Home made bitcoin miner...

[monkee]

god i hope opentoe is not BFL... lol

[mrb]

I received the board with the chip on it and some notes that came along with it. Says ASIC right on the board and it looks like there was a heat sink on the chip at one point but looks like a little glue on there. I want to remove the glue without destroying the chip. I know Acetone works great with removing just about anything but will that affect the chip itself? Several people did email indicating they may be able to help with this project and I'm this much closer to maybe getting something done. If you are a good programmer, can make/create drivers so we can interface with this let me know. I'll respond to the people who already messaged me. Of course once it is complete you'll get a free miner. NOT a scam here. Willing to pay and very serious about this. This is NOT a big operation like Avalon or others. We are just a few tech guys that wanted to give this a try and are stuck at the programming/interface portion here.

I predict that opentoe will ask whoever is interested in a board to "just pay for shipping" to get the "free" board and then somehow not receive it or receive something that turns out is not a Bitcoin mining board

[freequant]

god i hope opentoe is not BFL... lol

Actually this could be a plug from BFL to make people hope a bit longer. Now, the guy is going to post photos of a board full of chips with "BFL ASIC" written on top, and everybody will be like "woah, BFL ASICs are ready, OMG, let's preorder more".

[ChipGeek]

Just because it is an "ASIC", does NOT mean it is a "bitcoin ASIC".  As someone pointed out earlier, a GPU is a type of ASIC.  Yes, it can be programmed to mine bitcoins, but that was not its original purpose.  Given any random "ASIC" it may or (more likely) may NOT be able to effectively mine bitcoins. 

Let's see a photo!

[opentoe]

We are just a few tech guys that wanted to give this a try and are stuck at the programming/interface portion here.

Oh, so now you are one of the founders, and a tech guy at it?
Strange, because you claimed to be a bystander having no clue what your friends were up to just a few posts ago...

I'm not involved in this in anyway besides helping my friend find someone to help with the programming, that is it. I'm the middle man right now. Just taking what they have, trying to find someone to help if even possible and that's it. Man, you guys are paranoid as hell on here.

[opentoe]

Just because it is an "ASIC", does NOT mean it is a "bitcoin ASIC".  As someone pointed out earlier, a GPU is a type of ASIC.  Yes, it can be programmed to mine bitcoins, but that was not its original purpose.  Given any random "ASIC" it may or (more likely) may NOT be able to effectively mine bitcoins.  

Let's see a photo!

Yea, I hear you on that. I truly hope that it is made to mine away. I'll admit, I know ZERO (0) on what the chip is, or anything hardware at all. I'll be taking some photos tonight and putting them up here. Charging my camera battery right now. It is an old Nikon D70 so I barely use it and the battery was dead. Sorry. Give me a couple of hours or less.

This was the best I could get right now. This is one of many boards that will be put together I'm guessing. I was told this is about 5 GH/s. It is a very small board.

[mrb]

opentoe: this an Actel ProASIC3 chip. And despite the marketing name, this is an FPGA, not an ASIC (so I was right, again): http://www.actel.com/products/pa3/default.aspx Based on the VQFP-100 package it has got to be an A3P030, A3P060, A3P125, or A3P250.

It is absolutely not made specifically for Bitcoin mining. There is no way whatsoever that this generic 130nm FPGA beats the power efficiency of the 40nm Arria II FPGA (BFL Mini Rig) or 45nm Spartan6 FPGA (in pretty much all other Bitcoin miners).

Sorry for the false accusation of attempting to scam. It turns out you were merely ignorant of what hardware type you had.

[ChipGeek]

opentoe: this an Actel ProASIC3 chip. And despite the marketing name, this is an FPGA, not an ASIC: http://www.actel.com/products/pa3/default.aspx Based on the VQFP-100 package it has got to be an A3P030, A3P060, A3P125, or A3P250.

It is absolutely not made specifically for Bitcoin mining. There is no way whatsoever that this generic 130nm FPGA beats the power efficiency of the 40nm Arria II FPGA (BFL Mini Rig) or 45nm Spartan6 FPGA (in pretty much all other Bitcoin miners).

Sorry for the false accusation of attempting to scam. It turns out you were merely ignorant of what hardware type you had.

I agree.  5MH/s maybe, but not 5GH/s.  In my opinion, this is probably not worth investigating further.  Of course, it would be great to be proven wrong.  But I'm doubtful.

[opentoe]

opentoe: this an Actel ProASIC3 chip. And despite the marketing name, this is an FPGA, not an ASIC (so I was right, again): http://www.actel.com/products/pa3/default.aspx Based on the VQFP-100 package it has got to be an A3P030, A3P060, A3P125, or A3P250.

It is absolutely not made specifically for Bitcoin mining. There is no way whatsoever that this generic 130nm FPGA beats the power efficiency of the 40nm Arria II FPGA (BFL Mini Rig) or 45nm Spartan6 FPGA (in pretty much all other Bitcoin miners).

Sorry for the false accusation of attempting to scam. It turns out you were merely ignorant of what hardware type you had.

As I said, I was merely the middleman trying to give a helping hand to my friend. I've already said I have no idea on what the chips are or anything about them, but I do appreciate the fact that you guys do know what they are. I'll break the bad news to my friends and tell them their little ASIC mining project is over. Thank you guys for letting me know what the chip is. That's why I went to this forum first, I knew some people here are so damn smart technically they would know exactly what that board was.

Thanks again!

[freequant]

Glad to see this was legit. Apologies for the questionning earlier: there have been so many scam cases on this forum that now, any new project is perceived by default as a scam until proven legit. Sad but necessary. Thanks for sharing what you have got.

[BitCoinLoft]

I am building a homebrew FPGA miner. I know after ASICs this won't be a big deal   but, hey I've really discovered FPGA's just soon after disovering Bitcoin and it would be nice to tinker with it and they don't cost much. I've seen couple of people pushing around 400 Mhash/s from XILINX based boards costing under $200.

[opentoe]

I am building a homebrew FPGA miner. I know after ASICs this won't be a big deal   but, hey I've really discovered FPGA's just soon after disovering Bitcoin and it would be nice to tinker with it and they don't cost much. I've seen couple of people pushing around 400 Mhash/s from XILINX based boards costing under $200.

Be smart, do it right and you may end up deciding you want to build an ASIC miner also. You may even have a very good chance of beating BFL to the punch.