GekkoScience BM1384 Project Development Discussion

[Mudbankkeith]

Sticks are in today. (customs delays and opened package)

12.5Gig each straight out the box.

Nice kit sidehack/novak, the best sticks yet, Just love those solid green/flashy blue leds.

[alh]

*NIX is more common than you think.

 Pretty much every router "appliance" runs some form of LINUX (Cisco is the only major exception, they have their own propriatary OS stuff).

 Most of the Internet runs on some sort of *NIX - the exceptions are mostly (again!) Cisco boxes in the bigger routers.

 Many older smartphones run on a *NIX of some sort, though propriatary seems to be making a comeback lately with Android getting popular.

 Do keep in mind that the Mac OS is *NIX under the hood.

 To get technical, Windows "borrowed" a LOT of *NIX design concepts in the NT series and it's later derivations, and somewhat to a lesser degree MS-DOS and consumer Windows versions did as well. MS-DOS also borrowed heavily from the older DEC RT-11 OS though (both RT-11 and UNIX borrowed from older OSs as well).

There is a rumor that the acronym WNT (Windows NT) actually happened by "uplifting" the VMS acronym by one letter. The chief guy on NT (David Cutler?) supposedly was a big time developer on VMS. Just a rumor I heard.

[2112]

Early Cisco IOS's were heavily based on Linux.
When NT was released NT had dynamic memory allocation/deallocation, Linux did not.

Crazy stuff! Where did you get such information?

[chiguireitor]

Received the sticks today! Yay!

Testing them on Win 7/8/10 and working like a charm with zadig, no errors whatsoever.

Trying to get them running on my ubuntu server, but couldn't get it working as i needed to get out of the office early for some medical checkups.

Nice piece of hardware, congrats on the stick sidehack/novak.

That is all! no "buts"

When you say you could not get it working on linux what part are you getting stuck at?   If you post what your having trouble with we might be able to help.

Just device access permissions and such... i didn't get to it today, was fiddling all day with another project and couldn't test it further, will get back to it as soon as i resolve how to clear a code protect bit on a PIC i stupidly put on

[notlist3d]

Received the sticks today! Yay!

Testing them on Win 7/8/10 and working like a charm with zadig, no errors whatsoever.

Trying to get them running on my ubuntu server, but couldn't get it working as i needed to get out of the office early for some medical checkups.

Nice piece of hardware, congrats on the stick sidehack/novak.

That is all! no "buts"

When you say you could not get it working on linux what part are you getting stuck at?   If you post what your having trouble with we might be able to help.

Just device access permissions and such... i didn't get to it today, was fiddling all day with another project and couldn't test it further, will get back to it as soon as i resolve how to clear a code protect bit on a PIC i stupidly put on

Giving it root permissions should do the trick on most permissions.  That is ultimate permissions.   

Try giving it root on the command your stuck on and let us know what happens.

[sidehack]

You might want to shift it over to the support thread though.

[QuintLeo]

To me DOS stole more from CP/M & MP/M than the PDP 11 OS.

 To be picky, DOS was a (initially ripped-off later paid for) CP/M varient, based on "Seattle OS" that was a licenced CP/M "clone" written for the 8086/8088.
 CP/M however took it's interface almost directly from RT-11, even maintaining the "PIP is BACKWARDS" command structure among other obvious tipoffs.

 So the RT-11 to DOS steal was indirect, not direct.

Much of the NT design team was "lured" away from DEC

 If I remember the timing correctly, it was more that DEC was dying/had just died and they needed a place to go to work.
 Similar reason and timing on how Intel ended up with the Alpha IP (bought out of DEC bankrupcy IIRC), which they used as part of the input into designing the Pentium.



 Gotta wonder when sidehack is gonna change the name of this thread (if possible) from "BM1384" to "BM1385"....

[sidehack]

Or something else. Bitmain still hasn't budged about sample chips. I just tried again a few days ago, even asked about old BM1384 stock but I got nothing again. There are still other options.

[ATCkit]

Or something else. Bitmain still hasn't budged about sample chips. I just tried again a few days ago, even asked about old BM1384 stock but I got nothing again. There are still other options.

Maybe Spondoolies would sell you some? Their new rig is a beast only for industrial operations- but seems to have more efficient chips (0.15W/GH/s)  :

http://www.spondoolies-tech.com/products/sp50

Sure would be nice to have smaller miners with that kind of efficiency.

[sidehack]

Now don't tell nobody, but I'm talking with them about getting a few samples to play with. I was surprised but by no means unhappy to see they shifted to a smaller chip that's also stringable. If I'm working the numbers right, it's around 20W which puts it more in the A1 range than the 10W Bitmain chips we're used to, but the package should also cool more efficiently. Posted specs indicate it's a bump die of some kind, which will probably be more annoying to work with than something QFN (for routing, which depends on the actual pinout), but not nearly as bad as a big fat BGA like the Rockerbox was, or like SFARDS and 21e6 are using. All in all it's a pretty encouraging part.

[Mudbankkeith]

133Gh per chip

A 4amp 20w stick miner?  in time for santa's flypast?

[VirosaGITS]

133Gh per chip

A 4amp 20w stick miner?  in time for santa's flypast?

That sound pretty crazy, at 0.15 10w would be about 65GH. Maybe you could do 20w with proper cooling.

It doesn't sound very doable in term of powering and cooling it efficiently for a USB stick, maybe for a pod design where you have a couple of chips and you cool it off with a CPU heatsink?

[sidehack]

That's gonna depend on a lot of things coming together in a short amount of time. It took a lot longer to get the Compac ready than it probably should have, but a lot of that lost time was power issues. The buck design right now is pretty solid and wouldn't take much tweaking to power that chip at least moderately well - probably not all the way to the top, since that's close to a 40A draw and I really don't want to see that handled with a single phase. I could see 10W delivered to the chip, which would probably be about a 12W overall for the stick - for reference, we've pushed Compacs up to 15W input power but that was at a higher Vcore so the core current was lower and that's the real limiting factor for a regulator design.

Any dev this time would be much more heavily focused on software. I don't know a thing about Spondoolies' protocol except that it's both nonstandard and complex. Their rack gear uses an FPGA to translate between the controller and the chips, but Technobit implemented it in a micro on some of their Rockerbox things last year so I know that's possible. I'm sure it'd take a lot longer for Novak to figure out the code than it'll take for me to redesign the hardware for a stick.

There's still a whole lot of questions up in the air. All I'll say is it's not impossible.

I've been rolling the idea of a 4-chip CPU cooler pod for a couple days and so far I'm liking it. There's a few different options for how to flesh it out, so until we crunch the numbers on the best base design I won't know anything for sure. Again, it's not impossible.

If Spondoolies cooperates with sample chips (and they've historically been better at that than probably everyone except ASICMiner, may they rest in peace) the only real limiting factor will be dev capital. We've got a plan to free up dev time in the next few weeks, but having time doesn't always mean having money. All our income is based on sales, right now that's between Compac sticks and PSU hardware. Hosting is basically a breakeven concern and mining revenue accounts for maybe a hundred bucks a month. We run a tight ship and can operate pretty lean compared to a lot of shops, but the level of leanness we're running right now isn't really sustainable.

[Mudbankkeith]

I tried one of these on a stick last year
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/vdgpz6m9d45z2cg/2013-12-21%2021.56.26.jpg?dl=0]

[VirosaGITS]

That's gonna depend on a lot of things coming together in a short amount of time. It took a lot longer to get the Compac ready than it probably should have, but a lot of that lost time was power issues. The buck design right now is pretty solid and wouldn't take much tweaking to power that chip at least moderately well - probably not all the way to the top, since that's close to a 40A draw and I really don't want to see that handled with a single phase. I could see 10W delivered to the chip, which would probably be about a 12W overall for the stick - for reference, we've pushed Compacs up to 15W input power but that was at a higher Vcore so the core current was lower and that's the real limiting factor for a regulator design.

Any dev this time would be much more heavily focused on software. I don't know a thing about Spondoolies' protocol except that it's both nonstandard and complex. Their rack gear uses an FPGA to translate between the controller and the chips, but Technobit implemented it in a micro on some of their Rockerbox things last year so I know that's possible. I'm sure it'd take a lot longer for Novak to figure out the code than it'll take for me to redesign the hardware for a stick.

There's still a whole lot of questions up in the air. All I'll say is it's not impossible.

I've been rolling the idea of a 4-chip CPU cooler pod for a couple days and so far I'm liking it. There's a few different options for how to flesh it out, so until we crunch the numbers on the best base design I won't know anything for sure. Again, it's not impossible.

If Spondoolies cooperates with sample chips (and they've historically been better at that than probably everyone except ASICMiner, may they rest in peace) the only real limiting factor will be dev capital. We've got a plan to free up dev time in the next few weeks, but having time doesn't always mean having money. All our income is based on sales, right now that's between Compac sticks and PSU hardware. Hosting is basically a breakeven concern and mining revenue accounts for maybe a hundred bucks a month. We run a tight ship and can operate pretty lean compared to a lot of shops, but the level of leanness we're running right now isn't really sustainable.

Thank you for the update sidehack, if its just funding, maybe we can come up with someone community funded, ala kickstarted but less vaporware. Personally i'd be willing to buy in early with what i can and i'm sure i'm not the only one who would crowdfund you.

If the $/GH on the sticks were good i would totally buy tons of them to help you out but thats not doable, so i think there could be a lot of interest in something around or under 0.2$/GH.

If you come up with a plan for such PCB's (upgrade for S1/S3 path) or a pod/cpuheatsink-cooled that is concurrent, i think you would do great, considering how many people throw money at vaporware pre-order.

[philipma1957]

133Gh per chip

A 4amp 20w stick miner?  in time for santa's flypast?

well maybe on the under volt down clock method 2 amps 10 watts  and you get 60gh per stick


I can do 2 amps easy on my hubs  up to 8 sticks per hub  so I would really like these for sticks

[sidehack]

$0.2/GH is going to be hard to hit, I think. The best thing going right now is the S7 and that sells at what, about 38 cents per? I know prices are going to drop as more stuff appears, and I'll do the best I can but twenty cents is a hard target. That's about what a year-old S3 is selling for right now.

The $/GH on the stick, I've said it before and I'll say it again it's the best ever $/GH for a stick miner and I can't make it any cheaper. I know you're not complaining, but I'll reiterate the fact regardless. Something like a pod with about eight times the hashrate and only three times the price, I'd like to see that get going but my guys tell me it wouldn't sell either. I just have to wait and hope SPTech can come through for us with chips and I can do something good with 'em, and in the meantime keep selling Compacs and PSUs.

Regarding something community-funded, I do believe one of Kickstarter's rules for a hardware project is you have to have a working prototype before running the campaign. They'll fund manufacture but not development. I like that rule, and we try to run the same way. The first step on the path to BFL is conning someone else into funding your development. Well the first step on the path to BFL is apparently hiring known scammers to run your business, but the second step is getting folks to fund your development.

I don't know about doing TypeZero boards and a pod concurrently. The pod would come first since I'd much rather have something small and less complex to work on as far as ironing out control systems and multi-chip comms. The only real difference between the pod and the full-scale board would be chip count and probably a beefier power system, but all the digitals would transfer straight across so there wouldn't be much time between a pod and the full-size boards. I can work on non-control parts of the big boards while waiting on prototype parts to assemble and test the small boards.

If I had the money from a single typical vaporware scam sale (not even the whole scam, just a single customer's purchase) I could probably afford dev for the entire project.

[VirosaGITS]

$0.2/GH is going to be hard to hit, I think. The best thing going right now is the S7 and that sells at what, about 38 cents per? I know prices are going to drop as more stuff appears, and I'll do the best I can but twenty cents is a hard target. That's about what a year-old S3 is selling for right now.

The $/GH on the stick, I've said it before and I'll say it again it's the best ever $/GH for a stick miner and I can't make it any cheaper. I know you're not complaining, but I'll reiterate the fact regardless. Something like a pod with about eight times the hashrate and only three times the price, I'd like to see that get going but my guys tell me it wouldn't sell either. I just have to wait and hope SPTech can come through for us with chips and I can do something good with 'em, and in the meantime keep selling Compacs and PSUs.

Regarding something community-funded, I do believe one of Kickstarter's rules for a hardware project is you have to have a working prototype before running the campaign. They'll fund manufacture but not development. I like that rule, and we try to run the same way. The first step on the path to BFL is conning someone else into funding your development. Well the first step on the path to BFL is apparently hiring known scammers to run your business, but the second step is getting folks to fund your development.

I don't know about doing TypeZero boards and a pod concurrently. The pod would come first since I'd much rather have something small and less complex to work on as far as ironing out control systems and multi-chip comms. The only real difference between the pod and the full-scale board would be chip count and probably a beefier power system, but all the digitals would transfer straight across so there wouldn't be much time between a pod and the full-size boards. I can work on non-control parts of the big boards while waiting on prototype parts to assemble and test the small boards.

If I had the money from a single typical vaporware scam sale (not even the whole scam, just a single customer's purchase) I could probably afford dev for the entire project.

I understand. The 0.2 target was calculated with S5/S5 chips. For instance 300$/1300gh=0.23$/gh and i figure by the time your project go from dev to production to hitting people's door, it would have to be a bit lower still.

Of course if you do it at 0.1-0.15 J/GH the price per GH would naturally have to be higher.

And i know the USB was a toy and i'm glad i got one, in the end it i paid 45$~ for one and it was to support the project and play with it.
But to put in more money it would have to be something closer to 0.2$/GH than 1-2$/GH, of course higher depending on the efficiency, but i was comparing it to the current stick's efficiency.

Basically whatever you build has to fill a niche that beat other's in that category, either it be noise or price at various efficiency. Anyways thats how i see it. And thats why i got one stick, since it beat all other sticks at awesomeness

[sidehack]

Right now I'm more likely to get SPTech chips than I am BM1384, and given they're not talking to me about BM1385 either I doubt that'll happen. If I come out with anything it'll be new chips from someone and be capable of operating in the 0.15-0.25W/GH neighborhood. I'm not competing with the S5 - it's old news. I won't, and can't, compete with used hardware prices on new hardware with new chips a year old. If Bitmain and SP stay in the 80dB consumer and 17000W industrial products, it seems likely the "niche market" of people who want to be able to run miners like they've had access to for the two and a half years before right now will be wide open.

[Mudbankkeith]

4 Spondoolies chips will show maybe 500Gh.   That would be quite a mean little pod.
While 8 giving 1000+ would be a kick in the pants to Bit(stingy)main. Especially if it (and 3 brothers) would mount on a redundant S1/S3 chassis with a Pi(crust) on top.