[RUN 2 CLOSED][SIDEHACK STICK]GekkoScience Compac Official sales thread

[sidehack]

Shipped out 57 sticks today, making 77 total, and updated the queue numbers on the first post. This is every order shy of valkir's Canada group buy. I have two sticks tested waiting to go out, and nine waiting to be Novak'd into shape.

Had the first full failure stick today. I messed with it for about an hour but the buck just wouldn't come online. I was seeing some bizarre errors, even after replacing every active and most of the passive parts of the circuit, so I really don't know what the heck was going on unless the PCB was somehow hosed. So I hit it with a bat and moved on. We bought 20 extra PCBs just in case of problems like that.

In order to effectively divide my time between Compac order fulfillment and necessary project R&D, I'm going to shift my schedule to a format I've found to be ridiculously productive in the past. First thing when I come in, I'll straightaway assemble and clean up 20 Compacs. Depending on what needs to be touched up and tested, this could take between four and seven hours. Usually it's ASICs not fully connected, which for a 32QFN can be pretty annoying to troubleshoot, but occasional other problems like bad power and such are the issue. This time also includes installing the USB jacks, cleaning up any solder blobs, cleaning excess flux and any snap-tabs still on the PCBs. This means I'll probably ship Compac batches every two days, at least until the small order queue is caught up. After that it'll depend on how long it takes to make the next large batch (which range from 20 to 50 right now).
After getting 20 Compacs looked over and ready to roll, I'll be spending the remainder of the day (anywhere from three to six hours) on R&D. This'll mean dev and prototyping for miner boards. First priority is a PCB design for testing TypeZero power systems, and then working on all the integrated controls for the pod and TypeZero boards. Still waiting and hoping PlanetCrypto can get some chip news from someone, and I intend to keep working on a product assuming we'll get chips.

[bmoscato]

I have a dumb question... Is the queue for the shipped or to ship public ally available? I'm not sure where I fall on the list.

[sidehack]

There's 47 sticks between now and yours. That puts them probably being made on Friday and either going out Friday or next Monday.

[bmoscato]

Thanks for the update.

[jwever]

I received my 3 sticks today. WOOT!

Just want to confirm I'm running these properly. I compiled the latest version of bfgminer & starting with the following...

bfgminer -S all --set-device antminer:clock=x0782 ...

2 of my sticks seem OK, but the 3rd shows up as having 2 chips & lots of HW errors...
https://i.imgur.com/8VgPuZY.png

[bmoscato]

Have you tried swapping the compaqs around to different ports in the USB hub to see if you get the same errors on that stick?

[sidehack]

You know, Novak's cgminer has been tested to work with 8 sticks simultaneously and also doesn't require hex lookup tables for clock rate.

You might turn the voltage up a bit on the one. I set them to work at 150MHz on my brief bench test, but Novak burns 'em in at 200MHz and sometimes the volts are a bit low. No idea why it sees two chips. I've never actually used BFG.

You might send questions to The GekkoScience Compac BM1384 Stickminer Official Support Thread instead of posting here.

[jwever]

I've tried other ports and also running the "problem" stick by itself and get the same results. Actually running it by itself, yields 4 chips 0a,b,c,d ...

I will try cgminer to compare.

Didn't know a support thread existed, I'll post my findings there instead. Thanks.

[Luke-Jr]

I received my 3 sticks today. WOOT!

Just want to confirm I'm running these properly. I compiled the latest version of bfgminer & starting with the following...

bfgminer -S all --set-device antminer:clock=x0782 ...

2 of my sticks seem OK, but the 3rd shows up as having 2 chips & lots of HW errors...

Note at the very least, you will need to use --set-device compac:clock=x0782

[jwever]

Thanks sidehack - turning up the volts just a bit fixed the issue of bfgminer seeing multiple chips & spewing tons of errors.
Thanks Luke Jr - I am now able to adjust frequencies properly.

Fun stuff & great work guys!

[novak@gekkoscience]

Thanks sidehack - turning up the volts just a bit fixed the issue of bfgminer seeing multiple chips & spewing tons of errors.
Thanks Luke Jr - I am now able to adjust frequencies properly.

Fun stuff & great work guys!

Yeah for more info please do see the support thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1173963 which has info including a handy frequency table for bfgminer and a few tips on first things to try when troubleshooting.

--
novak

[Buchi-88]

Cgminer (official) also support this sticks in the future?

How much is the shipping to Austria?

The miner have "CE"?

[TheRealSteve]

Cgminer (official) also support this sticks in the future?

If pull request is made and accepted, yes: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28402.msg12377465#msg12377465
( in the mean time you can always use the custom builds/code or use bfgminer )

How much is the shipping to Austria?

2. Calculate the total cost of your order:
2a - $25 for every stick desired.
2b - Shipping: 1-3 sticks $6 inside US, $15 international; 4-10 sticks $10 inside US, $25 international

The miner have "CE"?

No.  The ones built in Germany will have CE and WEEE: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1141518

[Buchi-88]

The miner have "CE"?

No.  The ones built in Germany will have CE and WEEE: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1141518

THX, so a shipping from USA or Canada to Austria is not possible... -> customs officer...

[sidehack]

I'd prefer if folks in Europe bought the sticks made in Europe.

[Flep182]

The miner have "CE"?

No.  The ones built in Germany will have CE and WEEE: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1141518

THX, so a shipping from USA or Canada to Austria is not possible... -> customs officer...

Plus it will be almost the same price to get them to Europe. Some countries aren't that picky on CE labeling, but the taxes will be a bitch since sidehack said he doesn't want to lie about the value of the product

[sidehack]

So we didn't ship anything today. I was having a bit of trouble with the first row of sticks; two of them have been sidelined with power issues and Novak handed me back two more that failed testing (though I think one of those was from the previous batch).

Last night I took some time to do a bit of maintenance on the robot, did a bit of cleaning and calibrating and think I finally got the process ironed out. I ran out a panel of 30 sticks last night with only one manual intervention after the 3rd stick, and then this morning ran out another full panel with zero manual intervention on the whole thing (one hour, 51 minutes runtime). I then patched up and handed to Novak 20 of the sticks from the one panel in about 4 hours' time, which includes touchups, cleanup, mounting the USB jacks and doing any required repairs and reseating of ASICs (which is most of the trouble, and mostly related to the crappy solder paste). So that's pretty much double the pace from when I started last week.

If I can meet my goals tomorrow before shiptime, I'll have everything through Chigiueritato's Venezuela lot going out which will put us at about 20 from being done with the small-order queue and starting on some big reseller batches. So, if you've bought fewer than 20 sticks and not within the last two weeks, your order is probably going out tomorrow.

Once we catch up on the small-order queue (which will probably be Monday) I'll start funneling all Compacs into large orders. The quota queueing will still exist but I'll shift the quotas, probably 20% small and 80% large since I have a lot of large orders left hanging. But that means I'd have four or five sticks per day which could meet small orders immediately, so starting next week small orders will be shipped approximately without delay.

That said, sales have just about caught up to what we have in parts. If many more come in we'll have to fetch additional components to manufacture 'em. But that's a good problem to have, right?

[Chris_Sabian]

So we didn't ship anything today. I was having a bit of trouble with the first row of sticks; two of them have been sidelined with power issues and Novak handed me back two more that failed testing (though I think one of those was from the previous batch).

Last night I took some time to do a bit of maintenance on the robot, did a bit of cleaning and calibrating and think I finally got the process ironed out. I ran out a panel of 30 sticks last night with only one manual intervention after the 3rd stick, and then this morning ran out another full panel with zero manual intervention on the whole thing (one hour, 51 minutes runtime). I then patched up and handed to Novak 20 of the sticks from the one panel in about 4 hours' time, which includes touchups, cleanup, mounting the USB jacks and doing any required repairs and reseating of ASICs (which is most of the trouble, and mostly related to the crappy solder paste). So that's pretty much double the pace from when I started last week.

If I can meet my goals tomorrow before shiptime, I'll have everything through Chigiueritato's Venezuela lot going out which will put us at about 20 from being done with the small-order queue and starting on some big reseller batches. So, if you've bought fewer than 20 sticks and not within the last two weeks, your order is probably going out tomorrow.

Once we catch up on the small-order queue (which will probably be Monday) I'll start funneling all Compacs into large orders. The quota queueing will still exist but I'll shift the quotas, probably 20% small and 80% large since I have a lot of large orders left hanging. But that means I'd have four or five sticks per day which could meet small orders immediately, so starting next week small orders will be shipped approximately without delay.

That said, sales have just about caught up to what we have in parts. If many more come in we'll have to fetch additional components to manufacture 'em. But that's a good problem to have, right?

Thanks for the update.  I'm looking forward to trying one out.  Hopefully it will arrive quickly 

[AJRGale]

That said, sales have just about caught up to what we have in parts. If many more come in we'll have to fetch additional components to manufacture 'em. But that's a good problem to have, right?

Call it Batch 2 in the next few months? I'm sure there will be more going after them once the public shows off their new toys

[Flep182]

So we didn't ship anything today. I was having a bit of trouble with the first row of sticks; two of them have been sidelined with power issues and Novak handed me back two more that failed testing (though I think one of those was from the previous batch).

Last night I took some time to do a bit of maintenance on the robot, did a bit of cleaning and calibrating and think I finally got the process ironed out. I ran out a panel of 30 sticks last night with only one manual intervention after the 3rd stick, and then this morning ran out another full panel with zero manual intervention on the whole thing (one hour, 51 minutes runtime). I then patched up and handed to Novak 20 of the sticks from the one panel in about 4 hours' time, which includes touchups, cleanup, mounting the USB jacks and doing any required repairs and reseating of ASICs (which is most of the trouble, and mostly related to the crappy solder paste). So that's pretty much double the pace from when I started last week.

If I can meet my goals tomorrow before shiptime, I'll have everything through Chigiueritato's Venezuela lot going out which will put us at about 20 from being done with the small-order queue and starting on some big reseller batches. So, if you've bought fewer than 20 sticks and not within the last two weeks, your order is probably going out tomorrow.

Once we catch up on the small-order queue (which will probably be Monday) I'll start funneling all Compacs into large orders. The quota queueing will still exist but I'll shift the quotas, probably 20% small and 80% large since I have a lot of large orders left hanging. But that means I'd have four or five sticks per day which could meet small orders immediately, so starting next week small orders will be shipped approximately without delay.

That said, sales have just about caught up to what we have in parts. If many more come in we'll have to fetch additional components to manufacture 'em. But that's a good problem to have, right?

Dude, you're doing a fantastic job keeping everyone updated! 

And yes, getting more orders in than you have hardware for at this point is a luxury problem