*** Update 07-04-2014 ***

New big price drop on these boards. We have to get these things hashing. New base price is $104.99. Also, in the interest of getting these things moving i am throwing up 40 boards at $99 with free shipping worldwide if you buy 2 or more boards. Use the coupon code: drillbitsale to redeem this offer. This is a pretty damn good deal people. Jump on it. 

Remember, there is also a 5% discount for BTC payments. If you want to pay with BTC go ahead and submit the order and i will reply to you with the payment details. It will return you to an empty cart but the order will come through to me.

Cheers

Barntech

*********

Hey Kapobar

Try --drillbit-options Av16:int:825:1:1000. Should get you an easy 22 GH/s. They can definitely be pushed higher too but you will need to make sure you have good cooling. 

Barntech

Hey All.

It is with great pleasure that i am now announcing the Avalon 16 chip boards being available! 



I got the first couple back from the factory and they look and work great. The quality on these is excellent, much better than the previous boards. They come with big beautiful professional heatsinks and solid brass standoffs. I am really proud of these boards. 

They chain together reliably. The two i have running here are sitting very comfortably at 22GH/s each at recommended safe settings. They can be overclocked to higher hash speeds by unlocking the higher speeds option. Details of how to do this can be found here: http://drillbitsystem.com/forum/index.php?topic=309.0

These boards are going through their final quality control at the factory and will be ready to ship tomorrow. I am confident that they work and will continue to work reliably. I am opening orders for these now. Please go here to place your orders: http://drillbitsystem.com/shop/bitcoin-miners/avalon-16-by-drillbit-systems/.

The current retail price on these boards is $239 each but for all members of our previous group buy, i am offering a 20% discount which will bring the price to about $190 each. If you pay by BTC a further 5% discount will be added at checkout. Paypal is available but BTC payment is much preferred. To claim this discount, enter the coupon code: drillbitgb

*** Please note that there is currently a bug with the bitcoin checkout that we are working on. After you place your order it will return you to an empty cart and not show you payment details, but don't worry, the order is still being placed and all the details are sent to me. No need to redo the order. Your payment amount, including the 5% discount is being calculated based on current BTC exchange rate and forwarded to me. Until we sort out this bug, i will manually send you confirmation emails with all the payment details as soon as i receive your order. ***

Happy ordering everyone. Can't wait to get these boards out to you. 

Cheers

Barntech

If anyone is interested in bulk quantities please feel free to get in touch with me on drillbitsystem@gmail.com. 

Hello everyone.

New Avalon thumbs available:

http://drillbitsystem.com/shop/uncategorized/avalon-thumb-by-drillbit/

 

Hey all.

Sorry i've been kind of absent lately. I've had some real life things demanding my attention and have been hanging out for the Avalon stuff to get its bugs ironed out which has been unfortunately taking much longer than i would have hoped. In good news, this is now done and the Avalons are steaming ahead. A bit late in my opinion but its just been the best we can do considering all of the surrounding factors. I really would have loved to get this stuff to you sooner but thats just not the way things have gone. As it stands, the thumbs will be ready to roll in the next couple days and the 16s will be about 2 weeks. Thankfully the difficulty rises are slowing and the price looks to be heading up again so these things should still have some life in them. That said, no hard feelings if anyone decides to opt out on this one. Its a hard game this bitcoin hardware thing, it really is. But whatever, the boards will exist and i hope they find good homes. I'd much rather see them go to you guys than anywahere else.

Anyways, i am happy to announce that there is a new firmware available for the existing bitfury hardware which has some really cool features, including miniplane support (finally!), and per asic autotuning to get the most GH out of your hardware. I have it running on my boards now and it is nice and stable. Seems like most of the boards dropping out problems have been ironed out now too. Check it out here:

http://drillbitsystem.com/forum/index.php?topic=307.0

I will keep everyone updated with the Avalon stuff as it comes.

Hope you are all well and that no one got too stung by the MT Gox debacle.

More soon.

Barntech

Hey guys.

I'm back. Been a while. Hoping you're all well. I see that a few of you have noticed i've posted over on the drillbit forum about upcoming stuff. The avalon units are on their way and some repaired 8 boards from the last batch will be available but not many. For now i'm going to be keeping most of my communications over on the drillbit forum. At this point the Avalon boards will only be available to members of the old group buy. This may change depending on demand. If you want to write to me, email is preferred, followed by PMs on the other forum followed by PMs here. Its hectic having three inboxes to deal with. Anyways. Onwards and upwards.

Cheers

Barntech

Hey all.

Merry Christmas!  

It has been a pleasure sharing the last months with this community. Despite all the ups and downs, I have thoroughly enjoyed everyone's company. Sharing in this crazy protect with you all has been a great experience. Hope everyone is having lovely festive times with your family and friends.

Here's to a fresh new year with some fresh new exciting projects. And no more broken shit!

I hope you will all be joining us. Lots of announcements coming soon to lead us into the new year.

Cheers

Barntech

Haha.

Awesome as always goldshredder!

The status on aussie boards is, if i hadn't already sent it when we discovered the issues with the boards i kept it here to fix before sending. If you did receive it and feel like you can replace the part, hold onto it and do the repairs. If you received it and can't do the repairs, send it back to me.

Cheers

Barntech

Hey all.

I am moving all 8 board repair related discussions over to the drillbit forum. Things are getting a bit hectic and messy. All updates from now on will be made here:

http://drillbitsystem.com/forum/index.php?topic=206.msg1019#msg1019

If you want to send me a message, email is preferred and will make it easier for me to respond to everyone. Send emails to drillbitsystem@gmail.com

Cheers

Barntech

Hey,

Ok lots of questions coming in. I have a 'real world' engagement for the next few hours but then i'll be back to help everyone out. 

Barntech

No need to send miniplanes and double scrolls.

Hey Guys.

The repairs are being done by one of the members of our group buy. His forum name is tk1337. I have spoken with him for an extensive time and i trust him. He has a lot of experience with this sort of thing as well as all the equipment required to do the job. By all means, if you feel up for doing the fix yourself please do, otherwise, send your boards to the address on the labels and it will happen nice and quick.

In terms of security, you all have this persons name and address on the mailing label too so we can go lynch mob him if things go wrong, though they won't. :-) I believe this is the best and fastest way for all our U.S. members to get their boards sorted out. Feel free to write to me if you have further concerns.

Cheers

Barntech

Ok, so we have someone lined up to do the parts replacement for the U.S. Bobsag will be sending out prepaid shipping labels to everyone. Send your boards as soon as you can and we will get them sorted out. Can you please put a post it note or something on all the 'no green light' boards so it is easy to identify them on the other end.

Europe and other parts of the world, i'm still working on a plan for you guys. We have someone in Norway willing to help out, so once i get a bit more info from everyone, we can get that moving also. All Australian orders, please send back to me.

I'm not publishing replacements psrts for DIY until we try and test them. As soon as we get results i'll let you all know.

Thank you so much for all your patience.

Cheers

Barntech

All boards are affected by the component failure. The isolated statement refers to the fault being isolated to the two particular components mentioned, not the rest of the board, the idea being that repairing this will sort the problem out.

Hey Console, and everyone.

Our suspicion is that the parts that are failing are the regulator at U20 and the inductor at LP1 (both near the USB socket). For me here i have had one board with the U20 chip literally burn up and someone else reported this also. Whoever that was, can you please email me photos.

We will know soon if these are the culprits and have an idea at the fix, which will be basically replacing these two components. How this is going to happen exactly still needs to be worked out. Are any of you out there particularly handy with a soldering iron and PCB modding? If so, write to me and you can help us try a few things out.

I'm so sorry this is happening guys. We have strived at every step of the way to make sure these boards were made with maximum quality. Its very sad to see them not working as they should. Please know we are doing everything in our power to get this sorted out as quick as we can.

Will continue to update as i have have more info.

Barntech

Guys.

Its looking like a component issue. We're still testing here to get to the bottom of it. In the meantime, can you all please stop running your boards. I know this sucks but it will make things better in the long run. Whatever is going on here is fixable, but will be quicker and easier to fix if the boards are preserved as they are now rather than risking damage by running them while things aren't working as they should.

More soon.

Hey guys.

Ok, so there's some weird stuff going on. We're doing everything we can to get this sorted as quick as we can. Bare with us. So sorry that things aren't working as they should. Will update you as soon as we have something.

Barntech

The ability to do this will also be coming in future firmware updates.

Hey Guys.

Most of the packages have been sent. My very lovely helpful girlfriend and i have been furiously testing and packaging boards for the last 24 hours straight. Unfortunately we didn't get through them all, but the last few will be sent on Monday. Good news is the boards are all hashing reliably around 20 GH/s on stock settings and can be pushed from there there with overclocking! 

There are a few peculiarities they we have been struggling to work out and troubleshoot. Most importantly, the miniplane code is not working yet. The guys are working on it now that they have a fully stacked one to test on and hopefully will have a firmware update soon that will sort it out. It's nice and easy to update firmware, basically there is a button on the board that you hold in while powering it up to start it in bootloader mode, then you run an executable. What this means is for now you will have to connect each board by its own USB cable. You all have one per boards, and very sexy ones at that.  Now, the part that gets really weird and annoying, and we haven't properly diagnosed this yet, is if you connect more than 2 boards in a USB hub, things start to get very unstable, the hubs don't like it. Right now, the best possible configuration which works entirely stably is to connect each board to its own USB port on your computer. I know this will be a pain if you have a lot of boards, and by all means, feel free to play around, but i know that this will work. Hopefully we'll have this firmware update soon and all this won't be an issue any more.

Ok, some other things. There are legs and spacers in each package. Unfortunately the smaller bolt things in the U.S. packages are the wrong size so you guys will need to go buy some extra bits to hold it all together properly. All other others have been sorted with all the bits and pieces you need to make a nice solid block with your setup. I'll post some photos of how it all holds together soon but it shouldn't be too hard to figure out.

The fan connectors on the miniplanes and double scrolls have been put on backwards so you will need to turn the connector around and push the little plastic bit out, then it will work, or alternatively you could just snap that little plastic bit off if you want to.

The little heatsinks are for the mosfets, the 3 square guys in a row near the molex connector, apply the middle one first and then the one on each side. this will help with the thermal dissipation of the power supply.

Ok thats about it. You will all have your boards very soon. Enjoy!

Pics and extra bits coming soon. 

Barntech