FIRST ROUND SALES: 470 sticks paid | large queue: 312 (312 shipped) small queue: 158 (158 shipped)SECOND BATCH QUEUE: 505 sticks paid (505 shipped)SECOND RUN QUEUE: 745 sticks paid (633 shipped)
Sales for the second run of Compacs is
now open closed. I will be assembling using pulled chips, but every Compac will still have the same testing requirements and warranty. Delivery should start in the middle of February. Total batch size about 750 sticks.
GekkoScience Compac BM1384 Stickminer Official Support Thread
So, novak@gekkoscience and I built a stick miner. We call it the
GekkoScience Compac.
(render stolen from TheRealSteve)
Here's nine of them collectively cranking out 110GH off about 45W of 5VDC
I know nobody cares about stick miners. They all want their 100W 100TH magic money machines that you plug in and walk away from and require zero user interaction. But that's friggin' boring. So I built a stick miner that'll run
about 8GH off stock USB power, and can overclock to at least twice that with adequate cooling. We have achieved over 23GH with a stock Compac, and approaching 27GH with a modified unit.
The Compac features a Bitmain BM1384 (same chip as on the S5) and a fully adjustable regulator design that gives you a core voltage range of 550mV to 800mV without requiring "pencil modding" or soldering skills. It enumerates in cgminer as an AntMiner U3, which gives you command-line frequency control to adjust the hashrate. This stick is good for anyone interested in tweaking and testing stuff, or for anyone wanting to "get into mining" without spending a lot of money or burning a lot of power. It's designed as a flexible yet affordable tool to learn a lot about bitcoin mining and its hardware. It's by no means the most expensive stickminer available, but it is both the fastest and most efficient. In fact, it's actually
the third most power-efficient publicly-sold bitcoin miner in the world at this time (because the Avalon6 and S7 just barely beat it and are now shipping).
It's been extensively reviewed by several forum members and information about performance
is all over here if you want to look. Philipma1957 has done a lot of efficiency testing, and TheRealSteve's review is especially thorough and extensive.
And the part people may not like -
this is technically a preorder.We were deliberately as transparent as possible with the design and testing stages. We took in no outside money to fund development (except where absolutely necessary, which is to say short-term loans to buy chips before availability ran out), and at our own cost shipped a dozen test units to trusted forum members for review and approval before opening sales. We're banking on our reputation as honest and forthright builders now to get this project finished - the design works, it is thoroughly proven; all we need now is funds for bulk parts purchases. All sales revenue will be used first to pay back the remaining chip-loan debt, then be immediately funneled into purchasing materials prioritized by longest lead time. I expect to start shipping units within four weeks after sales open, but I'll give five weeks as the deadline to start shipping because something always goes wrong.
So, here's how this sale is going to work.
-
There will be 1000 Compacs manufactured for sale. Approximately 500 have already been sold and 500 more will be sold in this batch. No more will be made, probably ever.
-
Sticks are $25 per unit regardless of quantity desired.
- If all 1000 sticks are sold or otherwise spoken for (hey, I gotta keep some for the archives), I will close sales and refund any erroneous purchases made after stock ran out.
I have no coordinated Group Buys for this batch at present.
Currently I have four regions of the world being covered by an official local reseller of some kind. The goal here is to get sticks to customers in a more affordable way.
- AJRGale is selling for Australia
- valkir is selling for Canada
- chiguireitor is selling in Venezuela-
MacEntyre of bitshopper.de is manufacturing and selling in EuropeIf you live in any of these locations, I'd prefer you hit up those guys for sales. Bitshopper.de has contracted to manufacture their own batch of sticks for sale in Europe, so I'd prefer you talk to him about sales, but if you really really want one of my sticks instead of (or better yet, in addition to) one of his, I can probably send one or two without hurting his feelings.
If you're interested in bulk purchasing for a country or region not already covered, let me know soon and we can work something out.
So, here's the deal. If you want sticks from one of the places listed above, contact the local seller in the next few days and make reservations. Those sales will be handled independent from me so they make their own rules. If you are not in one of those places and would like to buy direct from me, here's the official process:
1. Calculate the total cost of your order:
1a - $25 for every stick desired.
1b - US Domestic Priority Shipping: 1-5 sticks $6; 4-20 sticks $10
1c - International shipping, 1-10 sticks: $15 first-class (2-3 week); $35 Priority (6-10 days)
2. If you bought one of those t-shirts (and can prove it) knock off $5 from the total.
3a. Bitcoin payment: Convert this US dollar value to bitcoin and send it (from an address you control) to our for-this-project sandwich address 1BURGERAXHH6Yi6LRybRJK7ybEm5m5HwTr
3b. PayPal payment: The above-calculated dollar value can be sent to sales@gekkoscience.com
4. Sign a message (maybe something about sandwiches) with the sent-from address and send the message, TXID, quantity purchased and your shipping address to me in a PM, or in an email to sales@gekkoscience.comThis queue starts fresh from zero. Orders will be shipped as they come in. I expect to start shipping in the middle of February.
I expect to start shipping sticks (in the order payments arrived, with some quota queueing for bulk orders) by October 23rd. Any delays in this timeline will be announced as they are discovered. This project cannot exist without transparency.EDIT: In case anyone's wondering what I mean by "quota queueing", that's what I call our policy with build-then-ship-immediately sales like this when customers include both large and small batch orders. Basically, as sticks come off the line we'll divide them up 60/40. The 60% will go to filling the myriad small orders in the order of submitted payment, and the 40% will go to filling the few large orders in the order of submitted payment. This is intended to ensure that small orders aren't forced to wait for the large orders to be filled first (a preferential treatment most mining manufacturers seem to embrace) but still gets the large orders handled in a reasonable amount of time.EDIT2: Now that small-queue backorder has been met, only large orders remain. I will be altering the quota queueing to an 80/20 in favor of large orders. No reserve stock will be held for incoming small orders, but up to 20% of any day's production can be used to fill immediate small orders if necessary.
