Klondike - 16 chip ASIC Open Source Board - Preliminary

[hf_developer]

I was looking at the PCB for the K16 and noticed that the PLL ground is connected directly to digital ground under the Avalon chip.
Does anyone know if this I how the Avalon reference design connects the grounds together?
The PLL ground lead on the ASIC is lead 8.

There is no problem with this. Zero-Potential should be the same on the whole chip to prevent leakage currents.

[LordTheron]

Is there anybody in contact with bkkcoins? Some of members should have his phone or personal email and ask him is his okay? God forbid but I am worried if something has happened to him. He might be ill or in hospital not able to say that we dont have to worry.

I think this must be the case. I have exchanged quite a few PM's with him in the past and he has always gone out on limb to answer me. I find this extremely out of character for him, although I sensed he was under a lot of pressure towards the end and Avalon pretty much destroyed the progect, he was always hesitant to release work that was not quite ready but had his arm twisted to release items early, which he did so stating it was still beta ext...

Lets hope he is OK and will be back soon and the community will except and respect the hard work he has put into the klondike.

Well he took my money for pcbs and other stuff from his shop and never delivered or refunded.  bkkcoins should be ashamed of himself.

[hf_developer]

So what is the overall state of the K16 project at the moment?

EDIT: Is anyone selling bare PCBs? I have all the components x 10 except for what BKKcoins sold on his website, as I was planning to get them there. And heatsinks.

Why don't you let them make by a pcb manufacturer?

[fasmax]

I was looking at the PCB for the K16 and noticed that the PLL ground is connected directly to digital ground under the Avalon chip.
Does anyone know if this I how the Avalon reference design connects the grounds together?
The PLL ground lead on the ASIC is lead 8.

There is no problem with this. Zero-Potential should be the same on the whole chip to prevent leakage currents.

The only possible problem is that the digital ground is noisy and by connecting the this that way maybe the noise would get into the PLL circuit and cause problems. I was wondering if anyone knows where the PLL ground gets connected in the reference design. If the reference design connects the ground the same way as the K16 then I would not worry about it.

[fasmax]

Is there anybody in contact with bkkcoins? Some of members should have his phone or personal email and ask him is his okay? God forbid but I am worried if something has happened to him. He might be ill or in hospital not able to say that we dont have to worry.

I think this must be the case. I have exchanged quite a few PM's with him in the past and he has always gone out on limb to answer me. I find this extremely out of character for him, although I sensed he was under a lot of pressure towards the end and Avalon pretty much destroyed the progect, he was always hesitant to release work that was not quite ready but had his arm twisted to release items early, which he did so stating it was still beta ext...

Lets hope he is OK and will be back soon and the community will except and respect the hard work he has put into the klondike.

Well he took my money for pcbs and other stuff from his shop and never delivered or refunded.  bkkcoins should be ashamed of himself.

I really don't think he would have done the this intentionally. Something must of happened. Wish we could find out what it is.

[hf_developer]

I was looking at the PCB for the K16 and noticed that the PLL ground is connected directly to digital ground under the Avalon chip.
Does anyone know if this I how the Avalon reference design connects the grounds together?
The PLL ground lead on the ASIC is lead 8.

There is no problem with this. Zero-Potential should be the same on the whole chip to prevent leakage currents.

The only possible problem is that the digital ground is noisy and by connecting the this that way maybe the noise would get into the PLL circuit and cause problems. I was wondering if anyone knows where the PLL ground gets connected in the reference design. If the reference design connects the ground the same way as the K16 then I would not worry about it.

It is. Please see attached the image from original avalon-ref

[fasmax]

Thanks for finding that. Yes Avalon did it the same way makes me fill a lot better:)

[Ente]

Last post of BkkCoins:

I'm still here and haven't abandoned the project. I've had some disruptions over the last week as the tile guys that I've been waiting for since March finally arrived and started putting in floors. I've been moving stuff around from room to room, and it's a mess, stuff piled up everywhere. Timing couldn't have been worse, and my time diverted. I'm setting up my workbench and tools again and back working again, though the room I'm in still has no floor and I'll have to move back again in 2 days. If it were just me here I could probably have delayed them but my wife (and other family) presses on me as well. Plus I really need a floor.

I appreciate the kind words above and want to finalize this whole thing so I can move on. I feel like I'm stumbling around not knowing what's actually going to happen regarding Avalon chips, much disheartened by everything, but trying to keep a more positive outlook.

Last post of Satoshi:

There's more work to do on DoS, but I'm doing a quick build of what I have so far in case it's needed, before venturing into more complex ideas.  The build for this is version 0.3.19.

- Added some DoS controls
As Gavin and I have said clearly before, the software is not at all resistant to DoS attack.  This is one improvement, but there are still more ways to attack than I can count. 

I'm leaving the -limitfreerelay part as a switch for now and it's there if you need it.

- Removed "safe mode" alerts
"safe mode" alerts was a temporary measure after the 0.3.9 overflow bug.  We can say all we want that users can just run with "-disablesafemode", but it's better just not to have it for the sake of appearances.  It was never intended as a long term feature.  Safe mode can still be triggered by seeing a longer (greater total PoW) invalid block chain.

Builds:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.3.19/

See the similarities?

Okay, I'm the first to speak out what everyone thinks:
BkkCoins is in fact a group of anonymous developers!

Ente

[itod]

BkkCoins is in fact a group of anonymous developers!

This is nonsense. I've being exchanging PM's long time ago with BKKCoins and his writing style was totally consistent with the way he communicated on this thread. I can guaranty you that it was not a "member of the group" response. I'm not saying other people did not help him develop his work, I'm only saying one person wrote posts on this thread and responded to PMs.

Edit:
And I'm very concerned what happened to him, he is very vocal person and I'm puzzled he left without even a rant about how everything turned out.

[LordTheron]

To be honest I dont care if its a person or a group!! The fact is that BKKcoins took my money and disappeared without shipping or refund.  Im just curious how many people didn't get their orders.

[Ente]

..I guess for some people the joke has to slap them right in the face, to be noticed :-P

Ente

[w33mhz]

Well I don't believe that he is the only one that has been quite in this matter.  It seems that the ppl in this post that have stated they have a working or psudo-working k16 (at least able to run on all 16 chips) have kind of fallen off the map as well.
Steamboat's group buy/assembly have been trying to contact them in order to resolve thier issues with only being able to hash across 8 of the 16 chips.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=192916.msg3184148#msg3184148

I am sure they are all hard at work trying to sort out the issues, its hard to troubleshoot and keep up with all the posts at the same time.  Everyone is just rather impatient because of investments that we have made/going to make.  This is pretty bleeding edge development, things take time and road blocks through everything out of wack.  IMO its better to be focused on the troubles at hand then doing PR work.

[r00t$]

To be honest I dont care if its a person or a group!! The fact is that BKKcoins took my money and disappeared without shipping or refund.  Im just curious how many people didn't get their orders.

I am still waiting on my order #149 for 3 boards, PIC's, stencil, and other misc items.

It's also been more than 45 days so I cannot file a PayPal dispute. Bkk had mentioned not to go down that route and that he would respond to all refund requests, so I chose to give him the benefit of the doubt... my mistake...

[marto74]

Hi, all
From the mails and PM's that we exchanged with BKK during working on Klondike project  I can say that he is a good man.
I spent a few coins in order to support him and to pay  a license fee too.
Do not turn this tread into shit , please.
After failing the Klondike project our team spent number of sleepless nights in order to deliver 16 chip board to our customers and we succeed, a little bit late  thou .
I know in person how hard debugging and sorting out new PCB design can be.
Let's wait and see.
I think that BKK have a good reason for despairing, so please cool everybody.

Martin

[KS]

Hi, all
From the mails and PM's that we exchanged with BKK during working on Klondike project  I can say that he is a good man.
I spent a few coins in order to support him and to pay  a license fee too.
Do not turn this tread into shit , please.
After failing the Klondike project our team spent number of sleepless nights in order to deliver 16 chip board to our customers and we succeed, a little bit late  thou .
I know in person how hard debugging and sorting out new PCB design can be.
Let's wait and see.
I think that BKK have a good reason for despairing, so please cool everybody.

Martin

Hi Martin, do you mean "despairing" literally (as in "lost hope") or do you mean "disappearing" (i.e. he's vanished)?

[southerngentuk]

I believe English is Marto's second language, am sure he means disappearing. 

Regarding lost funds - Am sure BKK never meant to take funds without supplying, I did receive most of my small insignificant order so he was sending out before something got in the way. He has given so much on this for nothing.

Lets give him some time.

[justmyname]

To be honest I dont care if its a person or a group!! The fact is that BKKcoins took my money and disappeared without shipping or refund.  Im just curious how many people didn't get their orders.

I am still waiting on my order #149 for 3 boards, PIC's, stencil, and other misc items.

It's also been more than 45 days so I cannot file a PayPal dispute. Bkk had mentioned not to go down that route and that he would respond to all refund requests, so I chose to give him the benefit of the doubt... my mistake...

I think it's more the fault of these developers that claimed they had the Klondikes running with 16 chips. Than the fault of Bkkcoins. but who cares who's fault it is. You need your money back. 

If you paid via PayPal and want a refund...  LISTEN UP.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=198489.4140

[freeworm]

So what is the overall state of the K16 project at the moment?

EDIT: Is anyone selling bare PCBs? I have all the components x 10 except for what BKKcoins sold on his website, as I was planning to get them there. And heatsinks.

We have plenty of K16 components (complete kits minus the Avalon chips) in hand including the PCBs, heatsink and fans, chips etc.
If you are interested, please PM me.

[vs3]

Hi, all
From the mails and PM's that we exchanged with BKK during working on Klondike project  I can say that he is a good man.
I spent a few coins in order to support him and to pay  a license fee too.
Do not turn this tread into shit , please.
After failing the Klondike project our team spent number of sleepless nights in order to deliver 16 chip board to our customers and we succeed, a little bit late  thou .
I know in person how hard debugging and sorting out new PCB design can be.
Let's wait and see.
I think that BKK have a good reason for despairing, so please cool everybody.

Martin

Hi Martin, do you mean "despairing" literally (as in "lost hope") or do you mean "disappearing" (i.e. he's vanished)?

+1

I believe BKK did an awesome job (even if not finished) and any backlash is certainly not deserved. I'd give him some more time to go through whatever he's going through.

(and yes - I bet marto meant "vanishing" and "disappearing" - a.k.a. "damn you autocorrect " )

[ScaryHash]

You guys do know that he kind of dissappeared when typhoon utor hit, right??

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23662733