First "complete" prototype finished and undergoing testing; as soon as a reliable source of parts can be found I'll start on actual production. If anyone's got an "in" with Molex or FCI I wouldn't mind a bit of assistance tracking down both parts and information.
This board is designed to mate with a Dell Z750P power supply from a PowerEdge 2950; said supplies can be found fairly readily on eBay in various conditions for as low as $12. They are rated to provide 62A at 12V at 90% efficiency. This interface board provides
- Screw terminals for +12V and GND so you only hook up what cables you need.
- Additional output capacitance for voltage ripple and burst current buffering
- Manual fan speed control (the stock full speed is quite loud)
- Auto-powerup which can be triggered by an external signal as low as 3V, disablable by a toggle switch
- Manual powerup from a toggle switch. Because toggle switches are legit.
- In-signal and Out-signal headers which allow chaining, so one supply can turn on multiple others
- Current share feature which should allow multiple supplies to cross-regulate and evenly distribute high power loads in parallel
I've had one of these supplies running a pair of full-overclocked Cubes for a few weeks with zero issues. These supplies, equipped with these boards, should work beautifully for standalone miners at reduced cost for comparable ATX supplies (similar power and efficiency) and without requiring paperclips or additional wire management. Output regulation should also be better than a standard ATX.
They'll also work as additional 12V rails controlled by ATX supplies; the auto-powerup was originally designed to fire up the supply as additional power for a GPU rig.
The Z750P uses a fairly common interface style and pinout; I don't have a complete list of other supplies this board would work for but there should be several.
I don't have an estimated price tag yet, probably in the neighborhood of $30 to $40 - a lot of that is going to depend on the cost of parts. All manufacture will be done by American people in America, which adds to the cost a bit but one of the tenets of my business is to never for any reason outsource jobs that can be done domestically.
I think this is a wonderful use for all the industrial parts which have been EOL'd just because the speed/capacity/etc does not fit the needs of the large corporations with huge server farms and upgrade all the time, including lots of hardware from the government.
TL;DR (just IMHO view on the computer hardware industry, as I had operated a business liquidating IT assets for almost 10 years)
In fact since all these servers and parts that are in them were built specifically for industrial use they already optimized them to run 24/7 and at maximum efficiency so there was no need for those 80 Plus PSU, etc certification. A lot of these servers are sold at pallets at a time for very cheap and a lot of times they look brand new (it seems common for "upgrades" to be done every couple years so these are mostly barely broken in) sometimes it's when a company goes out of business. In any case these servers have pretty high end (at the time of purchase) parts like RAID, SCSI with mostly 10k rpm hard drives (80gb but not everyone needs tonnes of storage), custom designed cooling to fit dual cpu installations cool and even redundant PSUs all in a 1u Case.
Most of these servers would work great for many people who are willing to deal with the sound of the fans or to part out and put into a regular computer case. For the part of the computer users that just need something to write documents or watch videos here and there they work great! Although computers have gotten so cheap and have other things like USB 3.0 which some of the older servers mostly don't have make it a very tight profit margin to convert these servers into desktop machines.
For small offices though these work great because the prices are so low they can get 10 of those servers for the price of a new one which they most likely won't use to the full capacity anyway. Of course marketing has gotten to even the small/medium business owners wanting the latest and greatest when that is not needed at all, especially if they are just using it for a firewall or some other task that does not require all the processing power from a new "top of the line" device.
I would install these servers/switches/IT equipment for my clients and they were very happy because it saved them so much money and there was no noticeable difference between the "used" equipment or new ones. In fact even using a Cisco 4000 switch can still provide a lot of switching power with gigabit blades, 24 port 10/100 Ethernet blades and lots of room to add up to 4/5 blades to the backplane (if I recall correctly) and also a management module that usually comes with those switches for remote management. Honestly, does a company really need all gigabit Ethernet connections for their office workstations? If some user needs the speed then a single gigabit switch can be installed in the rack, still saving money than getting all the newest stuff.
(Steps off soap box)
Last, since this hardware was made for industrial use they have already built the components to last a whole lot longer than even the manufacturer's EOL on the hardware. Not to mention all the perks like hot swappable fans/PSUs/etc.
So whole point, I think this is a wonderful project! Especially with all the "features" that those power supplies offer and at the price 20 of them can be purchased for the price for less than 5 standard ATX power supplies that are certified with the 80 plus etc, and as they are for consumer use all those power supplies lack the advantages of server PSUs like the load balancing.
In any case I fully support your project and would like to work with you on getting this out to the community as this is a wonderful way to "recycle" many very well designed INDUSTRIAL hardware that we need for our miners. I would rather use 10 dell PSUs to power 6 KnC Jupiter units than 6 SeaSonic or Corsair retail units. That would have been cheaper and would have provided more than enough power with some overhead in case of a failure on a unit or two, so no down time at all.
Please PM me if you want to chat more about the best way to do this as well as teaching the community the advantages of using industrial quality parts for our ASICs (which I would consider an industrial product as well) instead of being told to get consumer level retail parts or even just using off the shelf consumer parts for the ASIC manufacture's product lines (like HF and others).
The cost of these miners are more than 1/3 of a salary for many people and is comparable to getting a top of the line Cisco (or any other industrial hardware manufacturer) so I would expect industrial grade parts in my units but we all know that is not the case and they would rather pocket the extra...
Anyway, again, very cool. love this project. I may be able to tap some old resources to get bulk quantities of server parts for cheap in volume and will put money down for development of things like this.
Thanks!