[BOUNTY] PCB designer & More, for project ToFu ( For dead V2 blades )

[TerraHasher]

Got a dead V2 blade?

Me too !

Ladies, Gentleman, and lower earth dwelling life forms, It is with great pleasure that i announce the start of what i call project ToFu. What is to follow is probably a page of me rambling trying to make this all make sense. So to start off on the right... or is it left...... foot, i will summarize first then get into detail.

What we need: An experienced PCB designer well known in the community. ( * this is me winking at you Mr Teal and Chip Geek )
                      A community accepted Escrow holder with a proven track record of delivering what is pomised
                     The backing of the bitcoin community holding those dredded dead V2 blades or AM chips.
                     Someone to help me write the assembly instructions
                     An experienced software / firmware developer


The Project: Design a PCB for a 2 AM chip DIY USB miner.

Now the story, explanation, and endless ramble, feel free to stop reading whenever you want. Just donate to our designers.

How many of you are holding dead V2 blades? How many of you have noticed the sudden up-rise of posts with people having problems with dead V2 blades? How many of you like zebra cakes? ok that last part was for my own fascination.

At last estimated count just on this forum alone, i estimate there are about 5000 viable chips on dead V 2.01 boards floating around these days, and that number increases daily. The one thing i see in common with every post about a dead blade on this and other forums is the want to find a PCB for our viable chips, and the kicker is THERE IS NONE..... True, you can spend days triaging your board, make several posts on the forum, hope, pray, cuss a little, wish, then finally cuss some more, put it in a box and then on a shelf. or if you are like me, you pray to find another dead Sapphire miner on ebay for a couple dollars and you harvest a chip and fix the USB miner. But the truth is for the majority of the community, once you have a dead board it gets put up, or sold on ebay for pennies on the dollar in hopes of getting back a small part of your investment.

So what is project ToFu?

Project ToFu hopes to harness the collective knowledge of a great community to resolve a common problem that many of us are suffering from. Project ToFu aims to design, prototype, and test a DIY kit, and instructions on how to harvest your ASIC chips from your dead V2 blade and assemble a 2 chip USB miner which is viable to start (slowly) mining bitcoin again and reclaim a small portion of your investment on your original purchase.

What the final product aim's to include:

1x PCB board ready for you to start to assemble
1x shopping list for parts you will need to order to finish the board ( hopefully with item numbers from digikey )
1x assembly manual giving you step by step instructions on how to harvest your chips, and assemble the board
1x micro SD card containing the firmware for the board
1x project ToFU thermal color changing sticker for your heat sink.
You will need to provide your own chips.

People and positions we need to fill:

Escrow Manager: This person will hold the donations as they accumulate towards the bounties we will offer to a few of the key developer's needed to complete this project and then release the bounty once their portion of the project is complete. The escrow manager must have a long and well documented history of successful escrow transactions and must have the full support of the community. The Escrow Manager will receive 2% of the total bounty/donations received for their services.

PCB Designer/Engineer (s): This person, or these persons will be the lead designers and engineers of the PCB itself, The PCB designer(s) must have a well document history in PCB design involving bitcoin ASIC miners, and must have a fair amount of time to invest into the project / design of the board. This person / people will receive a yet to be determined bounty payment for their time and services.

Firmware Designer: This person will be in charge of coding the firmware and drivers for the Project ToFU DIY board and must have experience working with ASIC firmware. This position will as well receive a yet to be determined bounty payment for their time / services. I myself will be helping with this in my spare time, but will require no payment for my time.

Instruction manual writers: These people will all collectively work together to write a simple, small, step by step instruction guide for how to remove chips from bad boards, and how to assemble all the components of the new Project ToFu USB miner. These positions are volunteer positions and we will rely on the community to help get this step done.

Graphic Designer: This person will be in charge of designing a logo for project ToFu, this logo will be used on the packaging and the color changing sticker for the heat sink. This position is a volunteer position and we will again rely on the help of the community to find a suitable logo for our little pet project.

Donors: Any and all of you that can contribute even .00000001 BTC to the bounty pool to reward the lead designers, Once we settle on a person to hold our escrow, a donation address will be set up, as well as a donation mining account on BTCguild where you will be able to donate even 10 minutes of use on your miners to help the cause. all mined donations will pay directly to the escrow address. More details to come.

If you are interested in filling any of the positions above, please message me with your qualifications (and payment requirements if it is a position with bounty)

Now for every pre-teen's favorite game... NO not 7 minutes in heaven, get your dirty minds out of the gutter..... 21 QUESTIONS

Q: Why a USB board instead of just a new 10.7 GH/s design?
A: The several chip design is what got us in this situation in the first place. a small cheap DIY USB will be easy to assemble, easy to diagnose if there are problems, small, and have very few components to break, and in the worst case scenario if it does break, you lose two chips a very little hashing power. Also, USB's make great gifts to help attract new people to bitcoin. Besides, lets face it, the more hashing power and nodes we keep in our control and out of the hands of cloud mining companies, the more control we have over keeping bitcoin the way it is.

Q: How much is this going to cost me?
A: We are hoping to keep the cost of the Project ToFu kit between $10 and $15 usd. or free. lesser the actual PCB, its up to you.

Q: How do we know this isn't just a way for you to make money?
A: Because i am not selling these, In the end we will all either go in on a group buy from a PCB manufacturer to have the boards made, or leave it to others in the community to have them made. this whole project will be open source, and if you know a PCB manufacturer you will be able to have them make the board for you, but rest assure you will pay a ton for 10-15 boards where as a group buy we can probably get the boards for a few dollars each. Furthermore, for testing purposes, someone has to pay for rapid prototyping on the board to test them before finalizing the design, that person will probably be me, and a few other donors i am sure.

Q: When do you expect to have these done?
A: I have no idea, we have just launched this project today 12/24/13, and are still looking for designers, engineers, and programmers. I will update as each spot is filled.

Q: Why did you call it Project ToFu
A: because we all have a ton of blades that are Totally Fu**ed

Q: (Reserved for your questions)
A: ( Reserved for answers to your questions)

Q: (Reserved for your questions)
A: ( Reserved for answers to your questions)

Q: (Reserved for your questions)
A: ( Reserved for answers to your questions)

More updates coming soon, If you are interested in helping fill any of the needed positions, please message me directly and we will get something figured out.

Donation address will be posted once we find an escrow manager.

[TerraHasher]

Reserved

[sidehack]

Watching. Not sure what skills or resources I'll have available by the time this is moving, but I'll do what I can.

[rarkenin]

Watching and reserved. I would have applied but my PCB/digital electronics skills are still limited and related more to the theoretical than the practical.

[TerraHasher]

Thank you for the support guys, even if you cannot contribute to the design itself, everyone can help with this, the more awareness we can get to this project the better the chance we have at finding all the people needed to make it happen. I have just gotten off a 5 hour phone call with a PCB designer who has never worked with bitcoin and gotten prices on what it would cost to have the board designed. If all else fails and we cannot make this happen as a community and get the price point in where we want it. then i will just foot the bill and start selling the kit at around $30 - $40 each, not to be the corporate American greed monger like all these other companies, but without community development there are a lot of bills to be paid, and i at least have to get my initial investment back. So anything you can do to help spread the word about the project would help greatly, i have priced out manufacturing a small board like this, and we could actually get the board itself made for roughly $1 each even with a small order of 10,000 units. which would put the kit in at around $5.00 and cost of additional components yet to be determined but probably around $10, which means if we get community development, we could essentially use our dead V2 blades to make a USB miner for about $15 per miner. So please, lets keep this cheap, fun, and a community project. spread the word, tell everyone, sooner or later we will get a designer, escrow person, and firmware developer to stand up and help for a bounty. even if we cannot find the firmware developer i can do that myself, the big hurdle is getting the PCB designed. 

[sidehack]

Is the hardware spec for the chips actually published? I have a rough pinout from testing V2 blades, but nothing official especially regarding I/O pins and protocol.

[fasmax]

Has anyone tried to repair their blades?
Seems the easiest thing to do would be to just repair your blade.
If there is not enough information to repair your blade then there is not enough information to make a new design.
Maybe there is a common design weakness so if the problem were found a lot of blades could be repaired.
Repair seems like it might be less costly solution.
YMMV

[sidehack]

Less costly, and also less awesome. And since AM is no longer producing the USB BE, there's not a lot of low-entry-point mining options anymore so a $10-$20 dual-chip miner would be pretty sweet for noobs to play with.

[rarkenin]

Will the design of the PCB be published and open-source, so anyone can hack away and suggest improvements?

[freddyfarnsworth]

Less costly, and also less awesome. And since AM is no longer producing the USB BE, there's not a lot of low-entry-point mining options anymore so a $10-$20 dual-chip miner would be pretty sweet for noobs to play with.

I am broke newb, and would love the "heathkit" aspect of it, hashing to the masses Some fun assembly to boot !

[TerraHasher]

Fasmax we have all repaired a blade or two in our day, the problem is the amount of components on the blade itself and the massive amount of things that can go wrong, the problem is the blade design, not the chips, a simple 2 chip usb design would be easy peasy with only a handful of components, and some of us just like to tinker and have the satisfaction of DIY just to say "i made this". One way or another, this is going to happen, i am going to give it a few more weeks to see if we can get an engineer to step up and design the PCB for a bounty, and if nobody steps up as part of a community project, i am going to cut a check to an engineer i know i texas and have him design them. The difference is, if this is a community project and all bounties are paid as part of a community contribution to someone who steps up to help make it happen, the price point of this kit will be about $10-$15. Where as if i have to start cutting checks myself, i need to recoup at least my initial investment and then this turns into just another "i made something let me charge you double what its worth so i can make money" kind of thing. which is the direct opposite of what i want this to be. This would be a great item at $15, but cutting checks myself, a $30 product is the same as buying a sapphire miner off ebay. There are thousands of us, almost a quarter million on this forum. There has to be a few engineers in here besides Mr. Teal and Chip Geek that will step up and make a little BTC in the process since we cannot get either of them to volunteer.

The truth is, if we cannot pull it together as a community, then there really is no point even though i am going to do it anyways. There are to many, as a matter of fact ALL companies selling hardware right now that are doing nothing more then RAPING us, the end consumer. Pre-order BS. "let us start a company and make you fund it, then build a ton of machines, hook them all up, drive up the difficulty while we make hundreds of bitcoin, then when we are done, finally deliver them to you." or even companies that have items in stock now. " let me order 1,000 units from hong kong for $500 each, then turn around and retail them to you for $7,000 for 200 GH/s today."

It is without a doubt that it is FAR PAST time that we start to pull together as a community and DO IT OURSEVLFS. I mean, come on, i just bought 25 rolls of avalon chips for $1.89 each direct from china, tell me it costs $5,000 to make a 200 GH/s machine. Black Arrows Minion..... around $45 do have made. and the truth of these matters is, these companies in Hong Kong dont give a crap about NDA's and non-compete. The company i ordered my avalon chips from told me directly when i contacted them " we cannot sell the avalon chip direct to consumers, but we can put whatever name on it you want and sell you as many as you want"

Moral of the story, lets stop getting in line to get raped, and make this happen, then lets move on to the next community designed miner, i have the connections to get anyone chips to build any miner for next to nothing. If we stop allowing them to rape us, they all die, and we all are back in control of the markets.

If you can not help as a developer, or our escrow or graphic designer, even if you cannot donate a single uBTC, refer everyone you can to this thread, be the voice of reason. do your part to make the members of this forum a real community. help everyone become US not a bunch of me's, and lets make this happen, it can only get better once we get past the first project. Imagine 1 TH/s for $800. Trust it can be done with a community behind it.

Has anyone tried to repair their blades?
Seems the easiest thing to do would be to just repair your blade.
If there is not enough information to repair your blade then there is not enough information to make a new design.
Maybe there is a common design weakness so if the problem were found a lot of blades could be repaired.
Repair seems like it might be less costly solution.
YMMV

[grumpy619]

I am in. I know nothing about the hardware nor the software but I am a graphics designer / screen printer/ vinyl sticker guy. Let me know what you need I like the way you think.

DIY is the best way to go because now only the rich is playing in a game that was designed to be a level playing field. I've seen people populate boards with ease so I don't see why it would not be able to be done. Like i said before I know nothing about the hardware and the software but with the proper write up I think I can make it work.

[TerraHasher]

I am in. I know nothing about the hardware nor the software but I am a graphics designer / screen printer/ vinyl sticker guy. Let me know what you need I like the way you think.

DIY is the best way to go because now only the rich is playing in a game that was designed to be a level playing field. I've seen people populate boards with ease so I don't see why it would not be able to be done. Like i said before I know nothing about the hardware and the software but with the proper write up I think I can make it work.

Thanks grumpy, Still waiting on a PCB designer to step fourth, I have recently invested $500,000 usd in a hardware order for a group buy to get some hashing power in the hands of the masses before the march surge. but as soon as i recoup that if i have not found a PCB designer i am going to move forth with the 2 chip design for project ToFu  on my own dollar. Although with me having to foot the bill on a ton of it, I will not be able to offer it for the projected price nor will i be able to make the design open source. I was really hoping to get a little more community support to help everyone as a whole, and really did not want to come at this with a business approach but it appears that a business approach is the only option at this point. i should know more in a few weeks once all the 400 GH/s units i ordered are sold.

[grumpy619]

I think people wanna see results and or pay a lot of mony to make money. Kind of sucks if u ask me. I have seen something similar happening for brushless gimbals. They are spearheaded by someone and unless people see results no one wanna jump in. I just wish I had more money and or knoledge to drop into this game. It would be sweet if I can make a strong miner from home so we can shut people up on the ROI game.

[sidehack]

I'm still wondering if anyone has the actual interface data and whatnot required to drive the chips. Board design can't happen until you know the actual logic and signalling required; makes no sense to start at step 2.

[TerraHasher]

I'm still wondering if anyone has the actual interface data and whatnot required to drive the chips. Board design can't happen until you know the actual logic and signalling required; makes no sense to start at step 2.

I already have the I/O data sidehack, but you made a valid point.

I'm still fairly certain that i am just going to fund this and mark up the price to cover the cost of design. I dont have the time to do the design myself. Who knows. maybe i'll just abandon the project and let people keep paying thousands too much for their hardware.

[sidehack]

Ah, well nifty. Carry on sir. Not sure what time I'll have to assist, but I could probably (eventually) assist with resources and/or assembly.

[freddyfarnsworth]

I'm still wondering if anyone has the actual interface data and whatnot required to drive the chips. Board design can't happen until you know the actual logic and signalling required; makes no sense to start at step 2.

I already have the I/O data sidehack, but you made a valid point.

I'm still fairly certain that i am just going to fund this and mark up the price to cover the cost of design. I dont have the time to do the design myself. Who knows. maybe i'll just abandon the project and let people keep paying thousands too much for their hardware.

Here is a guy who designed his own PCB and seems he did it for kicks, very professional looking board.
Has a siliconrelic tag on the PCB
Contact him to see if he can help you design the dual chip PCB.
And since he owns siliconrelic I think you found a real name for your project.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=394700.msg4256260#msg4256260

einzeln
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=136807

[TerraHasher]

Thanks freddy, i am sending him a message now. Heres to hoping he is interested.

[mozi]

1. USB2.0 devices should not consume more than 500mA. It's unlikely that someone can power one single chip to its max (2000mA) with a USB powered solution. Correct me if I'm wrong.

2.

The PCB designer(s) must have a well document history in PCB design involving bitcoin ASIC miners, and must have a fair amount of time to invest into the project / design of the board

I've not the profile but I would design a PCB for free if someone was willing to sell me just a few chips.
I'm a software programmer but I designed a PCB last year as a hobbyist : http://postimg.org/image/k9cdmciqt/