How to start with FPGA?

[Fredyy]

Hi,

I'm realtive new to Bitcoin and minig but i've got some questions.

Right now im mining on a 7990 and a 5770 but the need a lot of energy and are pretty loud. I read about FPGAs as the new alternative, but i could not find any payable FPGAs for "Starter" everything seems to be >500$ but thats way more than i would like to invest for a my first steps.

Also i read, that FPGA are not standalone but need a host computer to manage them via usb. So i think the best way to save some energy would be a raspberry pi. Has anyone already managed to start a miner supporting FPGA on a Rasperberry pie?

What else can you suggest my for starting mining with FPGAs?

Thank you for your Help and Greetings,

Fredyy

[hm]

I am still waiting for my raspberry pi as well as for my first fpga mining hardware.
I agree with you about the high investmemt costs, first I waited but then I ate the sour apple and ordered some fpgas from enterpoint.

I am thinking of using a fanless Igel thin client with 1GHz cpu as fpga controller, but it draws about 20W. I have two spare ones to sell btw.
Perhaps the Bifferboard http://www.bifferos.co.uk/ can be used to run the mining software on openwrt. The board has 150MHz x86 CU, USB, NIC, 2mb ram, 8mb flash, and draws just 1W. priced at £35.
Another cheap alternative could be a TP-LINK TL-WR703N 150MBit mini WLAN router or other openwrt-supported hardware.
also see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=76685.0

[BePrivate]

ut i could not find any payable FPGAs for "Starter" everything seems to be >500$ but thats way more than i would like to invest for a my first steps.

I agree with you about the high investmemt costs

i'm also looking for some good FPGA's, i wan to start a mining rig..

but FPGA's are still very high in prices

[Phraust]

I've tested cgminer with a BitFORCE Single on a Seagate DockStar running ArchLinux.  Seems to handle it just fine, and it draws about 9w.

[Garr255]

Most FPGAs are very easy to configure and get hashing. You just need to install a driver along with python, and x6500s work great! http://fpgamining.com/

I'd also recommend checking out companies the GLBSE.

[PoorGirl]

Hey Guys,

I think the best is to actually buy an FPGA and learn by doing it. I spend a couple of days to run some calculations and these products seems to be the best regarding Mh/s and low power consumption:

• X6500 FPGA Miner
• ModMiner Quad
• BitForce SHA256 Single

I know micro-controllers from industry automation (you may have heard of Advantech from Taiwan) and as long as these Bitcoin boards contain a Watchdog they should run super stable and be easy to use. Guess today only Spartan 6 chips are useful, so no matter which board you buy the procedure to get it running should be similar.