Cairnsmore1 - Quad XC6SLX150 Board

[yohan]

The simple stacking arrangement with fans in normal place and not to be confused with the side blow push pull fan option.

[Garr255]

Does that provide sufficient cooling? Or can you not test yet because of the lack of a fully working bitstream?

[rjk]

I wonder if you could do a side-blow option with the boards sandwiched together - one right side up and the other upside-down. That might get them closer together to save space, while not compromising the airflow.

[Gomeler]

Will it be possible to purchase, on the side, those standoffs that you guys are using to stack the boards? I know I could spend a few hours searching for likely options, order them, realize I ordered the wrong thing and order more standoffs, or I could order them with the boards. Happy to hear the progress. Really look forward to seeing these things hash away on cgminer. Screenshots of that will boost confidence for sure.

[rjk]

stuff

Although I am sure all of us desperately want to see them accepting Bitcoins, I think it would be best to let them get things ramped up and working and shipping first, before dealing with setting up a Bit-pay account. I'm happy to wait.

[yohan]

Push pull fans will allow a lower stack height and the pillars normally used for the fan could be used as stacker pillars instead. That would get a stacking distance of about 39mm on the current heatsink.

We have not bothered looking at efficiency and thermals as yet. Until the bitstreams are running in all devices there is not much point doing formal measurements. That said early informal observation is showing good results.

The pillars we use are a custom height already and made by a company local to us. We can get pretty much any reasonable height made in a few days subject to a minimum order quantity which I think is about 100 pieces. The curent stacking pillar shown will be available as part of an optional stacking kit which will have the 4 pillars (75mm), an up/down cable and still to be decided maybe a linking power cable.

[Garr255]

How high can you stack these with nylon risers and still have a rigid structure?

[Syke]

That has nothing to do with my issues with intersango. For Merchants using bit-pay, there is no conversion you have to do, its just like accepting paypal.

https://bit-pay.com/accountingHelp.html

"The maximum payout per day is 1000.00 USD or 1000.00 EUR."

That's not a very workable solution for most merchants. Does anyone know if bit-pay will increase that limit?

[rjk]

That has nothing to do with my issues with intersango. For Merchants using bit-pay, there is no conversion you have to do, its just like accepting paypal.

https://bit-pay.com/accountingHelp.html

"The maximum payout per day is 1000.00 USD or 1000.00 EUR."

That's not a very workable solution for most merchants. Does anyone know if bit-pay will increase that limit?

I'm guessing they have some way of increasing it, since BFL uses them, and each single is more than half that. 2 orders would put them over the limit, or one order of 2.

[Garr255]

That has nothing to do with my issues with intersango. For Merchants using bit-pay, there is no conversion you have to do, its just like accepting paypal.

https://bit-pay.com/accountingHelp.html

"The maximum payout per day is 1000.00 USD or 1000.00 EUR."

That's not a very workable solution for most merchants. Does anyone know if bit-pay will increase that limit?

I would assume that there is some kind of "verification" process you'll have to go through to lift the limit, similarly to PayPal.
If not, this is a massive hindrance to those who want to utilize this great service.

[norulezapply]

Great work keeping everyone so well informed yohan! Enterpoint is really doing an excellent job so far with Cairnsmore1 and showing other FPGA producers how it should be done professionally!

Even if these FPGAs offered less MHash/$£, I'd still buy them from Enterpoint over the competitors products any day, solely on the support you've given the community on the development process so far...

Yohan does a great job ! To be fair, some competitors work alone or in a very small team. That leaves not much time for frequent updates. I own products of 3 different manufactors and all of them have been very helpful.

That's true. Some competitors who work alone with ngzhang do provide excellent support as well considering. I just really appreciate the highy detailed updates and keeping the community in the development loop. Some of the competitors who work in teams (whom shall not be named) have abysmal track records and could learn a lot from enterpoint.

[fizzisist]

Great work keeping everyone so well informed yohan! Enterpoint is really doing an excellent job so far with Cairnsmore1 and showing other FPGA producers how it should be done professionally!

Even if these FPGAs offered less MHash/$£, I'd still buy them from Enterpoint over the competitors products any day, solely on the support you've given the community on the development process so far...

Yohan does a great job ! To be fair, some competitors work alone or in a very small team. That leaves not much time for frequent updates. I own products of 3 different manufactors and all of them have been very helpful.

That's true. Some competitors who work alone with ngzhang do provide excellent support as well considering. I just really appreciate the highy detailed updates and keeping the community in the development loop. Some of the competitors who work in teams (whom shall not be named) have abysmal track records and could learn a lot from enterpoint.

Would you mind naming those competitors? Just wondering if you're talking about FPGA Mining LLC, since we work in a team. If you are, what was the problem?

[Garr255]

Great work keeping everyone so well informed yohan! Enterpoint is really doing an excellent job so far with Cairnsmore1 and showing other FPGA producers how it should be done professionally!

Even if these FPGAs offered less MHash/$£, I'd still buy them from Enterpoint over the competitors products any day, solely on the support you've given the community on the development process so far...

Yohan does a great job ! To be fair, some competitors work alone or in a very small team. That leaves not much time for frequent updates. I own products of 3 different manufactors and all of them have been very helpful.

That's true. Some competitors who work alone with ngzhang do provide excellent support as well considering. I just really appreciate the highy detailed updates and keeping the community in the development loop. Some of the competitors who work in teams (whom shall not be named) have abysmal track records and could learn a lot from enterpoint.

Would you mind naming those competitors? Just wondering if you're talking about FPGA Mining LLC, since we work in a team. If you are, what was the problem?

I wouldn't worry about it

[yohan]

I wonder if you could do a side-blow option with the boards sandwiched together - one right side up and the other upside-down. That might get them closer together to save space, while not compromising the airflow.

There is a benefit drawing air over the rear surface of the board so back to back possibly isn't a great idea. We made some special provisions in the PCB design to improve heatflow to the back surface from the chips. That effect is additive to the more conventional top side heatsink and fan and would benefit for air over the back of the board or even water cooling. However the side blow push-pull option should work fairly well and keeps the stack height down to 39mm on the first release of boards and possibly 29mm on the boards with a smaller height heatsink although on the latter a bit higher might be better for rear cooling. There is experimentation still to be done there. We also have some other ideas as well to play with although they may not make an appearance until Cairnsmore2 where we have bunch of new ideas to show you all.

We are looking at brackets now for the side blow option and more on that in the next week or so. As that is a retrofit option it is not high on our list to sort out in the very short timeframe.

Yohan

[regular]

Is there any warranty on this?  Also how will you be shipping them?  For us Canadians, shipping by postal service would be much cheaper than courier.

[yohan]

Warranty is 1 year.

Postal charges have gone up significantly here and it is not much cheaper by postal service. It also means someone has spend 30 minutes going to a Post Office that costs us and that is way more than the difference to a courier who picks up at our shipping dept. never mind the disruption to the flow of orders out of the door. Tracking on postal services is also very poor and on an item of this value we need to ensure that something actual arrives.

We will be using a mixture of couriers DHL, FEDEX and probably UPS depending on where they are going to. Depending on the service we use most places in Canada would normally be delivered anything from next day to 3-4 days.

[regular]

For shipping to Canada, please use dhl as its probably the cheapest when it comes to brokerage fees. With  Ups and fedex pls use international economy express services which include brokerage fees.

[yohan]

A lot of this depends on the contract we have with individual couriers and they price based on your profile. Taking FEDEX as a case we can actually send more cheaply on International Priority than International Economy and that is peculiar to us. DHL is getting a lot of our business currently but they are being competitive and wanted our business. We are talking to the courier companies to see if we can do better based on a raised volume.

For those of you within the first 50 orders you should have got an email today asking if you wanted your first board on an early shipping slot i.e. this week or next week depending on how things here work. We are now taking payments for people that want the early shipment. After this first week of shipping and a bit of the next we will revert to shipping purely in order we received orders. It is then all down to how fast we ramp up output and when those large amounts of heatsinks arrive.

Yohan

[gyverlb]

yohan, will all shipping boards have a new design (fixing the early RX/TX problem making the second FPGA incompatible with existing bitstreams on your prototype). If not, do you plan to ship boards with a new design in the future ? If yes when ?

[norulezapply]

Great work keeping everyone so well informed yohan! Enterpoint is really doing an excellent job so far with Cairnsmore1 and showing other FPGA producers how it should be done professionally!

Even if these FPGAs offered less MHash/$£, I'd still buy them from Enterpoint over the competitors products any day, solely on the support you've given the community on the development process so far...

Yohan does a great job ! To be fair, some competitors work alone or in a very small team. That leaves not much time for frequent updates. I own products of 3 different manufactors and all of them have been very helpful.

That's true. Some competitors who work alone with ngzhang do provide excellent support as well considering. I just really appreciate the highy detailed updates and keeping the community in the development loop. Some of the competitors who work in teams (whom shall not be named) have abysmal track records and could learn a lot from enterpoint.

Would you mind naming those competitors? Just wondering if you're talking about FPGA Mining LLC, since we work in a team. If you are, what was the problem?

I wouldn't worry about it

No, not you