I must admit I hadn't. I'll try and check but is fairly academic if we recommend to go to 2.5.0 anyhow assuming I got that bit right. It does look like that is the best thing for everyone to do.

I would recommend updating the Controller to Rev 1.3. For most customers this is an improvement. Rev 1.4 isn't far off and might also bring a few subttle improvements. I'm doing that in my spare time which pretty much non-existant so that is slow progress. There is also a software debug tool coming that will check an entire rig out for any coms problems. We are using a raw version of that here not to set up our big test rig already. We will try and make that customer friendly towards the end of the week.

Kano I am not in any way having a go at CGminer or the CGminer team or the hard work that goes on there on your team. Any post on this thread is a mixture of telling our customers of what we know and also a way to gather data to see if it fits with customer experience. This is purely a process to make things better and also to help us here to find the source or sources of a bug. I don't even what to attribute blame as a certain person thinks. It's all about identifying what causes a problem and even then it will often be a blend of things. If by changing one thing that fixes an issue that is good enough by us and that doesn't matter if it's software, firmware or even hardware as long as we find a solution. That's how we work.

Personally I'm not the correct person to report a software bug. I know every little about the software side and so far I have not even gone as far as identifing the correct place to post the bug report. Unless you happen to come from Airbus there is always a possibility of a bug. The circumstances we had here yesterday were unusual for a landline broadband but not unlike 3G based broadband users might get. It does appear that version 2.5.0 of CGminer maight be a good move from customer response. The 2.4.3 choice was made 11 weeks ago and that probably made sense at that point when we did initial system design. Obviously thimgs have moved on and when the relkevant person is back in the office we we look at this more closely and contact you as appropriate. Part of what we are doing now could be called integration, support, or even round2 of system design and we have to pull together all of the different aspects of the system and make it all perform.

We will look at other options but we don't really want to do that in a hurry unless we can't solve the CGminer? issues. To do so could open up a pile more of support issues to deal with and that would slow progress on all the new things we are working on and want to bring for you all to use. I think we will try CGminer 32.5.0 first and see where that takes us.

Do send us the info and we will do our best to sort it out.

It is our plan to get Cairnsmore1 adopted into the official CGminer but we want to be in something of stable position. I think we are pretty much there now. I think we should look at 2.5.0 to seeif that is better and get that looked at in the next few days. What we are trying to avoid is unnecessarily changing when other things are changing as well. The reason for that is to minimise the risks of a support nightmare of changing several things together and something going badly wrong. That's a fairly normal approach on a project like this.

The problem, or bug, we saw was by sheer luck. If you have a rock solid internet connection you would not see it the same way we did. It just happens that our local area is getting internet improvements and we have been getting short interuptions on our service. These interruptions then lead to the drop of hashing rates. We have seen this happen under the same circunstances a number of times so we are pretty sure of the association.

Can you send us this as a support case with as much detail of your setup as possible.

The port numbers may change so you need to keep an eye on what is used.

We are going to try and shortcut some of this stuff so bear with us whilst get those materials get produced. It's been impossible to keep documentation up with the development progress and changes but that should be improving now as it settles down. What we should have today is a contstraints file for the array FPGA. That will tell you where dip switches and leds are. It's not going to be very complicated as there is a very small set of I/O.

The LEDs depend a lot on what is on the board has as configuration bitstreams and these do vary with them. Recently the back two are being shipped without a configuration bitstream. That will change with the next major release of bitstream when we bring all 4 FPGAs into operation.

The FPGAs notionally operate as 2 pairs at least in this iniial phase.

Possible CGminer Bug


We have got an intermittant internet today and we are having short periods when basically data isn't pass and we get timeouts. We have seen that in our big mining test reg, running on the same internet connection, that after such an outage that CGminer (V2.3.4) appears to stop scheduling work correctly to some or all of the stack of boards. It does continue to intermittantly schedule work and is not a total stoppage but hash rates appear to fall to less that half that expected. This does appear to be a  problem that a number of rig, and in particularly the bigger ones, are reporting. Once this happens there doen't seen to be any way to recover CGminer other than a complete restart.

You should have received the boards with DIP switches set for the loaded twin bitstream which does only run 2 FPGAs so expect hasing about 380MH/s. We are getting U here between 5 and 6 which what to expect at the moment. DIP switches SW2-5 usage is entirely dependent on the bitstream used. When we release our native bitstream they won't be used at all but settings for the "twin" are on http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/cairnsmore/cairnsmore1_support_materials.html. We are now shipping all boards now with the "twin" bitstream running on positions 0 and 3. For the twin only the first 2 bits of each switch are actually used. One bit is a reset the other is the hash start point.

There are 4 com ports of which only 2 are used for coms. the other 2 are used for JTAG and SPI programming functions. If running windows the easy way to check what ones correspond to coms is to look in the Device Manager. It's usually fairly obvious in there. We do have a small utility coming that will do some port scanning that's mainly aimed at testing but might have some general application in helping setup.

It's definately not the case that "customers are on their own" or will be but there are finite resources right now. I would put it that it will be more a slow down in support response time this week but it's for the greater good towards the goal of better performance and reliablity. Anyone who does have a Cairnsmore1 problem should still send us as much information about their issue as they can to our "bitcoin.support" email. That way we have a track record of it and hopefully don't miss it. Unless you have done developments like this yourself before it's not easy to imagine what goes on here as a development task as complex as Cairnsmore1 or even the support issues of dealing with hundreds or even thousands of possible rig hardware/software combinations used with the product.

That's fair enough.

I also don't want to get too distracted on all of this and actually keep moving our product forward and I think we are doing that. I know that is not always visible to the forum but it is happening. Also I can't make a specific promise (or I will get balled out that) but 800 MH/s switchover might be academic anyhow in not so distant future.

What I might do if I find a little time is a quick pass though pin adapting design for the first FPGA in the pairs and show the back FPGAs working as half Icarus. That will shown that tha back half is at least as good the front and maybe if we need to do a little more work on the controller for that. I think we are ok already on the latter but a further check does not do any harm. Ok it's not a total answer but it might calm any uncertainty about what we have as a hardware platform.

The very first post of this thread has this and I don't think this has been materially changed since the thread started..

We have listened to your comments on Merrick6 (see other thread) and are going to create a board specifically for Bitcoin with 4 XC6SLX150-2FGGG484C FPGAs. The price guaranteed until the end of June 2012 is GBP £400 / USD 640 / 520 Euros (plus tax and shipping). We are selling at the cost to manufacture price until we do the work of benchmarking it and check it working with the Bitcoin interface software. After we complete the benchmarking/software work the price will increase by 50% to cover our costs in doing this work and general support.

To get the initial price we need to receive an order before the end of June. You price and order will be confirmed to you by email. We may extend this offer at our sole discretion. Payment will be by PayPal or by bank transfer.

Prices are based on current exchange rates or staying within 5% of current rates.

We will accept pre-orders on the basis that no money will be charged until your board is ready to ship. We reserve the right not to sell to any person or organisation and/or to ask for more information in respect of and for export control. To pre order send an email to bitcoin AT enterpoint DOT co DOT uk with address and contact details.

UK shipping cost is £8 + VAT. EEC 32€ + VAT, US $40. Please ask for other places.

Local duties and any applying taxes will be charged direct to you by courier. For UK and EEC we will charge UK VAT unless you are VAT registered in your country (not UK).

We expect to complete the design for this board by the 1st of May 2012. We will show some CAD images of the board then. First production boards will ship towards the end of May although some lucky people may get them earlier. I will announce image availability on this forum.

The spec of the board is as follows:

FPGA - 4 x XC6SLX150-2FGG484C
Heatsinks - stick on or clip on supplied with single 12cm fan(with mount pillars) to blow over all
Size - approximately 15cm x 15cm.
Programming - with our Prog3 cable (£50/$80/65€) or similar. We may add this interface into board as standard.
Data transfer - FT4232 USB interface. Each FPGA has a port.
PCB - 4-8 layer
Power input - 12V from Jack or disk drive (Molex)
SPI Flash - We will have local FPGA image storage so you don't need to JTAG load every time.
Clock - single oscillator or clock generator.
Core voltage - 4 regulators each 12A

There is no performance specification on the Cairnsmore1 website pages as far as I remember or every has been and all we have talked about in terms of performance that we expect to attain is somewhere in this thread.

As to your specific performance issues have you sent an email to Enterpoint outlining the problem. If we have missed that I do apologise and do send it again to us. We can't fix what we don't know about. You might have a hardware fault or there might be something else causing you an issue so tell us about it. We are slowly working our way through support items as best we can and we will take action based on a custom need.

There is something about 700-800 MH/s and the price switch somewhere in this thread. I probably said also at our discretion. I'll struggle to find that now and by all means do quote what I actually said. But it's a fact that it is our choice what we sell a product at and when we change prices. It's not like we didn't warn that there would be a price change. That was said on day1 in the first post.

Actually what I don't like about you posts is that you have nothing useful to either us or other customers to add and just seem to trolling and making the tread even harder to follow.

I have absolutely no problem with genuine customers posting grievances here but I would also like the same information passed to our support email so we can try and sort out issues. Our support mechanism runs mainly on that not on this forum thread. The team simply don't the time to read the thread and get anything done. I will attempt to pass information accross the gap but I don't have infinate time to do it and it's very easy to miss something when the tread is busy or cluttered. I'm also not an expert in everything and that can mean I don't necessarily have a full understanding to always convey problems accurately to the team. I have said previously that we will talk about any problem or design flaw and that continues to be the case.

I also don't have problem with customers and knowledgeable people spreading useful information that improves things for customers. Our own support mechanism can't cope with all possibilities platforms, OSs and software.

There are no major hardware design problems quite the contrary. Given the aggressive development cycle we now have a very good design for the purpose. There are probably a small percentage of genuine hardware faults (we need to see boards to confirm) and we have extended and intensified our board testing to try and catch any future ones before they leave us to go to customers. The last thing we want is customers recieving faulty boards. We are swapping out any faulty boards as fast as we can after we try and do some level of diagnostic with the customer to try understand the problem and to try and identify if it is likely to be hardware or software. This is also part of our development process that we understand problems and if there are any holes in our hardware test strategy we improve the testing. We can't even hope to model all environmental circumstances customers have in our testing but we can certainly always make it better. Once we have a few "faulty" boards back in the lab we will look further to see what problems they do have and learn from that.

To third party software I wasn't blaming everything on those items and I recognise the hard work many people put into these items. It was merely a statement of fact. However it is a fact of life that there are previously undetected bugs or new ones that occur with OS updates or even new bugs that peculiar to a individual customer setup. We don't have test suites for all possible combinations out there and we can't stop the roll of OS updates, driver updates, and new hardware platforms but it is something that we have to try and deal with. It all takes time to work with. In this initial phase we have tried limit the possibilities we have to deal with by say initially just supporting CGminer and not actively supporting ETs bitstream. That is only a recognition that we have a finite sized team to deal with issues and there is only 24 hours in any one day. It is also a fact that the more support work we do the less progress we make with new things. It is the same people doing the work.Last weerk we did a lot of support work and didn't make much progress on new things like the bitstream. This week we will try and move the balance a little more to new development items.

Pricing we said we would hold until end of June initially and then we have extended up to now. It may be that ET's bitstream isn't working and we might be wrong in that change based on that. We are not actively involved on that development so only know a limited amount. But it is no real effect on existing customers so you are not being asked for more money on existing orders. We do need to change pricing at some point to cover our costs in supporting this product. If we don't cover our costs or make some small profit there is absolutely no reason to be in the Bitcoin market. There is after all a legal obligation here to make a return for our shareholders not a loss. Thatr's a commercial fact of life. You can argue whether the new pricing is justifable for your ROI but there is no obligation to buy from us and you can buy competitor kit if that is what you want to do. The market will prevail in this respect.

I don't how you really know as you don't have a board. You cancelled as soon as *** came on the scene with an announcement so don't get bitter if you made the wrong decision.

Outside a very small number of boards listed on this forum there are hundreds working and pretty much stable in the field especially since Controller Rev 1.2. We are still working to tweek the Controller more as is and and will be a much more major change when we bring in our own bitstream design. More on that when we are ready.

There are a handful of boards that probably have a hardware fault and we are replacing them. We are still to have any of these back and to do properal analysis on them but that will happen in due course. There are also a few customers that have particular problems out of a number exceeding 100 rigs. We believe most of these issues are a combination of USB, OS, driver and CGminer issues all of which are basically third party items. There may also be a few more hardware failures as well amongst that lot. We are working our way through those issues as fast as we can but there are literally hundreds of possible combinations and it is hard and slow work to model problems in the lab so we can debug and fix issues. Our big rig that is starting to take shape will give us a good platform to find and fix the oddball issues.

We have made the pricing change based on the availability of eldentyrell's bitstream being available, at close to the rate he has been promising, and we believe that is running in several Cairnsmore1 boards. We said this would happen no matter where a bitstream came from. The pricing change isn't much of an effect on existing customers and everyone that has purchased gets the chance to buy same again at the offer price until the end of September. Over that the new pricing also takes account of previous orders for the benefit of discounting so we think we have been very fair to customers that have committed to us. We do need to raise prices to cover the costs of support work and it is important to the product development that we do that.

We are continuing to deliver boards on time and in some cases earlier than promised.

The only place we might be seen to be at fault in my view is finishing our bitstream and not getting the Icarus replication quite perfect. The bitstream is a couple of weeks behind schedule but does have great promise. All I can say is that we sold this product as a concept going into a development program and it is exactly that. I don't think we could have been clearer on that to potential customers and any that have been unhappy about the current project state have been allowed to cancel or delay pre-orders payments as they wished. We are making significant forward progess on this project every week and the product gets better every day as a result of that.

Outside of all this I think we already have the product with the best capability and design currently available in the Bitstream market. I don't think anyone has a thermal solution as good as ours. Running close to maximum power the heatsinks sit at 5-10 DegC above ambient with the F12 fan running. Protection for fan fail also came this week in Controller rev 1.3. You are free to dissagree on all of that and I would say go and make your own if you can do better. We will stand on what we have done against any competition and we will do that in a totally fair fashion. We are still only on the 12th week of product development and I don't think we are doing too badly given what has been achieved by the team at Enterpoint. There is more to come and that will be delivered as fast as we can achieve that.

Initial Offer Is Now Closed

Initial offer is now closed. The only exception is if you already conversing with our boardsales and anyone that is in that category has 3 days to place their order. Alll other offers including the Same Order Again (placed July-September) remain open.

Pricing for new orders:

Final Warning for June Promise Customers

Anyone promised a June delivery should have received an email saying units are available by now. There are a very small number of people that have not responded. Any of these units that are not paid for this week will be removed from our list and new pricing structure will apply on any replacement orders. We are doing this so we can satisfy demand for these boards and allow us to either supply more units to other customers or simply to pull forward orders for other customers.

Anyone on an early to mid July promise should have had notification that units are available. If you have not received notification let us know and/or check your spam box.

Were those stats over the 11 hours?

Nothing in that price range.

The main power supply is 12V which can be from a range of sources but the controller section can also power from USB.