help needed in fpga (actually enlightment and instructions...)

[stergium]

reading through the forum i stumpled upon a claim that someone could use a fpga card from a dvr for mining..
and i remembered a dvr that is presumably dead in my office. long story short i have a pci card with an altera cyclone chip ep1g20f400c8 .
Does anybody knows if this can be used for mining purposes?
can someone instruct me how to do that?

[makomk]

It's probably an EP1C20 at a guess. The short answer is maybe, but it's probably not worth the hassle...

[ElectricMucus]

If you set the Logic Blocks in direct relation (which is only a very rough estimate) you could hope for 10-15mh from it. But with fpgas it isn't all that easy since you have a certain amount of minimal space for a function to actually run.

[stergium]

ty for replying.
when my total hash rate is no more than 130 mh/s , 10-15mhs is good....
ok. so i have that card in pci. what can i do with it ? how? do i need a special driver? software to send to the card what to run?

[ElectricMucus]

If you are asking these question there would be a long road ahead of you. In short you have to access the jtag interface if that is a development board you would most likely have some pin headers for it if it is not you would need to solder a wire to those pins in some way.
idk how the interface is implement in the open source fpga miner but you would have at least adapt it specifically for you board.

just look up the relevant thread goto fpgamining.com and ask the people involved in this project for help, I am just an interested bystander at this point

[stergium]

i'm also a bystander on this...
so , with as much as i've gathered there is no way to "send" instructions to a pci card without a soldering iron , and a cable with direct access to the board. fpga mining is not applicable to fpga cards in general.(and probably will never be)
It was a question that i had to be clarified.
thanks for the info.

[cicada]

This is back-seat-driver, off the cuff stuff, with-no-experience-in-these-things, but:

The vendor that produced this card likely a) has their FPGA instructions stored in a memory chip, and usually these are re-programmable (aka 'firmware update').  If not, it means they're b) loading the instruction set on the fly, usually as bytecode contained in their driver software.

If the card happens to have an open-source driver, and you're really lucky, it may be possible to figure out either a) how to update the firmware with your own instruction set, or b) figure out how they load it on the fly, and load your instructions instead.

If you're unlucky, they don't have any open-source driver or equivalent, or the bytecode they use is signed in a particular way to avoid people doing exactly what you're trying to do.  This is more common in, say, a smartphone than an off-the-shelf video recorder card.  In either of those cases, your only choice is to interface with the FPGA directly as EM suggests.

Regardless, it's going to take some work and a lot of trial-and-error to get anywhere with it.  By the time you do, the 10-15mh/s may no longer be worth the power it consumes.