Why haven't we seen PDIP chips the traditional hobby DIY guy could use?

[2112]

I mean no offense to your opinions, but I've had a heck of a lot more fun designing the Compac than I would have had working on an FPGA board. I like to work with hardware instead of pretending to work with hardware, and programming a thing to think it's the hardware I want is not nearly as fun as getting iron burns.

Fun, and a perception of play, is a very individual thing. The only 'fun' that I can recall that involved soldering irons was when the professors left the room, we over-applied the rosin-based flux and played really loud "Smoke on the water" by Deep Purple on the tape recorder and tried to come up with alternative lyrics to that song. I'll be perfectly happy to never need to touch the soldering iron again in my life and do all my work by supplying design plans to the workshops.

Integrating a microcontroller with digital voltage control and temp sensing will go on the next model up.

I'm glad to hear that you are considering next version.

But you are going to commit a grave mistake if its going to have a programmable microcontroller with firmware. USB 2.0 has enough bandwidth to support all the required circuitry in the completely dumb-terminal mode.

Unfortunately I don't know the specifics of the ASIC you are using, but the general design points are as follows:

1) absolutely no firmware or microcontrollers can be run on the same power supply as the mining chip !!!one!eleven!
2) simple, high bandwidth USB to serial converter chip with high noise immunity using SPI, I2C, plain serial with hardware flow control, etc.
3) pre-calibrated SPI/I2C thermometer IC touching the same heathsink
4) external clock generator with programmable frequency and duty cycle.
5) SPI/I2C interfaced programmable voltage converter
6) if the chip doesn't have a an on-die temp-sensing diode maybe there is a way to rig up a temperature sensor by doing e.g. IO-pad leakage to time converter with external RC components and measure chip temperature indirectly by measuring time in the host software.
7) obviously, if there is an on-die diode then just hook it up the external thermometer IC.

Don't dis the manual voltage adjustment

I'm trying to. But I sense that you are probably not aware what can a single person do with e.g. a copy of National Instruments LabView Student Edition when that person doesn't need to practice screwdriver artistry and work around firmware limitations/bugs/faults but can simply do a proper laboratory workflow by setting up operational points (voltage,clock parameters) and measure the outputs (temperature,hashing speed & error rates).

One additional comment about the lame design choice that Spondoolies made: they used on-chip temperature-to-digital converter macro instead of a cheaper and simpler diode with external thermometer IC. The internal SSN (simultaneous switching noise) on their chip made their temperature readouts rather unreliable. And they knew very well that the SHA256 mining chip is very close to the theoretical maximum toggle rate of any practical digital circuit.

[sidehack]

Ah. I spent a lot of high school and my first few years of college programming, and then remembered how much more I enjoy hardware work instead so I shifted focus back to that. To me, building is much better than typing. I'll probably get into FPGA sometime in the future but for now I'm satisfied.

Grave mistake or not, it is going to have a programmable microcontroller (most likely 8-bit AVR) with firmware. USB 2.0 has enough bandwidth to support all that, but if we're working with Bitmain chips again it'll be running on bare unaddressed UART so we'll either set up a simple control set the chips ignore or something using accessory pins on the converter to talk to the micro. I2C temp sensor and voltage control and PWM fan speed. Coded in assembler, probably less than two hundred lines.

If we keep on Bitmain ASICs, they take in a fixed clock and each chip has an internal PLL multiplier so frequency setting is done there. But most everything else you mentioned is something I'm planning. Thanks for the advice.

Also, I tend to be more impressed when people choose to use screwdrivers and pencils than automate everything ever. Remember, I like simple.

I'm not going to get into a fight over who's the better engineer, because you're probably going to win - probably with both knowledge and experience. But to quote Abraham Lincoln, "I will do the very best I know how - the very best I can, and I mean to keep on doing so until the end." Which requires doing, so I'm gonna.

[Mitak]

QFP...
What about heat transfer

[sidehack]

To be specific, QFP-EP. Have as good a heat transfer as any QFN with belly pads, but a lot easier to verify placement and proper soldering. Leaded packages would be nice to see, folks wantin' to play with designs and such.