GekkoScience BM1384 Project Development Discussion

[TheRealSteve]

And that my fellow miners is the ONLY way to make profit in btcland, ripoff all the miners w/ a new project to drool over.

I'll happily send a few bucks toward people who are still enthusiastic, are reputable, and have the technical knowledge (and if they get stuck, there's plenty around that'll help) to make something that - contrary to your statement - some people do want.

We tend to lean pretty heavily on the Bacon Texas Cheesesteak Melt from Waffle House.

Two on their way

[1713527416]

1713527416

[Bicknellski]

Good luck.

Be willing to buy a few for our school project on mining.

[goodney]

We ended up buying some sample BM1384 from Bitmain and the chips arrived on Monday, so now we can start playing with them.

Sidehack:

How did you go about buying the samples? Did you contact Bitmain directly? They don't seem to sell samples online.

How many did you buy? I'd buy a few off you if you don't need all of them.

-a[g

[sidehack]

I asked Dogie, and he got me an email address and I asked them for samples and they gave me a price. I bought 40, and we'll probably end up using all of them.

[Gladimor]

Are you looking for investors in this project?

[sidehack]

That depends on how you define "investor". We won't take anything except sandwiches until basically all the design work is finished and we're ready to line up production. At that point, we'll probably have to bring in outside money to run out an initial batch but the assumption is folks putting in money will want boards in return.

[Bicknellski]

I asked Dogie, and he got me an email address and I asked them for samples and they gave me a price. I bought 40, and we'll probably end up using all of them.

I think we have some as well.

I will see if I can get the Engineer to send them to you as we are no longer working on our project. They were free samples I asked for but better they go to someone who can use them. USA to USA right?

[sidehack]

10 of our chips were free samples, but I wanted more to play with so we could get at least one full prototype out of it with extras to blow up accidentally.

To be more specific regarding investors or project donations or anything like that, we're deliberately not taking in outside money until the entire design is complete. For one, people tossing in outside money usually want to think their money buys them decision-making privileges and that's not how we operate. For two, if something goes wrong and we don't finish the project or by the time we finish the chips aren't available anymore or it'd cost too much to batch the boards, nobody except us gets screwed and we don't have to pay anyone back. For three, nobody should be asked to front someone else's dev costs. Isn't that the primary reason preorders suck? Because someone asks you to pay for a thing which doesn't exist and which they can't guarantee actually will? We deliberately do not do this. We've taken preorders before (our first batch of DPS2K boards were a preorder) but only after the design had been completed, and prototyped, and thoroughly tested on our own dime. That's the way it is and the way it's gonna be.
If we get in a real bind and we're really close to finished but unable to scrape up resources for a test PCB run or something, maybe MAYBE we'll ask for an advance. Or take it from the sandwich fund. But no big money until we're ready to manufacture.

[philipma1957]

10 of our chips were free samples, but I wanted more to play with so we could get at least one full prototype out of it with extras to blow up accidentally.

To be more specific regarding investors or project donations or anything like that, we're deliberately not taking in outside money until the entire design is complete. For one, people tossing in outside money usually want to think their money buys them decision-making privileges and that's not how we operate. For two, if something goes wrong and we don't finish the project or by the time we finish the chips aren't available anymore or it'd cost too much to batch the boards, nobody except us gets screwed and we don't have to pay anyone back. For three, nobody should be asked to front someone else's dev costs. Isn't that the primary reason preorders suck? Because someone asks you to pay for a thing which doesn't exist and which they can't guarantee actually will? We deliberately do not do this. We've taken preorders before (our first batch of DPS2K boards were a preorder) but only after the design had been completed, and prototyped, and thoroughly tested on our own dime. That's the way it is and the way it's gonna be.
If we get in a real bind and we're really close to finished but unable to scrape up resources for a test PCB run or something, maybe MAYBE we'll ask for an advance. Or take it from the sandwich fund. But no big money until we're ready to manufacture.

Good I like that,but if you need an ssd ,a mobo, some ram and hdd. 

A u-2 usb stick wires usb hubs   any general parts I will put them in a flat rate  box and ship them off.

[sidehack]

Right now what I really need is nine-day weeks. I literally have four different jobs to work on for four different people in the next six days, which will probably require about 50 hours in the shop and 20 hours on the road. On top of the two different in-house design projects I'm working on, as well as maintaining the hosting facility. I spent this evening laying out a gEDA footprint for the 37-pad BM1384, and hopefully tomorrow after batching out about 70 D750 boards I'll have time to start working up a breakout board PCB design for it. We'll have to get a few run out from a quick-turn fab house so Novak can start the particulars on chip comms while I work on regulation and maybe bust out a stickminer PCB as a refinement from the breakout board design.

If I do a stickminer we might just open-source it. I can gauge interest for a manufacturing batch if I can get good chip prices from Bitmain. Likely it'd use the same cgminer as the U1/U2. Voltage would be fixed probably at 0.65V or so, meaning a practical max of 10GH at around 3.1W hopefully for no more than about $20 each.
Heatsinking will be fun to figure out since the chip is a top-cooler.

I think we're good on computer parts and such for now, Phil. What we really need is more time. Or maybe a tech-literate sidekick to help out around the shop but doesn't expect to get paid.

[notlist3d]

10 of our chips were free samples, but I wanted more to play with so we could get at least one full prototype out of it with extras to blow up accidentally.

To be more specific regarding investors or project donations or anything like that, we're deliberately not taking in outside money until the entire design is complete. For one, people tossing in outside money usually want to think their money buys them decision-making privileges and that's not how we operate. For two, if something goes wrong and we don't finish the project or by the time we finish the chips aren't available anymore or it'd cost too much to batch the boards, nobody except us gets screwed and we don't have to pay anyone back. For three, nobody should be asked to front someone else's dev costs. Isn't that the primary reason preorders suck? Because someone asks you to pay for a thing which doesn't exist and which they can't guarantee actually will? We deliberately do not do this. We've taken preorders before (our first batch of DPS2K boards were a preorder) but only after the design had been completed, and prototyped, and thoroughly tested on our own dime. That's the way it is and the way it's gonna be.
If we get in a real bind and we're really close to finished but unable to scrape up resources for a test PCB run or something, maybe MAYBE we'll ask for an advance. Or take it from the sandwich fund. But no big money until we're ready to manufacture.

I highly respect what your doing.  Making a product with no pre-order and making it on your own dime is rare.  But definitely nice to see.

[sidehack]

It's what we've always done, and probably always will do. Likely we'll send prototype boards to a couple trusted members for "beta testing" as well, before taking in money.

[adaseb]

Out of curosity, I don't know if you are allowed to tell us or not but how much did you pay for the chips?

Reason being is that Bitmain likes to hike prices. Aren't you worried if you try and order 1000's of chips they might hike the prices because they will lose money to their competition?

[novak@gekkoscience]

Reason being is that Bitmain likes to hike prices. Aren't you worried if you try and order 1000's of chips they might hike the prices because they will lose money to their competition?

Of course, but the hope is that bitmain and us would both profit if they give us a good price- although chip prices will probably dominate the price of our design so we could be in trouble if they do hike prices.  Conceptually, even, our miner would be fairly novel so I can see that bitmain would be interested to see how it fares.  Absolute worst case, our design is pretty flexible so we could probably change chips.  I hate to say avalon but without the BE300 we would be pretty low on choices.  Bitfury might hopefully also be an option by then.

To those of you interested in running off of existing S1 controllers, that isn't terribly high on my priority list but I would be glad to provide documentation to anyone else who is trying to do it if you guys beat me to it.  Our goal is to make our miner versatile and useful to the community, not keep proprietary secrets.  Odds are we will be using the iccarus driver off of cgminer (sames as antminer U1,U2,U3) with different flags for our voltage and clock adjust.  I haven't compiled cgminer for the S1 controller but you shouldn't need much besides that (new, as of yet unwritten) driver on an S1-compatible cgminer to run our board.  If someone knows more about running/compiling cgminer on the S1 controller please chime in.

Also thanks to everyone who donated sandwiches or wished us luck, it's really great to see people excited about this.

--
novak

[valkir]

Nice! Really happy to see other project like Nanofury.

Im also curretnly looking with VS3 to build a good watt/gh miner with the A3222 chip from Avalon.

I will follow you for sure. And which you best luck on that project!

I will lokk with VS3 if he could help you.

Cheer

Valkir 

[novak@gekkoscience]

Nice! Really happy to see other project like Nanofury.

Im also curretnly looking with VS3 to build a good watt/gh miner with the A3222 chip from Avalon.

I will follow you for sure. And which you best luck on that project!

I will lokk with VS3 if he could help you.

Cheer

Valkir 

Also a good chip, though avalon is not my favorite people.  Out of curiosity what size of miner are you looking at?

--
novak

[valkir]

Check you pm! 

[Dexter770221]

...
we would be pretty low on choices.  Bitfury might hopefully also be an option by then.
...

Miners are no longer simple devices as they used to be. These days, electrical and physical design and construction may take months. Modern miner is a piece of art and a result of hard work of engineering teams. Because of its complexity and high power consumption mining equipment today requires a lot of technical support and oversight. We do not sell our chips to consumers, hence no datamaps, protocols descriptions or sample chips of our 28 nm ASIC will be available.

[sidehack]

Well. Screw those guys anyways.

[novak@gekkoscience]

Miners are no longer simple devices as they used to be.

... And whose fault is that, anyways?

--
novak