Ok kids
... as promised here my report of my visit yesterday at the binmine.ch offices in CH.
I initially wanted to meet Thursday, but Giorgio told me that Friday might be a better time, because they will have parts delivered to them. This way it would not just be a meeting where we talk and theorize about the Bitcoin phenomenon and technology.
I arrived around 16:15 after over six hours of driving from Germany. It was pouring down with rain pretty much all the way until I crossed over at the San Bernardino pass. The temperature rose from an average of 9 degree Celsius to 22 degree and the sun came out as well just before my arrival in Camorino.
Giorgio picked me up outside the office building and we walked to the offices. First we sat down in their meeting room and started talking about the clone and their current timeline.
This week the electronic parts arrived. Giorgio (as stated in his previous posts) drove to the factory near Milan that morning to pick up the board.
Here are my pictures of them ... fresh out of the shrink wrapping:
30 minutes into the discussion a courier brought the parts needed to assemble the first prototype. They have everything at the moment except the Avalon chips, the TP-Link based "motherboard" (running Linux and cgminer) and a case to house everything.
The project plan for the near future looks like this:- Next week (
week 1) assembly of the board(s) with all the electronics ... see picture
.. this is were all the magic is going to happen
- In two weeks (
week 2) they get their prototype case. This case will be slightly modified from the original to optimize airflow and housing of a bigger power supply
Here a CAD picture taken from the designer workstation
- End of
week 3 beginning of
week 4 they wanted to have the complete prototype incl. case ready, except for the Avalon chips. Unless
somebody can provide them with sample chips out of their own early order. They already had some discussions about this with various people, but nothing concrete yet.
- One they prototype is confirmed to work as expected (ideally with Avalon chip .... or at least Avalon boards). They begin mass production of the first batch. Their goal is to have everything ready before the Avalon chips arrive at their offices. The day they arrive, Giorgio will drive them down to the factory together with all miner boards and start production immediately.
- After assembly of the complete units, every manufactured unit will have a 24 hours burn-in test were it will hash nonstop to confirm stability and quality.
- Finally all orders will be shipped in an FIFO order.
- The current
estimated time for arrival at your doorstop (if you have ordered one)
will be end of August.
Here some topics we talked about:
- My initial question was: What does qualify you to create such a clone in a timely manner? The answer was, that they already worked in the electronics area for quite some time. They developed a WiMax base station on their own, which they wanted to sell with a partner. They developed and tested the whole thing and made a few working prototypes, but unfortunately their partner went bankrupt before they could go to market. So in the 2nd picture you not only see the part of the team, but also their former project in background. The white (heavy) box is the WiMax base station, fully packed with electronics and a FGPA driving the unit. The team designed and developed everything from scratch incl. the programming of the FPGA. So if you know somebody who wants to run his own WiMax network talk to them.
- This brought us to FPGAs and the one used in the Avalon boxes. At the moment only a bitstream image of the FPGA 'firmware' is available, because the Avalon guys used some protected code from the manufacturer of the FPGA (I believe it is Xilinx). This FPGA is worth around 20 USDs and drives Avalon boards. They reckon that they can easily modify the board in the future to accomplish two things: A) Drive up to 8 boards and B) more importantly get rid of the TP-Link board. This boards is known to be buggy and quite a bit of hackery from Avalons side went into the development to make it work (an additional USB hub on the FPGA board as well as a modified power supply and more RAM on the TP-Link board). Their way forward would actually be a Raspberry PI, something I like a lot more as well. This far superior platform compared to the TP-Link hack opens a whole new world of possibilities to make the clones at lot more useful (besides of mining).
- We kept talking about a lot of little things around the Avalons as well. So for example ... Did you know that Avalon does not apply thermal paste to the heatsink? So they heat up a lot more and the chips age at an accelerated rate I guess. So my advise to current Avalon owners would be ... get some good thermal paste, take the heatsink of and apply a (very) thin layer before screwing it back on again.
bitmine.ch's plans for the future have already partly been revealed. But here is a small outlook of what we talked about:
- They want to offer spare parts, compatible to the original Avalon Box ... so in the (unlikely) event of something breaking in the/your? Avalon you can get a spare part from bitmine.ch
- A 3U rack mounted and water cooled version is in planning at the moment. This unit is likely to be different from the Avalons and has potentially around 180 GH/s to offer. An ETA is not in sight yet ... maybe end of this year!? Here a picture of the water cooled units,
those are going to be machined out of a block of aluminum one by one.
Finally we talked about another visit in a couple of weeks for an updated report. I'm on holiday next week so I suggested to come back once they start manufacturing the 1st batch in the factory .... so I can take some pictures from the assembly line (if allowed) ... and/or when they get some Avalon chips early and they can make them run in their own prototype.
If anyone has questions about the visit ... ask them here or send me a PM.
All the best!
one4many
P.S.: Keep in mind ... the biggest risk of this project (and maybe even your investment) is the delivery of the Avalon chips!!
