Greetings everyone,
So here is my weekend update:
First the (sort of) bad news - despite me triple-checking the documentation I've managed to put the USB connector backwards. (pins are 4-3-2-1 instead of 1-2-3-4)
The immediate result was that I had to solder it backwards on the test boards, and that there will be yet another version of the board
I guess that's just a bit more work for me (and no sleep again) but at least that's a very easy fix.
The good news - and before that please excuse the not-so-pretty looking boards - those are the engineering samples as the nice-and-pretty ones are not going to make it on time.
Out of the 4 borders I hand-soldered 2 had the bitfury chip misplaced by a bit (and had shorts and I'll be unsoldering and fixing them later) and 2 were fully completed. And because of the USB connector bug it's been soldered backwards.
Here are the two boards, and one of them hashing (the LED on) :
and for the geeks - on that one I was looking at the MOSI and MISO signals (data being sent to and from the chip) :
And for those with "Show Me The Money" question - below are two screen shots from the debugger as the boards passed all tests:
On the two pictures I was testing with 54 and 52 bits speed setting - which is the thing that controls the speed - the more the bits the faster it hashes (and more heat, and eventually hardware errors).
For that test I've adapted BitFury's code (taken from
here) and replaced his RaspberryPI stuff with what I needed to run it with our controller and under Windows. Oh, yeah - did I say that this device was going to run under Windows (too)?
Some more technical details:
- Voltage was set to 0.808V. We can go as low as 0.800 (due to power regulator limitations) and as high as 5V for those inclined to experiment
- Temperature: After running for about 30 minutes on 54 bits and as it was taped on the desk the board got up to 75C. That was the most extreme condition - no ventilation, and all heat was directed to the side that was taped to the desk (and wood is not very much thermally conductive
). I'll be doing some more tests with no and a little bit of ventilation.
- GHashes - I haven't measured the exact GHash rate yet, but at 52 bits it's somewhere around 2.0-2.1GH/s and at 24 bits it's in the vicinity of 2.4-2.7GH/s.
- Power consumption will be the next thing to measure. I know for sure that it is below 2.5W as it was plugged into an old monitor which is very picky about devices drawing over 0.5Amps.
For those asking what's next - We gave up on the idea of writing our own miner (yeah, I guess we were a bit optimistic about that
) and we're currently doing the surgical cutting and pasting into legkodymov's cgminer clone (which was never meant to work under Windows and that's what we're currently fixing). My guesstimate is that this is going to take us probably another 10-20 hours of coding, or barring any nasty surprises in a few days the next pictures (and video!) will be of cgminer running our device.
Finally - I realize that for many of you guys this entire GB represents some kind of a risk, and as we're near the end patience is running thin and I want to assure everyone that we stand absolutely firmly behind our promise. We will either deliver what we promised or you'll have your money back. All 100% of it. I'll even pay the transaction fees.
I realize that many of you are considering the risks in this GB and speaking of risk - I doubt that anyone has taken more risk than the development team, who so far has invested their own money into ordering boards and materials (have I mentioned that we've been paying $70 extra for overnight shipping on everything?) and dedicated countless hours into this project. Looking in retrospect I see a lot of things that we could've done different (and faster) but we're a very small team and without the (sort of) unlimited resources of the big businesses.
Nonetheless - I'm very excited with our progress so far and I'm confident that we'll be able to deliver the nice NanoFury devices in your hands as promised!
And we do appreciate your trust in us and all the support and encouraging feedback from the forum!
