Did you check you have space left on disk?

Oh hey guess what?

Chicken butt.

Also, an actual update.

I realized on Saturday, while sitting on my couch getting nothing accomplished, that the reason I haven't gotten much accomplished with design work lately is because I had been coming in on weekends for that and focusing on manufacturing Monday through Friday, but I've only had two or three weekends since about the first part of May that I've actually been in town and those days I was usually pretty darn beat and ended up staying home, or did come in for a while to dawdle on stuff.

So anyways we're a bit ahead of the game now that I have some decent help, so I took today to start working up Terminus pods. And the verdict is - it's gonna take a few more changes to the PCB to get 'em going proper.

So while I was laying out connections to the microcontroller I forgot a simple but non-obvious fact - one of the GPIO pins is pretty freakin' worthless. So I'm using an 8-pin micro, which means 6 pins of IO. I need 6 pins of IO - specifically, 2 I2C lines, 1 analog in and 3 outputs. So of the 6 IO pins, it turns out one can only be used as an input, not an output. So hey how about I use that as the input? Handy enough. Except oh wait I need ADC input and that's the only pin not tied into the ADC.

So I think I've figured up a half-decent workaround to the problem this causes, and I should be able to combine two of the outputs into a single output with a small additional circuit to handle the second function. But that means redesigning the PCB.

So now I'm left with about twenty Terminus boards whose internal controller won't fully function. It's supposed to handle fan speed and power shutdown off the temp sensor, reset the string when it detects a lockup, stuff like that. Power shutdown cannot work as it is. I started on simple problems first and haven't gotten to temp sensor interfacing yet but that could probably work for fan speed control, but without power shutdown it doesn't matter a whole lot anyways.

So, apparently I start every paragraph with the word "so". Additionally, I may populate one of these boards with the full miner (I started with just the power and base controls), lock the fans on full, wire up an RC reset, basically rolling back the advanced controller feature set to basic. We'd still have the better 5V onboard that can power a Pi, and the 6-pin power jack alongside the barrel, as improvements. And if it works I can have a dozen or so to sell on here as a "beta release" kind of thing if folks are interested, while I wait another two or three weeks on the revised PCBs to arrive.

These guys would be the final form factor, so I'll be doling a few out to resellers so they can get an idea of sizing and mounting requirements for enclosures or anything else.

By the way, I forgot to mention but these pods work with VH's cgminer. You'll want --gekko-terminus-freq to set the speed. It runs 0.44GH/MHz so 250MHz gets 110GH.