Latest posts of: jstefanop

Quick update for you guys!

So finally got ASIC ship date from packager. They are expected to be delivered to me on the 30th (there was about a 1 week delay due to the Chinese holiday all week last week). Production and shipments will start the week of the 30th, and I expect the full batch to be shipped out by mid november.

Since I decided to include a fan with these, I reworked the thermal design for it around the fan. There is no point in including a large passive heatsink with a fan, so am now including a pin type heatsink designed for fan induction airflow. This has done wonders for efficiency and max these can be pushed. Looking at about a 10c reduction in temperatures for all frequency ranges, and allows a max clock of nearly 1GHz (I was going to cap the clocks at about 800mhz with the old heatsink). This allows for a hashrate of nearly 6MH per miner (even though I would not recommend running it past 800mhz for stability/longevity)!

Below is a pic of the new thermal design...its only 20mm thick from base of PCB to top of fan, and the whole thing is 10mm shorter due to the fan not being stuck in the back.

Here is a pic of me trying to make the voltage regulator blow up...after nearly 3 days it was still going Cheesy

(that was running on a hub controlled by an original Rasberry Pi btw)

Windows binaries are also done, as well as Pi 1/Zero, and Pi 2/3. I will be posting instructions and driver links probably next week for you guys to download and making sure the software runs on your systems (so these will run on Windows/Mac/Linux/armv6/and armv7/8 systems).

Were just a few weeks away and can't wait for you guys to get your hands on these!

Quote from: VTdude12 on August 25, 2017, 07:06:15 PM

Hey jstef. Just got 13 of these from Holy the other day and, first off, they look great. With that said, having mixed success thus far... working on getting them installed and only 1 of 3 are allowing Windows to recognize the attached GPU. FYI, I have confirmed the riser itself is working by unplugging from your m2 and plugging directly into motherboard (Windows recognizes then).

Motherboard = ASUS Prime Z270-A

All other hardward & bios settings are the same. Any ideas what I can try? Thx!!!

Yea you have to make sure M.2 slots are configured for PCIe...some motherboards have the option to switch between SATA/PCIe, and some M.2 slots don't have PCIe support at all.

Quote from: Ursul0 on October 07, 2017, 04:37:35 PM

Quote from: STT on October 07, 2017, 03:33:05 PM

Does any protocol need 16gb of memory, I cant think anything that is coming close to that requirement or you might have some great advantage tp go forward with. Increase the HBCC tons? I dont know, I dont think that alters that usage exactly. I read a few different forums so I'll post if I see anything but you might be better off selling it or at least advertising then buying the cheaper Vega that come out closer to xmas perhaps

Thanks man, I'd appreciate any info. At this point I'm inquiring on the ways of returning FEs to the shop I got it from. will see how it goes...
Part of the plan was to use it for research purposes, but with this crazy price tag and not being able to mine properly and thus getting some ROI now is a bummer.

This is exactly what I did, somehow Newegg agreed to a instore credit with a 100 restocking fee, and picked up two vega 56s for the same price Grin

Vega FE is a joke and the 64s/56s use the EXACT same pcb and die. Even it's double stacked HBM memory is worse ( upper stacks actually use separate slower timings). Unless you can use the 16GB it's a waste of money.

Quote from: Sev18 on October 02, 2017, 03:22:38 PM

Is it technically possible to build usb ETH miner like this?
Would it be impossible due to ASIC-resistance feature of Ethash?

Yea its already been done..a GPU attached to a USB riser Wink

There are no ASICs for Ethash since the bottleneck is the memory throughput and the 2GB+ dag size, and currently GPUs have the fastest memory of any compute device that can store that much data in memory. You could theoretically make a very efficient eth ASIC, which would essentially be a GPU with the cores optimized for ethash, but since the 2GB+ ram needed would already cost 10-20 watts, at most you could probably reduce power consumption from ~120 watts to maybe 25 watts for the same hash power and probably even more cost than a GPU. The power savings alone would not be worth it, since ~30MH for a single eth ASIC would never ROI the development costs.

Scrypt is actually a "similar" algorithm to Ethash, but how its structured allows you to make tradeoffs in memory size vs compute, and since compute is cheap scrypt ASICs have essentially reduced the memory requirements per scrypt core to 32kb. The ASIC used in Moonlander 2 has 64 scypt cores, which comes out to ~2MB of essentially L2 cache memory on the die. Just this 2MB alone actually makes up >50% of the ASIC die. You can't make this memory tradeoff with Ethash, so you can quickly see why a pure Ethash asic with its 2GB of memory needed is nearly impossible Wink

Quote from: bostonvex on October 01, 2017, 11:53:44 PM

Quote from: Toughit on October 01, 2017, 11:03:25 PM

Anyone know where i can read why wolf has a gag order?

$20 he was involved in the development of an AMD component in some way shape or form and signed a NDA...

nope...he has just developed mods for Vega on linux side that allow timing/volt mods that allow same kind of speedups you see with BIOS mods for polaris etc, and his big clients don't want anyone else using them Wink

Im doing the same stuff, pretty much just modified drivers to do the stuff BIOS mods did (since you can no longer BIOS mod vega with its security chip). Just injects the voltages and timings during runtime instead (kinda like what windows guys are doing with registry edits).

If i wasn't so busy with my USB asic id probably release a how to guide...the changes are pretty straight forward, and you just need to recompile the linux kernel.

Maybe wolf's overlords want to gag me too? Wink

Quote from: jseph1234 on October 01, 2017, 03:07:20 AM

Quote from: jstefanop on September 29, 2017, 09:57:45 PM

I hate to repeat this every couple pages, but the #1 point of these is not all about ROI. They are low cost miners anyone can afford to buy and a great way to learn about crypto and how mining works. I specifically build these in order to get new people into the ecosystem, that would have never bothered because A) they cannot afford 2-5k USD mining ASICs, or B) can't even run one because of crazy power and noise requirements. Alot of people also gift these as a way to get people that have never even heard of crypto into crypto.

I say this all the time, but new people and veteran members alike get stuck into the ROI and higher price mania and forget that the only way your going to even ROI on a 2k machine, or expect your 54 dollar litecoins to turn into 200 dollar litecoins is by getting even more people interested, buying, and using crypto. A new user is not going to buy 100 Litecoins, or buy a L3+.

Whats better? The same old 10,000 people using litecoin and about 1,000 huge mining farms mining it all in an endless cycle, or 100k new people all mining with these USB miners and all getting interested and buy/using Litecoin?

Hope you get it now Wink

I empathize with you but its freakin' god___ blank annoying when a new person reads about this and they are all SOLD OUT!! Can't even get our hands on one and our meaning me! (Plus a lot of other new people I'm sure)...just sayin

Im working on scaling up production...im a one guy shop, and I don't have the resources to risk making a massive batch that I can't deliver. Which is why the first batch was relatively small, but as soon as the first batch is shipped out and everything goes smoothly ill be able to ramp up fast.

Have to keep in mind that the main bottleneck are the ASICs...I secured as many ASICs as I could afford, and all of that came out of my pocket with zero pre-order money. For second batch ill have more capital to work with and be able to order a larger number of chips.

If you didn't get one there will be another chance!

Quote from: andytranter on September 30, 2017, 07:59:29 PM

Quote from: wavelengthsf on September 30, 2017, 02:38:30 PM

Quote from: andytranter on September 30, 2017, 12:03:38 PM

I’ve quite a specific question hopefully someone can answer!

I have an rpi set up to run my single avalon 741 miner - could I also plug in a Moonlander 2 usb miner into the rpi and use that to power it?

If so, it would be great to dual mine!

This might work, but it could be complicated to setup. The easiest would be to get a separate Pi for the Moonlanders.

If you really want to make it work, you'd have to run your own version of cgminer for the Avalon and then some other mining program for the Moonlander in a different screen session. Not sure if the Pi has enough RAM to make it work.

Thanks wavelength.
Would the nicehash programme be an option to run alongside the Avalon programme?
I also read you can squeeze out some zRam if you overclock the rpi correctly, although I must admit I’m only going off what I can find off google!

Yea you could do this with no problem...ill be providing bfgminer binaries for all major OSes and ARM builds for pi's. You can just point bfgminer to nicehash pool and mine with this on there.

Please keep non-order related questions to the main thread instead of here though. Thanks!

Quote from: fanatic26 on September 27, 2017, 10:50:43 PM

You will never make your money back running one of these. As it sits the ROI is nearly 2 years at current prices, meaning you will be priced out by the difficulty adjustments and never break even. Then you add in the costs of a powered hub and you are just throwing money away. I just dont get it....

Quote from: QuintLeo on September 25, 2017, 07:58:40 PM

Got a quibble with your original post.

USB 2 is limited to 500 ma at 5 volts, or 2.5 watts.
You're not going to pull 3 Megahash on a stock USB2 port without going well beyond it's specs.

USB *3* has a 900 ma limit - 4.5 watts - THAT'S where you can pull enough power out of the connection without exceeding specs to get close to 3 Megahash.

USB "battery charging" ports are special case upgrades to the USB 3 specs for power distribution, and a lot of "powered hubs" are capable of quite a bit more current per port than the spec requires even if they don't meet the full "battery charging" specs.

Stick miners have NEVER been intended to compete on a hash/$ basis with a "full" miner, there are way too many overhead costs that are always quite a bit higher per chip.

My original post was never comparing USB 2 ports....most people have USB 3 ports these days, and in its current config the stick can do almost 4 MH on USB 3 power. I was mostly stating the fact that you can stick this in your normal USB 3 port without extra hubs or anything else and it will run at nearly full speed.

EDIT: nvm i see where the confusion came from...I had mistaken listed USB 2 in my OP and meant USB 3.

Quote from: expertlevel on September 26, 2017, 04:32:00 AM

Quote from: jstefanop on September 25, 2017, 04:45:44 PM

The final design has been locked in for production next month, and I'm happy to reveal it you all! PCB is a cool matte black design, with the same anodized black aluminum heatsink as the original moonlander. I decided to include both memory voltage adjustment in addition to core voltage, as my tests had an efficiency gain of 10-20% for ASICs that can handle lower memory voltage!

As a super thank you to all who pre-ordered I decided to include a 25mm fan into the cooling solution as well, so no need to come up with clumsy external fan solutions to keep these cool. A top side small ASIC heatsink will also be included to further increase thermal efficiency (it will be black not blue).

Looks great! Can you share final dimensions?

25mm width, total length from front of USB port to back of fan 85mm, hight from bottom of main heatsink to top of small heatsink ~34mm

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I am still looking for a reputable member/reseller in the Asia region that would be interested in bulk distributing these in that region. At minimum you would need to have some sort of e-commerce store up, be able to accept crypto payments, and have some sort of verifiable seller reputation. I have had hundreds of PMs from members in these areas, but I'm unfortunately swamped right now and can't service small orders for Asian countries.

Shoot me a PM if your interested for future batches (I have a couple dozen units from this batch I can reallocate as a "test" run).

Quote from: aironeous on September 15, 2017, 01:17:19 AM

When will asic puppy be shipping? Is been a while now. Forgive me if I'm uninformed.

Guys please at least read the first post before asking basic questions. No one will receive anything until end of October at the earliest. And thats if ASICs actually get delivered on time and production goes smoothly. At that point my distributors will get the first moonlanders, and they will ship to you in the order of payments. If you weren't one of the first to place an order I would not expect anything until November.

With that being said, all major components are ordered, PCBs are being fabricated, and ASICs are still on schedule for mid-october delivery. So I don't foresee any delays at this point.

Keep in mind to mine these at a decent hashrate (4MH), you only need 5 watts (1A per port). The original moonlanders you needed at LEAST 7-10 watts to mine anywhere near 1MH so these are way more USB port friendly, and alot more hubs *should* work with them.

Quote from: Astrali on September 14, 2017, 06:52:53 AM

Quote from: jstefanop on September 13, 2017, 09:59:41 PM

So I've been playing around with memory voltage on the production board(Moonlander 2 has a separate memory voltage controller), and was originally not going to include an adjustment for memory voltage (was going to be fixed), but I've been able to make some significant powers savings by tweaking memory. So looks like you guys will have full voltage control over both memory and core voltage Cheesy

This frees me up from having to choose a "high" memory voltage set point to ensure it working across all chips, and you guys can tweak even lower if the ASIC allows.

Ive been able to get the low end (3.4 MH/s) down to just .75 amps! Thats 3.75 watts and 1.1 watts/MH!

For comparison to the L3+ , if I could build a 150 chip version, that would be 510 MH @ ~ 560 watts!

as there already is a variant with Huge amount of chips ..
i would be interested about something in the middle .. maybe a device with 20 or 30 chips.

This will most probably be payable to an average dude like me but still rock the house! Cheesy

Yea I would not, nor have the capability to build a huge ASIC...plus it goes against my philosophy of spreading out the hash. And yes if I do build a non USB ASIC it would be a "pod" style in the 5-20 asic range Wink

Quote from: GMPoison on September 14, 2017, 04:01:12 AM

You can compare anything to anything. I also didn't say anything was "better than in the traditional investing world". I said that compared to the traditional investing world, the profits are much much higher, and compared to the traditional investing world, the risk is much much higher. There is nothing false about that statement. Just because we can't quantify the risk of investing in crypto, doesn't mean we can't observe it (as we all obviously do and can agree). Also, if you think these will be selling for $800-$900 USD 4-5 months from now, you're the one that obviously doesn't understand this game at all and obviously hasn't been around for too long.

Wait how "long" have you been around? Obviously not long enough to remember 2014-2015. Thats when 5k-10k scrypt machines ended up being resold for a fraction of that price a few months later. Those were fun times...picking up 250MH ASICs for 300 bucks back when diff was 40k Cheesy

Quote from: QuintLeo on September 13, 2017, 08:53:56 PM

The probability of folks being able to get mining chips made on a 7nm process next year is pretty much ZERO.
2019 - perhaps, but even THAT is looking very iffy.

For perspective - Intel MIGHT be shipping 10nm late THIS year, and they've been working on THAT node a lot longer than anyone has been working on 7nm (and Intel is USUALLY the first folks to market with usable chips on a given node).

Keep in mind some history - 14/16nm was first ANNOUNCED as being available almost 2 YEARS before the first actual products hit retail using THAT node.

10nm has proven to be MUCH more difficult, and preliminary indications are that 7nm (in the cases that will actually BE 7nm) is going to be much much tougher yet.

Mining gear hasn't so much "stagnated" as it finally caught up to current state-of-the-art on semiconductor technology, so it doesn't have the OPTION of "move to a better node every year or less" any more, it has to wait on the INDUSTRY to be able to move - which has commonly been a 4-6 year cycle and seems likely to get WORSE as semi tech has gotten well into the range where quantum effects and the limits of silicon are bringing Moore's Law to it's knees.

Intel has said flat out that "10nm is the end of the road for silicon", IBM has already announced that it's work on the 7nm node is using HYBRID Si/Ge wafers because pure silicon couldn't scale any more (but Germanium isn't going to be able to scale much further than Silicon)....

I'm not going to be shocked if 7nm is the END of "standard" semiconductor technology, at best I'd guessing the next node after THAT will be 10 years more-or-less down the road.
It might be time for alternative tech to start getting itself OUT of the lab, like carbon nanotube electronics....

Umm Apple's 10nm A11 chip is already in full production and will be shipping in their iPhone 8/X in a few weeks...they are already working on 5 and 3nm chips as well, so 10nm definitely is not the limit.

Quote from: org0x004 on September 12, 2017, 10:29:27 AM

Quote from: jstefanop on September 11, 2017, 11:36:14 PM

Quote from: dora-gt on September 10, 2017, 02:16:12 PM

Quote from: org0x004 on September 10, 2017, 10:45:56 AM

Do we have an estimated shipping date?

I want to know too, but just trust him and give him time to do the best work Cheesy

When I saw his picture of the production candidate (smaller than dev) and the following message of considering heatsink and small fan, I felt his passion for the product.
That is great. So I want him to do what he wants, to improve the product.

Shipping is all dependent on when I get the ASICs, and foundry is still on schedule for mid-october delivery to me. Most major parts are ordered, and PCB design is is almost complete. As soon as I have the chips ill be able to start production and will be shipping out hundreds per day. The first people that pre-ordered will probably get theirs end of october, and if you were at the end of the pre-order probably mid-november.

And yes, this at minimum will ship with heatsink, and all you need to run at lower end speeds without a fan. Im trying to work with a small fan manufacture so I can bundle a fan as a "thanks" to everyone that pre-ordered. This will allow you to run it at almost full speed without needing an external fan to blow on the sticks.

Thanks jstefanop for the update! Out of curiosity, will you solder the ASIC chip into the PCB by hand?

If I made each one by hand, then you guys wouldn't get these until 2019 Wink

All the prototypes I have shown are made by hand though...im about to go blind placing hundreds of components Cheesy

Quote from: BenRickert on September 12, 2017, 12:02:31 AM

Quote from: mustangy on September 11, 2017, 03:21:59 PM

in hand sep 5
8 L3+ and 12 s9 Sad

and i still searching for a colo or rental basement etc ? prices are good but i dont want to sell

Litecoin Difficulty today is 776k. At .08 Kw the L3+ produces $13.38 per day or $400.00 per month. I'm sure you will find some ignorant sucker to dump your machines on, but you better take the money and run. I predicted this very scenario back in June and everyone laughed or got all butthurt. Now it's reality. BTW, that's "today's" numbers. They are GAURANTEED to get worse. The last sheep are almost in the pen. The farmer is sharpening his knife.

Where are you getting 13 from? Its currently slightly over $20 for LTC mining even with 10 cent power. But you are right these will be quickly go to under $10 per machine in the next month or two. People were laughing at me when I was telling them diff will be over 500k by end of August, and my estimates were on conservative side.