclocked until I have more hubspace. Not really for profit so much as for entertainment - had a lot of fun learning the hardware and doing the mods. I probably got in too late/too small for BTC to really be profitable, but what I have invested has resulted in hundres of hours of entertainment. The first BE I tried to hack, I hosed the regulator and killed something. The next one was ugly; didn't have any surface-mount parts so wired up 1/2W resistors for the feedback adjust and my oscillator was an ancient four-pin thru-hole spider'd onto the pads. Stuck up like an inch off the board, fell off a few times, ripped off some pads and traces, thought I'd killed that BE at least twice but it's still running.


Got one of the new blades (the ones without adjustable VRMs) running stable off the same speed oscillator; pushing out about 14.8GH. Should have parts kits available end of the week if anyone's interested, and a full writeup is pending a bit more playing around. For my own playing, gonna be putting together a fully adjustable clock source and see just how high it'll go. Probably put up pictures of the whole setup tomorrow sometime.

That amount would get you a bulk discount, but additional (international) shipping may eat it up. Either way we'll keep it reasonable.

It really doesn't take a lot, thinking something like 0.1BTC for the base kit shipped, 0.15 for the full kit shipped. Sometime soon (it's been a hectic weekend, and will continue to be a hectic week) I'll have an actual build log posted - gotta get a webserver up first though.

For reference, the stock rates at about 10.7GH; with the base kit applied mine was reporting about 14.6 and after adding parts to the VRM output (which greatly dropped line noise) it's been reporting around 15GH (which is actually higher than theoretical expectations, go figure). Running stable for 13 hours now, no X chips and no heating issues.

That would include USPS Priority shipping in the US. Bulk orders would be negotiable, and shipping outside the US researchable.

Kits will start shipping today, 12/18

I had enough questions from people having difficulty keeping overclocked blades cool and efficient, that I'll be including parts to run three different overclocks - the same ~13GH overclock from V1 blades, a ~14.4GH overclock and the maxed-out 15GH like the original kit. Basically just find the one you're able to keep stable and use that.

Selling for flat 0.025BTC per kit, as many as you want shipped for 0.01BTC

I'll also be offering upgrade service with return shipping and next-business-day turnaround for 0.085BTC per unit.

I also have a couple overclocked Blades I'm looking to sell if anyone's in the market. They're retailing for 0.38BTC in the group buys, I'll sell these for 0.43BTC which includes USPS Priority shipping and insurance. One's a 14.9GH, one's a 14.4GH


To place orders, submit payment to address 1EpQdQgAs2CrF2TYRTmdAasE5vQNPWwQCs
PM me with your desired shipping address and a link to the transaction block of your payment. I'll respond with a confirmation that your order has been received, and a tracking number for the shipment when it ships.


Instructions on applying the kit
http://www.gekkoscience.com/be_ins/blade_ins.html

More details farther down. If anyone has any further questions regarding specifics or things I've overlooked, feel free to PM.


I'm also currently developing additional overclock for ASICMiner Cubes, as well as working on standalone high-efficiency power supplies for them and other devices (including GPUs) that use PCIe 12V connectors. The next few weeks should be interesting.

Someone at work mentioned bitcoins to me not quite two years ago. He didn't have a lot of info, and couldn't explain it to me in a way that made sense and the conversation ended in less than five minutes. And then about fifteen months later someone else asked me what I knew and I knew nothing and started looking it up. And wishing I'd paid more attention back then. Oh well, still having fun messing with the hardware side of it.

Pretty sure I registered on here four or five months ago and haven't actually posted anything yet. Should probably get around to that. Life in a box, oh well.