[Announcement] Block Erupter USB

[sidehack]

...huh? There were some BE200 stick projects in 2014, but as far as I know the BE300 never saw production. Engineering samples were tested and data released in December 2014 with efficiencies between 0.2 and about 0.35J/GH, making them almost equivalent to the BM1385 which appeared something like 8 months later.

My BM1384 Compac was originally a dev step toward making a pod. There was never intended to be a stickminer product, but the first step was to make sure we could talk to one ASIC. Enough people wanted a stickminer that I went ahead and finished designing it. I kept working on pod stuff on the side, but honestly I was limited by drivers. Novak's Compac driver was a rehash of U3 support in Icarus and we had no real idea how to support multiple chips natively. VH spent weeks reverse-engineering the signals coming out of an S5 controller to do it and now has a driver that works for an arbitrary number of BM1384, from 1 to a couple hundred. That's the real key that makes my job as the hardware designer not necessarily easy but a heck of a lot more possible.

It would have been nice to have worked with BE300 instead of BM1384 in 2015, if ASICMiner had not evaporated. Those looked to be some pretty solid chips, and with ASICMiner's open support of third-party dev with BE200 - compared to Bitmain's hostility toward everything and everyone that isn't Bitmain - everything would have been a lot easier.

Anyways, USB Block Erupters.

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[truckinusa]

That BE300 announcement in December 2014 was what got Novak and I seriously considering designing our own miner.

I know you have done some usb miner projects, but why isn't there a mass produced usb miner with whatever whatever specs that can run less than 10-25w of power?  I would totally be mining right now if it wasn't for the heat and noise.  A small lottery ticket is better than none at all?

[sidehack]

My stuff isn't exactly "mass production" on the scale of Block Erupters and U1/U2, but my stick miners will run about as cold as you want them to. The 2Pac will get about 8GH at stock USB power if you set it to baseline voltage and 75MHz.

The reason there are no mass-produced stickminers at all right now is because the industry doesn't care about anyone except themselves and high-dollar commercial customers. That's why the only miners made in the last two years are >1KW 80db monstrosities requiring industrial power and exhaust. Why should they focus efforts into a $30 miner and get a thousand annoying customers to wrangle when they can make a $2k miner and sell a thousand to one guy?

[truckinusa]

My stuff isn't exactly "mass production" on the scale of Block Erupters and U1/U2, but my stick miners will run about as cold as you want them to. The 2Pac will get about 8GH at stock USB power if you set it to baseline voltage and 75MHz.

The reason there are no mass-produced stickminers at all right now is because the industry doesn't care about anyone except themselves and high-dollar commercial customers. That's why the only miners made in the last two years are >1KW 80db monstrosities requiring industrial power and exhaust. Why should they focus efforts into a $30 miner and get a thousand annoying customers to wrangle when they can make a $2k miner and sell a thousand to one guy?

I don't know how much demand there is but I wonder if you could sell 10,000 100GH usb miners if there was such a thing?  Must be economics preventing the manufacture of this product.

[sidehack]

If you want a 100GH USB miner but you don't want it to run at 10W, it's currently physics and the state of semiconductor technology preventing its manufacture. The best chip available right now could get you about 30GH from 2.5W USB power. I'm currently developing that stick. Take a look at the recent posts in my GekkoScience 16nm dev thread.