Cairnsmore1 - Quad XC6SLX150 Board

[dirtycat]

I love how all these noobs are ordering these things and trying to mine when there is no bitstream available.. YET!

EDIT: on a side note.. cant wait till there is a stream avail.. will def be ordering

Atleast I have my board set up and waiting now. A working bitstream will be ready in a couple of days. Have fun waiting til October for shipping...

Im happy for you!  By October hopefully everything will be up to par and hashing at full speed.. in the mean time I got my gpus and a a few ztex hashing right now to keep me happy until then.

[1713997343]

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[1713997343]

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[norulezapply]

I love how all these noobs are ordering these things and trying to mine when there is no bitstream available.. YET!

EDIT: on a side note.. cant wait till there is a stream avail.. will def be ordering

Atleast I have my board set up and waiting now. A working bitstream will be ready in a couple of days. Have fun waiting til October for shipping...

Im happy for you!  By October hopefully everything will be up to par and hashing at full speed.. in the mean time I got my gpus and a a few ztex hashing right now to keep me happy until then.

And you too. I'm sure it will be I have faith in Enterpoint and don't mind waiting a couple of days extra for a basic stream.

[ChiangYay]

Hi,

Very nice and nice pictures too thanks, but I don't see any kind of Power Supply.
How does it get the power to run?

ChiangYay

[DILLIGAF]

Hi,

Very nice and nice pictures too thanks, but I don't see any kind of Power Supply.
How does it get the power to run?

ChiangYay

Well you have looked at the pictures so you can see the 6 pin PCI-e and molex connector that will take power from a standard computer power supply and from my looking at it looks like there is a your typical wall wart power supply connector there as well beside them connectors.

[rampone]

+1 for enterpoint
+1 for DHL
+1 for TRICONE MINING (how do we get the specs of the board to eldentyrell
+1 for CGminer "cairnsmore"mod download, even if it hashes slow

[yohan]

Ok I will try and do a "state of the nation" outline:

USB- Drivers for the USB will hopefully be in place today. Basically we have are tidying up drivers that we have working so not really a risk but some time required. The FT4232 chip is very versatile and we have notionally one of the 4 channels that it supports allocated to JTAG, one to SPI driving, and two for coms. The FT4232 has internal micro-engines to support JTAG and SPI functions. At the moment the JTAG can be used to program the main array FPGAs and Flash memories that store bitstreams and we have this working for Linux and Windows. We may extend the SPI functions to directly program array Flash memories but that isn't working as yet. That's a nice to have and actually more of use to us in production maybe than anyone else.

Programmer- In-built programmer is working. See above USB description. Just needs board powered and the standard supplied USB lead wih some software.

Bitstreams - We have a twin,or even triple, approach here. The first of these is these is building the standard VHDL/Verilog dersigns that are arround for our pinout and all of the units shipped have a 50MHz version that is working and can earn Bitcoins. With this approach we can run Icarus style pairs directly wired or "patched" through the controller. We have a range of options on I/O that we can use. Building these bitstreams takes typically 1-2 days to attempt a build and they don't always complete so it is a slow process. We are trying a few things here to stabilise the standard design which is highly sensitive to build variation. This is our initial way of providing a bitstream.

Seperately we are looking at better, original design, bitstreams. This will deliver a much better solution both in stability and probably performance. It's going to take a few weeks and maybe a bit more to get these solutions to a useful level but these will be our long term offering.

When requested we are also supporting any 3rd party bitsream development.

Documentation- This with be very patchy for the first couple of weeks but it will start to appear soon. As we are evolving bitstreams and software it may also not be totally up to date for the first few weeks, or even complete, but we will do our best to make it useful and keep it on track.

Software- We have some initial CGminer extensions that hopefully will be available today. As we evolve controller and array FPGA designs there will be updates and variations so it will be a changing item over the next few weeks.

Stacking Kits- We are starting to get elements of these together but more will appear over the next few weeks. Basic stacking pillars are available now and up/down ribbon cables hopefully from today. Power linkages we are looking at to see what works best and that is tied a bit to development of a power distribution board that will allow a high effiency ATX power supply o/p to be used in a cost effective way to power a stack of boards.

Power Supplies- Because of the weight and hence shipping cost we decided not offer as standard a power supply. Given the wide range of ways that a Cairnsmore1 can be powered we think it's better for customers to source locally. We hope to run some tests on specific units an make a recomended list and some of this will be linked to what we do as power distribution boards. Some way down the line we might offer a turnkey rack that incorporates a power supply but that is more likely to be Cairnsmore2 than Cairnsmore1.

Production- We are moving into a stable manufacturing phase now. The hardware side of the product is locked down and the in-built programmer covers firmware updates in the field. The general target is to have the major part of the "development" over by the end of June. It's not an exact science predicting development cycles so that might vary a little. That's also our general target to achieve performance levels of about 200MH/s per array FPGA. More advanced things will come beyond that.

In terms of unit delivery times we will try and pull forward delivery dates if possible but we won't promise that. I do expect that to start improving for new orders in the next few weeks as we catch up on the initial demand and eventually units will become a stocked item for next day delivery into Europe / US and maybe 3-5 working days for those unlucky Australians on the other end of planet.

Ok so hopefully I have covered most questions in that lot and at the point of sounding boring I will say it's still a development product. Hopefully by now that doesn't surprise anyone. It's still very rough and ready as a product but that will improve over the next few weeks and longer.

[Keninishna]

I think almost everyone will be requesting support for the tricone mining bitstream, I believe eldentryell just needs the pinouts which I'm assuming will be in the coming documentation. I'm also guessing I should send an email to preorder for the stacking accessories? I'm thinking I should order 3 cables for every 4 boards, which then would hook up through usb at the end and be recognized as one device? Maybe I'll just wait for more details on stacking. Thanks for the updates.

[yohan]

We will try and do some pictures of inital stack options maybe today and that will given some ideas to people of what is possible. We are still working on things like brackets for side blow fans and other stacking heights but these will probably take a few weeks to sort out and to have a full range available. Again this is an evolving area and a little patience is needed whilst we come up with the best solutions. It's not the highest priority on our list to do but we will get there and make something that works for customers.

[rampone]

+1 for extremely fast shipping (though express was a little to quick if the drivers are not out)

and a request for eldentyrells 3rd party firmware.

i believe you guys can do a bitstream similar powerful, but how long will it take? Would be fine, if we could use eldentyrells tricone firmware for the time before? Maybe also eldentyrells firmware shows how powerful your board is, as the bitstream does not work that good with the "lower"powered ztex boards.

[norulezapply]

+1 for extremely fast shipping

and a request for eldentyrells 3rd party firmware.

+1 to both of these

[rampone]

I heard you like Cairnsmore Boards?

Unboxing Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUBDATTkT4Q&feature=youtu.be

The most professional Unboxing VID EVER!!!

[TheHarbinger]

I heard you like Cairnsmore Boards?

Unboxing Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUBDATTkT4Q&feature=youtu.be

The most professional Unboxing VID EVER!!!

I just peed myself a little bit.

[rjk]

I heard you like Cairnsmore Boards?

Unboxing Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUBDATTkT4Q&feature=youtu.be

The most professional Unboxing VID EVER!!!

lol that's great.

[rampone]

I think I have the DNA of one of enterpoints workers. I think i have a organic/technical FPGA Hybrid Board

on the bottom there is a little hair under the "lötstopplack" (solder resist color). As far as I can see there should not be a electrical problem (hopefully).

I think I will clone that worker, and let the clone manufacture the boards for me

[MrTeal]

I think I have the DNA of one of enterpoints workers. I think i have a organic/technical FPGA Hybrid Board

on the bottom there is a little hair under the "lötstopplack" (solder resist color). As far as I can see there should not be a electrical problem (hopefully).

I think I will clone that worker, and let the clone manufacture the boards for me

If it's under the solder resist, it would have come from whoever their PCB manufacturer is, not someone from Enterpoint. You probably have some Chinese factory worker DNA there.

[rampone]

^^ I put my guess to a worker from UK as I can feel the hair on the ground plane it must have come after the copper and before the solder resist, it crosses data lines to one fpga though. I think the electrons flowing will not care

EDIT:

You guys are probably working a lot for the drivers and something working. I am hot for anything, even 10 MH/s also willing to try under windows and ubuntu and soon on openwrt with a TP-link router.

Nom Nom Nom

[yohan]

Sorry guys we got abit distracted on something else today so drivers and software not quite finished.Meanwhile so eye candy showing the main parts of simple stacking.

[rjk]

OooOOoOoO   NOW I get it. Awesome.

EDIT: I see 9 in the top stack, what's the maximum? Also, what is the maximum stacking cable length? Because once you get above so many, you have to start over on another stack.

[jjshabadoo]

Any results on power consumption at this point?

[yohan]

There is not a defined limit but something like 10 units is reasonable unless maybe you are an earthquake zone. Of course if you are next to a wall you could use an an angled bracket at the top to steady the stack. Or use something like a mechano bar with holes across the top to brace to the adjacent stack. The whole arrangement is very flexible and what works in your space.

We still have to add the up/down logic function but that is coming after we make headway on the hashing and clear the initial drive/software bits. The up/down can be used over multiple stacks. Just needs a longer ribbon cable to take the end of one stack to start of the next and you can run your entire rig on one USB cable. That is the plan.

Picture is simple stacking where units are literally just stacking as they come as standard. Taking off the fan assembly allows side blow configuration that can use the up/down in the same way but board spacing can be tighter. It's not set yet what spacers we will support but a total height step of 40mm would fit nicely with 120mm fans in push/pull configuration. That would use 2 fans to cover 3 boards. 40mm would say allow 20 boards in a stack without being silly. Stacks of 10, 20 maybe 30 boards also line up well with high power ATX PSUs and our plans for a power distribution board.

At the moment power usage is very low but that's meaningless until we get hashing rates up.