Klondike - 16 chip ASIC Open Source Board - Preliminary

[mxz280]

32W

[1713948268]

1713948268

[1713948268]

1713948268

[Mabsark]

What are the options/alternatives for the k16 heatsinks?

There are many options covered in this thread, I suggest you look at some rather than having people repeat them over and over.

Type the word heatsink into the search and you should get 6 pages of hits.

People shouldn't need to search through multiple pages of mostly irrelevant information to find 1 comment which makes a passing mention of the info you're looking for.

Any kit that is currently ready should be linked to in the initial post.

There are no kits in this thread, it's a design discussion thread. Go look at one of the board buy threads, there are many, like Burnin's or Terrahash threads.

By kit, I meant parts that are to be used in conjuction with BKKs boards. Parts such as heatsinks, cases, etc, not an actual bundle of parts that you buy and put together yourself.

[BkkCoins]

The 6 pin PCIE cables use 3 x 12V lines, providing 6.25A and a a maximum wattage of 75W. That should allow 2 devices to be powered per cable using a splitter.

Also, how many amps does a K16 use?

You should expect around 40W (3.3A) . It probably will use less. Using the max ratings for regulators, under a condition of over clocking, you could probably draw up to 55W (4.6A) beyond which it would be dicey and shut down should occur if the regs are doing their job. Off hand, I didn't go check at what rating the shutdown  kicks in. This is allowing an approximate 75% for regulator inefficiency but actually hope we get better.

The PCIe connectors are actually rated at 13A per pin by Molex and I guess the PCIe spec takes a pretty conservative approach. If you used sufficient wire thickness to avoid heating I think whatever your PSU is capable of could be split onto multiple boards. Most PSU have pretty hefty 12V rails available between PCIe and Molex. You can likely even find 24pin mainboard adapters letting you use that source as well. I think I've seen something like that on ebay. The cheap Molex-PCIe adapters tend to use wire that is a bit thin so you wouldn't want to split twice with those.

[angelus359]

Kinda interested in the k-1

I don't see anyone willing to make them though

[Beastlymac]

Kinda interested in the k-1

I don't see anyone willing to make them though

Try using the search button
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=217316.0

[turtle83]

What are the options/alternatives for the k16 heatsinks?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Aluminium-Heatsink-Silver-93735-128x40mm-L-100mm-/140314710015

Came across that yesterday. You can hang them from 2 bars. Place on floor/flat shelf. Make long rows provided you push adiquate air...

Just that the mounting holes need to be machined.

[zurg]

What are the options/alternatives for the k16 heatsinks?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Aluminium-Heatsink-Silver-93735-128x40mm-L-100mm-/140314710015

Came across that yesterday. You can hang them from 2 bars. Place on floor/flat shelf. Make long rows provided you push adiquate air...

Just that the mounting holes need to be machined.

Makes me wish I shouldn't have thrown away this box of Pentium 2 chips I had at work... those things had HEATSINKS! lol

[itmiller]

The 6 pin PCIE cables use 3 x 12V lines, providing 6.25A and a a maximum wattage of 75W. That should allow 2 devices to be powered per cable using a splitter.

Also, how many amps does a K16 use?

You should expect around 40W (3.3A) . It probably will use less. Using the max ratings for regulators, under a condition of over clocking, you could probably draw up to 55W (4.6A) beyond which it would be dicey and shut down should occur if the regs are doing their job. Off hand, I didn't go check at what rating the shutdown  kicks in. This is allowing an approximate 75% for regulator inefficiency but actually hope we get better.

The PCIe connectors are actually rated at 13A per pin by Molex and I guess the PCIe spec takes a pretty conservative approach. If you used sufficient wire thickness to avoid heating I think whatever your PSU is capable of could be split onto multiple boards. Most PSU have pretty hefty 12V rails available between PCIe and Molex. You can likely even find 24pin mainboard adapters letting you use that source as well. I think I've seen something like that on ebay. The cheap Molex-PCIe adapters tend to use wire that is a bit thin so you wouldn't want to split twice with those.

I have a single rail 650 watt OCZ PSU (http://ocz.com/consumer/psu/zt-series-550w-750w-power-supply/specifications). It only has 2 PCIe outputs. Using the proper guage wire, can't I just chain splitters to run multiple K16 boards? How many boards do you think I could run off each PCIe output? 8???

I'm trying to figure out how this can be done and what gauge wire I need to use.

[joeventura]

yes

K16s only require 35 watts max so you should be able to split off

[turtle83]

The 6 pin PCIE cables use 3 x 12V lines, providing 6.25A and a a maximum wattage of 75W. That should allow 2 devices to be powered per cable using a splitter.

Also, how many amps does a K16 use?

You should expect around 40W (3.3A) . It probably will use less. Using the max ratings for regulators, under a condition of over clocking, you could probably draw up to 55W (4.6A) beyond which it would be dicey and shut down should occur if the regs are doing their job. Off hand, I didn't go check at what rating the shutdown  kicks in. This is allowing an approximate 75% for regulator inefficiency but actually hope we get better.

The PCIe connectors are actually rated at 13A per pin by Molex and I guess the PCIe spec takes a pretty conservative approach. If you used sufficient wire thickness to avoid heating I think whatever your PSU is capable of could be split onto multiple boards. Most PSU have pretty hefty 12V rails available between PCIe and Molex. You can likely even find 24pin mainboard adapters letting you use that source as well. I think I've seen something like that on ebay. The cheap Molex-PCIe adapters tend to use wire that is a bit thin so you wouldn't want to split twice with those.

I have a single rail 650 watt OCZ PSU (http://ocz.com/consumer/psu/zt-series-550w-750w-power-supply/specifications). It only has 2 PCIe outputs. Using the proper guage wire, can't I just chain splitters to run multiple K16 boards? How many boards do you think I could run off each PCIe output? 8???

I'm trying to figure out how this can be done and what gauge wire I need to use.

Your wire should be able to handle 3.3A times the number of K16s u feed off it.

So to feed 2 K16 the wire should allow for 6.6A . There are many resources online which gives conservative estimates of how much current can be safely pushed. I particularly like this one - http://bit.ly/183bHf4

Also, in spite of having single rail, it is possible that the PSU is not designed to push all the power thru one connector... As long  as the wires are not the limiting factor, if you overdraw then modern PSUs would auto-shutdown to avoid damage.

[BkkCoins]

I have a single rail 650 watt OCZ PSU (http://ocz.com/consumer/psu/zt-series-550w-750w-power-supply/specifications). It only has 2 PCIe outputs. Using the proper guage wire, can't I just chain splitters to run multiple K16 boards? How many boards do you think I could run off each PCIe output? 8???

I'm trying to figure out how this can be done and what gauge wire I need to use.

You have 54A @ 12V total on a single rail. But I doubt you can pull that on the PCIe cables alone. You would want to check what gauge wire they used and look up how many Amps is safe. They expect you to use the 12V over several cables - 24pin ATX, 4pin CPU, Molex cables, SATA and PCIe. All of those could be adapted to provide several PCIe connectors spreading the load over the various outputs available on the PSU. With 54A and being conservative for safety you may limit yourself to 12 boards @ 4A each, total 48A or about 89% max load. I would expect on average lower draw than 4A so that fits with optimum efficiency at 80% load for your PSU. Above 12, I would recommend either higher power PSU or 2 PSU to share the load.

Everyone seems to figure this stuff differently so this is just my rough estimate.

*****
K16 took me 6 hours to populate by hand and is about to go into the oven after I run a couple oven tests. Jeez, there is a lot of caps on that board.

[joeventura]

*****
K16 took me 6 hours to populate by hand and is about to go into the oven after I run a couple oven tests. Jeez, there is a lot of caps on that board.

Good Luck BKK we anxiously await your results!!!

[turtle83]

*****
K16 took me 6 hours to populate by hand and is about to go into the oven after I run a couple oven tests. Jeez, there is a lot of caps on that board.

Good Luck BKK we anxiously await your results!!!

All the best!

[marto74]

Best of luck
We are building the firmware for k1 @ the moment

I have a single rail 650 watt OCZ PSU (http://ocz.com/consumer/psu/zt-series-550w-750w-power-supply/specifications). It only has 2 PCIe outputs. Using the proper guage wire, can't I just chain splitters to run multiple K16 boards? How many boards do you think I could run off each PCIe output? 8???

I'm trying to figure out how this can be done and what gauge wire I need to use.

You have 54A @ 12V total on a single rail. But I doubt you can pull that on the PCIe cables alone. You would want to check what gauge wire they used and look up how many Amps is safe. They expect you to use the 12V over several cables - 24pin ATX, 4pin CPU, Molex cables, SATA and PCIe. All of those could be adapted to provide several PCIe connectors spreading the load over the various outputs available on the PSU. With 54A and being conservative for safety you may limit yourself to 12 boards @ 4A each, total 48A or about 89% max load. I would expect on average lower draw than 4A so that fits with optimum efficiency at 80% load for your PSU. Above 12, I would recommend either higher power PSU or 2 PSU to share the load.

Everyone seems to figure this stuff differently so this is just my rough estimate.

*****
K16 took me 6 hours to populate by hand and is about to go into the oven after I run a couple oven tests. Jeez, there is a lot of caps on that board.

[Bicknellski]

I have a single rail 650 watt OCZ PSU (http://ocz.com/consumer/psu/zt-series-550w-750w-power-supply/specifications). It only has 2 PCIe outputs. Using the proper guage wire, can't I just chain splitters to run multiple K16 boards? How many boards do you think I could run off each PCIe output? 8???

I'm trying to figure out how this can be done and what gauge wire I need to use.

You have 54A @ 12V total on a single rail. But I doubt you can pull that on the PCIe cables alone. You would want to check what gauge wire they used and look up how many Amps is safe. They expect you to use the 12V over several cables - 24pin ATX, 4pin CPU, Molex cables, SATA and PCIe. All of those could be adapted to provide several PCIe connectors spreading the load over the various outputs available on the PSU. With 54A and being conservative for safety you may limit yourself to 12 boards @ 4A each, total 48A or about 89% max load. I would expect on average lower draw than 4A so that fits with optimum efficiency at 80% load for your PSU. Above 12, I would recommend either higher power PSU or 2 PSU to share the load.

Everyone seems to figure this stuff differently so this is just my rough estimate.

*****
K16 took me 6 hours to populate by hand and is about to go into the oven after I run a couple oven tests. Jeez, there is a lot of caps on that board.

Can I interest you in a Pick Place Machine?

[BkkCoins]

Best of luck
We are building the firmware for k1 @ the moment

The I2C routines are non-functional on github right now but chaostc has been doing some code and testing while I've been doing the board stuff, so there is now some functioning I2C code but it's not up there yet. He wants to test it with 3 PICs first. It detects and assigns slave addresses, relays cmds and polls for results - though I'm not sure all that is working yet.

The PIC code to communicate via USB to the ktest app should work. You can send work items and see them queue up, and output signals to the ASIC, timed to push according to ASIC count but of course I haven't been able to test acceptance by the ASIC yet and result return. I also don't know if the PreCalc code is working correctly. I have some test data on github that should be valid nonce for given midstate, but I need to grab and compile the cgminer PreCalc code as test app and dump valid values to compare to the one in the PIC. I doubt the ASIC will return good nonces if the PreCalc is wrong, so this is one of my next work items.

If you need more midstate+merkle+nonce test data then I have a bunch I captured off my GPU mining rig with kslog to test with. I can add it to the utils directory as well.

[marto74]

We build the firmware excluding I2C, we find it blocking the build.
I

[BkkCoins]

Can I interest you in a Pick Place Machine?

I'd love one but way too expensive. I just had 4 linear rails and bearings arrive in Bkk (from China) to make a small manual rig so that later I can do this much more quickly. After all this has slowed down I want to add steppers and play with automating it but that's another whole topic. I figure having the slides with a vacuum pen (on the way now) spring mounted would speed this up a lot. The USB cam will fit in too as I've been working under a ring light magnifier - which is ok. A lot of the time is opening packages and cutting tape, and fidgeting the 0402 caps. I'm just taking a break to read the forum before going back to do some baking.

[BkkCoins]

We build the firmware excluding I2C, we find it blocking the build.
I

I did have it compiling with I2C and it would send some master data out to the slaves but after that I'm not sure what state I left it in last time. I know for sure it doesn't detect USB status and decide upon master/slave correctly but chaostc has fixed that - just hasn't been sent over yet. Anyway, you can chop it out and just test the ASIC side.

[joeventura]

Kinda interested in the k-1

I don't see anyone willing to make them though

I'd be willing to make them all day long as soon as a working model was validated.

And i'd sell them for a helluva lot less than those Block Erupters!!