X6500 Custom FPGA Miner

[fizzisist]

Any word on when we can expect to see them on cablesaurus, and what cooler they'll offer as stock (the zalman one?)?

Well I can *see* the heatsinkless board on cablesaurus again now. It even says "In Stock"... but when I go to buy it, it says:
"Products marked with *** are not available in the desired quantity or not in stock!"
(desired quantity 1 or 10 - doesn't seem to make a difference)

Stop teasing, Cablesaurus!

They listed 10 in stock just a few hours ago and they're already gone!! We'll need to get through testing and packing some more boards before he lists more. Sorry about that!

[hashking]

He is not teasing.  I just picked up 3 that will ship wednesday.

[tgmarks]

If anyone wants some of the #4 size standoffs that work on the  rev 2 boards, I have a few extra. just pm me.

[tgmarks]

Are their faster bitstreams in the works or is the 200mh/s going to be the top for awhile?

[fpgaminer]

Are their faster bitstreams in the works or is the 200mh/s going to be the top for awhile?

We are working on the next revision of the firmware, dubbed Overclocker firmware, which will allow overclocking (or downclocking) the FPGA. This should provide a boost over the rated frequency if the board is kept sufficiently cool.

[Garr255]

Excited for that

[Qoheleth]

So, just to check: those white pins on the new red boards are for fans, right?

[TheSeven]

Yes, there are two fan headers on the Rev3 boards, directly connected to the input voltage.

[Qoheleth]

When are you planning on getting more in stock?

[fizzisist]

When are you planning on getting more in stock?

Well, they're in stock here right now, but we can't seem to supply enough to Cablesaurus to keep them in stock (selling out within hours of listing them). Because each board needs to be tested, then packed up and shipped to Cablesaurus, there's a bit of a lag. They will have more stock later this week.

Sorry, but you guys are just buying these up too fast to keep up!

[julz]

When are you planning on getting more in stock?

Well, they're in stock here right now, but we can't seem to supply enough to Cablesaurus to keep them in stock (selling out within hours of listing them). Because each board needs to be tested, then packed up and shipped to Cablesaurus, there's a bit of a lag. They will have more stock later this week.

Sorry, but you guys are just buying these up too fast to keep up!

I think you'd sell more in the long run, and be able to plan the size of your manufacturing runs better if cablesaurus simply accepted pre-orders.
I've been checking the cablesaurus site over the past weeks and have always been unlucky.
I bought ztex & icarus boards in the meantime.

[rjk]

When are you planning on getting more in stock?

Well, they're in stock here right now, but we can't seem to supply enough to Cablesaurus to keep them in stock (selling out within hours of listing them). Because each board needs to be tested, then packed up and shipped to Cablesaurus, there's a bit of a lag. They will have more stock later this week.

Sorry, but you guys are just buying these up too fast to keep up!

I think you'd sell more in the long run, and be able to plan the size of your manufacturing runs better if cablesaurus simply accepted pre-orders.
I've been checking the cablesaurus site over the past weeks and have always been unlucky.
I bought ztex & icarus boards in the meantime.

+1 Accepting pre-orders allows for impulse buyers.

[Garr255]

But only accept a certain number of pre-orders, or tell them "first 100 will ship then, next 100 will ship then", so you're not totally over encumbered. Limiting the number of pre-orders might completely defeat the purpose of them, though

Perhaps set up an "I'm interested" mailing list, so people who have signed up know right when the boards will be restocked?

[fizzisist]

Thanks, everyone, and sorry that stock has been so limited. We made the intentional decision to not accept payment for orders until we knew we could fill those orders in less than a week or so. We would prefer to have less sales and happy customers, than more sales but a huge backlog of orders and people angry that they haven't received anything yet.

That said, shipping should be ramping up a lot in the next week, so we hope to keep Cablesaurus stocked up and make everybody happy real soon.

I have to say thanks to everyone for the huge amount of interest we're getting on this new board! I'm sorry for the delays in getting answers to emails and PMs. I'm surprised my inbox hasn't exploded yet! By the way, if you really want to get in touch with us, the forum PM system really isn't suited to managing lots of messages. Much better would be to send an email to sales@fpgamining.com.

Thanks!

[O_Shovah]

Hello everybody,

As promised i release some images and data of my FPGA family at its daily work.

The setup (please excuse the messy workbench)                                                                                                                                                                    
   
 
[From left to right: ARM board "Gumstix" (the first i developed on), Icarus(rev0),120mmfan ,x6500(rev2),120mmfan,Pandaboard ES(revB2),Bitforce single(1.0)]

And the mining data thanks to TheSeven

[Garr255]

Looking good

[torusJKL]

Hello everybody,

As promised i release some images and data of my FPGA family at its daily work.

[...]

[From left to right: ARM board "Gumstix" (the first i developed on), Icarus(rev0),120mmfan ,x6500(rev2),120mmfan,Pandaboard ES(revB2),Bitforce single(1.0)]

[...]

Do you use the Pandaboard to control the FPGAs?
How does the Pandaboard cope with the workload? What do you think, how many FPGAs could you manage with it?

[TheSeven]

Yes, he is using the pandaboard to control them, and I'd guess that it should be able to handle around 10 boards. Haven't done any actual measurements with that combination though.

[jav]

Some mining rig photos: I went through with my plans for a mineral oil cooled setup. :-)







What you can't see here: The USB and power cable is rising up to the top, as I placed a nail there above the whole setup to run the cables along that. This is an attempt to prevent oil from trickling through the cables. So far the oil stays where it should, hopefully that will last.

All in all it seems to work fairly well. I would like your input though on what is an acceptable temperature to run the FPGA at. First I tried running without a fan and the oil would slowly start heating up and after about 30 minutes the thermometer showed 46 deg C (you can see in the picture that the thermometer is measuring in the middle of the heat sink). At that point I stopped and added a fan. It's not really helping all that much, but it is keeping the setup at about 43 deg C right now.

On the other hand I have yet to see a single invalid share. The system has been mining for over a day at 200 MHz (per FPGA) with 0 invalids. So would that indicate that I can risk a slightly higher temperature? I would really like to run this completely passive.

I was also thinking that this might be a good excuse to play around with 3d printing a little bit and maybe build something that would increase the surface area for the oil to cool down and maybe even have some kind of circular setup driven by convection. Although if I do that, which seems like a fun project, it would probably be just me guessing how to do that rather than being based on actual physics. =)

[jav]

I also wanted to point out a few things I ran into when setting up the software side of things, as it might be helpful to others as well.

This is on Debian Linux: When I first connected the board using USB, I used 'lsusb' to see all connected devices and did a 'lsusb -v -d 0403:6001' to show more details about the board I just connected. That gave me some infos, but also a "Operation not permitted". To be able to access the board using my user account, I added this udev rule: /etc/udev/rules.d/90-fpgamining-x6500.rules with this contents:

Code:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="0403", ATTR{idProduct}="6001", MODE="0660", GROUP="fpgamining"

and created the group 'fpgamining' and added myself to it (you have to logout and login again for the change to show up):

Code:

# addgroup --system fpgamining
# adduser jan fpgamining

MPBM still remained silent though and after I added some debug output about what exceptions are thrown, I got "could not set config 1: Device or resource busy". This, as I was quickly informed in the IRC channel, is because of the module "ftdi_sio" which is loaded automatically and grabs access to the device. So I did a 'rmmod ftdi_sio' and added "blacklist ftdi_sio" to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf to prevent the module from loading again in the future.

After that it was smooth sailing with MPBM and this cool piece of hardware. =)