[BitCentury] Metabank 120Gh 65nm Pre-Order Proxy [CLOSED]

[digitalmagus]

Hi guys,
Here's the current status as of 8:30PM Moscow time 19th Sept.

* We received all packing material! However, we have yet to begin packing aything, but the night is young and we have caffeine
* Units up to order #7/23 (re: your contract), have either been tested or are being tested right now.
* Testing process is getting more optimized now
* I've started working on some basic documentation so you'll know what to do when you receive your units. I intend to put at least some basic instructions on paper for the German customers in German (google translated) to help with customs.
* The packing process is going to be time consuming. We are making our own boxes from other boxes as we couldnt find boxes that would fit perfectly (after calling and checking out 40 different companies!). So lots of exacto knife and duct tape action involved, but overall I'm happy with the solution we came up with. I will try to take some pics tomorrow of what they will look like packed.
* So as of right now still targeting Friday morning delivery of at least a couple of units, but we'll see. We're all a bit sleepless over here
* I will try to finally get to most people's correspondence after this post. Thanks for your patience.


Lastly, just in case everyone wasn't drooling enough, just thought I'd share some pics taken just a few mins ago.

1. Raspberry Pi connected to a triple unit


2 Raspberry Pi Ethernet connection through last slit in front of box. There is no hole in box for raspberry pi, so this is the best way to access it from network.


3. 750 Watt power supply of triple unit.  Singles & Doubles come with 500W power supplies.


4. Double unit hashing away.


5. Top view of triple unit


6. Showing motherboard type A & B interconnection cable.


7. Side view of triple unit. The white stuff at the edges of the heat sink is excess thermal paste that can be wiped off with a dry cloth if you really want to.



8. Top view of stacked units. The boxes are actually strong enough to stack them at least 10 high; however, I would not recommend it! We are in a hurry and don't have proper racks and shelves, so we are stacking a few. If you do this even temporarily, please make sure the power supply "flower" holes (same as drawn inside bitfury ASIC) are NOT covered, so air can ventilate. "S7", "D2", "T3" etc pencil markings just means Single#7, Double#2, Triple#3.


9. Aren't they beautiful? :-D


10. Sad and idle Bitfury ASIC mining machines, orphaned and looking for a good home ;-)  To be tested next.

[digitalmagus]

Really nice work Luis and team! I think it was already mentioned but I can't find it right now (maybe somebody here knows): What pricing will be on the boxes? USD/BTC and metabank-price/bitcentury-price?

Hi acayne,
I can't comment on this publicly, but we will follow DHL's advice we got earlier this week in order to ensure that customs clearance is as successful as possible. Sorry I have to be so ambiguous.

[digitalmagus]

Great news for all, cool to see Timur pull through and to get all the ordered units at once!

Timur not only pulled through, he went way above and beyond my expectations when he actually personally delivered all the units to us (past midnight, no less)! These guys are all working around the clock... for weeks.  I also got to visit Metabank's workshop where they assemble all the units. Let me tell you, they have a good sized team working on these units, and have lots in stock to continue to deliver for a while.

I'm batch 3 so I'm probably a few days away from seeing any testing. Won't stop me from checking at every available wifi hotspot through Japan

I told that to my co-worker here helping with testing, I think he feels pretty special now ;-)

[digitalmagus]

I have a Bitcentury order (Batch 1 order 6) can you give any info on when it will ship? Will you email out tracking nr? (US shipping. Need NO power supply)

I am hoping to ship all units ASAP, meaning a few short days here. Yes, we will definitely email out tracking numbers! Thanks for the info on your order re: power supply, much appreciated.

Luis

[philipma1957]

I have a Bitcentury order (Batch 1 order 6) can you give any info on when it will ship? Will you email out tracking nr? (US shipping. Need NO power supply)

I am hoping to ship all units ASAP, meaning a few short days here. Yes, we will definitely email out tracking numbers! Thanks for the info on your order re: power supply, much appreciated.

Luis

I have a piece of the swede75 machine please handle it with care

[TheSwede75]

I have a Bitcentury order (Batch 1 order 6) can you give any info on when it will ship? Will you email out tracking nr? (US shipping. Need NO power supply)

I am hoping to ship all units ASAP, meaning a few short days here. Yes, we will definitely email out tracking numbers! Thanks for the info on your order re: power supply, much appreciated.

Luis

I have a piece of the swede75 machine please handle it with care

Kid gloves, furry kid gloves

[digitalmagus]

I have a piece of the swede75 machine please handle it with care

Kid gloves, furry kid gloves

I hope Sealed air instapak "gloves" will do ;-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K8Q1uLKI7U

[TheSwede75]

I have a piece of the swede75 machine please handle it with care

Kid gloves, furry kid gloves

I hope Sealed air instapak "gloves" will do:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K8Q1uLKI7U

Totally bad-ass! Thank you for taking care of our little babies

[Bogart]

Awesome.  It looks like mine's in testing now.

You can ship mine without the power supply also.  Maybe you can sell the power supplies back to Metabank.

Are you shipping them with the hashing modules connected to the backplanes so that they're ready to mine?  It doesn't look like there is much physical support holding them in place.

I would prefer to see the modules individually ESD-bagged and bubble-wrapped and shipped each surrounded by some kind of cushion (peanuts, foam, paper, etc.)

[TheSwede75]

Awesome.  It looks like mine's in testing now.

You can ship mine without the power supply also.  Maybe you can sell the power supplies back to Metabank.

Are you shipping them with the hashing modules connected to the backplanes so that they're ready to mine?  It doesn't look like there is much physical support holding them in place.

I would prefer to see the modules individually ESD-bagged and bubble-wrapped and shipped each surrounded by some kind of cushion (peanuts, foam, paper, etc.)

Peanuts are for peasants, I want mine packed in Cashews!

[digitalmagus]

I would prefer to see the modules individually ESD-bagged and bubble-wrapped and shipped each surrounded by some kind of cushion (peanuts, foam, paper, etc.)

We will be removing each card from its slot, putting it inside an antistatic bag, bubble wrapping it, laying it horizontally inside the box and taped down if required (likely for singles and doubles). Then the box itself will be bubble wrapped, and surrounded by instapak foam, inside a triple carrugated cardboard box, with an extra lid on the top and the bottom. Then more duct tape. One can never have too much duct tape
Luis

PS. Time permitting, I will try to make an unwrapping instruction video, so you will know how to get mining within 15 mins or so. Failing that, I will provide text instructions and answer questions here.

[Bogart]

That sounds pretty good.  If you can fill any large voids in the inner box (and outer) with some kind of packing material, that would be even better.

[digitalmagus]

@Bogart, I sent you a pm. Please reply when you get a chance. Thanks.
Luis

[senseless]

There is a problem with the metabank miners. Specifically the rPI runs out of memory after awhile when running cgminer. I have created a watchdog script to monitor if cgminer is running or not and to reboot the rPI if cgminer dies or is not running.

Login to rPI via SSH

type "sudo su -" to gain root access.

type "nano cgminer-cron.sh"

Insert the following code:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
TEST=`pgrep -f /usr/local/bin/cgminer`
if [[ "$TEST" == "" ]]
then
        /sbin/reboot
fi

Save the file and exit (ctrl + x)

type "chmod +rx cgminer-cron.sh" to make the file executable.

type "export EDITOR=nano ; crontab -e" to edit the crontab scheduler.

Insert the following code at the bottom of the file:

Code:

* * * * * /root/cgminer-cron.sh

Save the file and exit (ctrl + x)

.....

Additionally.. Modifying the server / pool information from the web panel does not save it on disk. In order for your configuration to survive a reboot you will need to modify the cgminer.conf file on disk.

To modify the cgminer.conf file on disk type (as root) "nano /home/pi/.cgminer/cgminer.conf" and edit the cgminer.conf to your liking.

Code:

{
    "api-allow": "W:127.0.0.1",
    "api-listen": true,
    "api-port": "4028",
    "pools": [
        {
            "url": "http://pooladdress.com:port",
            "user": "username"                        
            "pass": "password",            
        }
    ]
}

Save the file and exit (ctrl + x)

[digitalmagus]

Hi guys,
When I spoke with legkodymov on Wednesday face to face, he explained that he is working with Lukr-Jr to have a BFGminer version for metabank units in the near future as there's several bugs with the existing cgminer as per above. Luke-Jr has some early beta's, but I'll let him speak about his own software. In short, it sounded like it would be more reliable. Also Metabank said there will not be a second batch of units; however, they will be making more units for themselves and thus will be improving their products and software and my understanding is they will release most of that info.

Status update:
1. By the end of today, all customer units will have been tested.
2. We had one of the first singles that appeared to have random booting issues, but it may have just been a particular plug on one of our powerbars. We will re-test this unit more thoroughly. We also found 2 triple units that had sub-par hashing rates, around 200Gh-250Gh. We will analyze these in more detail after all remaining units get tested. Our gut feeling is a few poorly performing hashcards in each of the triple units. If we can identify these, then maybe we'll just swap some around to at least get 1 unit upwards of 300GH, and then take the other back to Metabank as soon as we get a chance.
3. We have packed 1 unit for shipping so far, and plan to still ship 2 units later today.
4. After today our shipping volume should ramp up significantly each day, as that will be our primary focus. Until now, our #1 priority was unit testing.

And now for packing pics... This was our first attempt...

I am almost confident we could drop this thing down a small flight of stairs and the unit would still hash afterwards, but don't worry, we don't plan to do this level of unit testing ;-)

[stripykitteh]

Well done guys.

The postcard is a nice touch. 

[digitalmagus]

Some other info I got on Wednesday from Metabank, that I havent had a chance to pass on yet.

1. The Metabank web interface hashrate display for cgminer is not reliable for accuracy. It's better you rely on your pool's hashrate, or run cgminer from the raspberry pi's shell via ssh.
2. One nice thing about the web interface is that you can easily change pools with it.
3. Next version of the web interface will display performance per hash card. No ETA at this time. Metabank is a tad busy getting all units out the door.
4. There is a temperature sensor on each card. There are 2 LED's on each hash card. One green and one red. Either can blink or go into solid state. Right now, if the red LED goes on (except during boot procedure), it may mean that card's temperature is too high. One of the metabank guys actually touched the sensor while the unit was on (not that I'd recommend doing that), and the heat discharged to his finger, and then the red light went away. Obviously this doesnt change the temperature or solve any overheating problems.
5. FANs:. The Single and Double units have 3x 3000 RPM fans. The Triple has 3x 4000 RPM fans.
6. Power Usage: The Singles will use aprox 160Watts, doubles ~350W and triples ~500W.  This is all at default hashing speeds out of the box, and at 230volts. Expect a bit less efficiency at 120V for North American customers (i.e. more watts will be used).  So this should help you buy a power supply. I'd like for some of the more electrical experts chime in, but what I heard is that if a device needs, say, 80 watts of power, the absolute minimum power supply size should be 100W. So the basic rule is never exceed 80% of the rating of the power supply. That said, different vendors will have different efficiency ratings, and to be safe, you may want to have it at even much less than 80%, although some may allow for higher safely. Also expect about a 5% variance of power usage upwards during bootup procedure as compared to normal operation.

There's an entire science to optimizing energy efficiency, and so I'm not going to pretend to know what I'm talking about here, so please speak up if you understand these sorts of details and can help your fellow miner

7. When you connect your units to your LAN's, the raspberry pi will acquire an IP via DHCP. You can find out your unit's IP by either by doing a subnet ICMP sweep (google angry ip scanner), or by connecting to your LAN router and checking the ARP table. Some routers may actually identify the unit as raspberry pi as my asus here does.

8. After you get the IP, simply http to it, or ssh to it.  In either case, ID=pi PW=raspberry

9. You can view cgminer logs via web interface or by command line: tail -f /var/log/cgminer.log

10. You can stop or start cgminer as follows: (via SSH only)
sudo service cgminer stop
sudo service cgminer start

I've noticed a few times during testing that when we first power on the units, lights on all cards remain solid green indefinitely. We've learned this is because cgminer didn't start properly for some reason. You can either reboot the unit (takes about 1 minute or less), or ssh in and restart cgminer.

[fpgaminer]

Thanks for all the hard work, BitCentury crew! 

3. We have packed 1 unit for shipping so far, and plan to still ship 2 units later today.

* fpgaminer crosses fingers.

[sabd]

Great progress guys! I'm looking forward to mine (pardon the pun) soon. Can anyone suggest a pooled mining profitability calculator that takes into account the increasing difficulty so I can figure out break even and stuff like that?

[spiccioli]

Great progress guys! I'm looking forward to mine (pardon the pun) soon. Can anyone suggest a pooled mining profitability calculator that takes into account the increasing difficulty so I can figure out break even and stuff like that?

I'd like to invite every new owner of a BitCentury/Metabank unit to join HHTT pool.

This is a small pool and needs to grow to reduce variance.

Now, if just one or two of you join it it will help but it won't make a big difference, but if ALL of us (I'm waiting for a unit as well) join it, well, it will become a medium sized pool and every one of us will have a few added benefits:

- very small fees
- half of each found block's transaction fees goes to the user that finds it
- low variance
- rock solid

and we will help the bitcoin network spreading our hashing power to a different pool (than btcguild  ).

Think about it! 

spiccioli

ps. for sabd question, I use this one lately: http://www.btcinvest.net/bitcoin-mining-profit-calculator.php