GekkoScience BM1384 Project Development Discussion

[valkir]

Awesome! If you need more tester let me know. Im in Canada but I could probably paid the shipping!

Hope you will eat a good sandwich with the btc I send 

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[chiguireitor]

I'm gonna try and finish the breakout PCB tonight. Lost all day yesterday for a 21-hour drive to fetch PSUs, we got orders to make you know. Tomorrow will be all manufacturing so what I don't get done today will probably not get looked at until Thursday or so. I want to get a head start on the stickminer PCB so I can get an idea of heatsinking and send some specs to a manufacturer to get some samples run out.

I may post the breakout PCB when it's done. It won't be tested until we get prototypes populated and played with, so mostly it's just a proof of hey we're doing something to earn that sandwich money.

BTW, how did you get the chips? how much did it cost? and the shipping?

[philipma1957]

The "Hammer debate" was never whether a USB stick would be made with BM1384 XOR Hammer. It was whether, in addition to a BM1384 stick, should we ALSO dev a Hammer stick. Not necessarily because it's objectively comparable for power use or hashrate, but because market variety is a good thing and who knows it might be cheaper or more fun.

Please explain "3 x   2 chip sticks". Are you expecting a two-chip BM1384 stick? Because that's not going to happen unless you have some 1.5A-per-socket USB hubs. Though it might be fun to work up a secondary design that uses two chips string'd under a higher voltage of the same buck circuit; it'll cost more, but honestly not a lot more since 80% of the parts wouldn't change and the only added BOM would be the second ASIC, level-shifting components and a bigger heatsink. It'd certainly be overkill since the two chips could be cranked up to about 40GH and drink 20W, but a 5W 16GH stick might be fun to play with for folks with beefy hubs. Dangit that's so cool. Dangit Phil. Stop making me think about awesome stuff and adding to my workload.

those stud hubs are .9 amp but I have 3 bridges that bridge 2 ports giving me 1.8amps

photo soon

[adaseb]

Yes wondering what you paid for those chips.

Currently you can buy the Minion chips for $20 but need to order half a million dollars worth

http://www.blackarrowsoftware.com/store/minion-asic-manufacture.html


They are each 120Gh/s

[philipma1957]

Yes wondering what you paid for those chips.

Currently you can buy the Minion chips for $20 but need to order half a million dollars worth

http://www.blackarrowsoftware.com/store/minion-asic-manufacture.html


They are each 120Gh/s

and they are not very good for power anymore.

[valkir]

Hey philipma1957 where did you get these bridge?? I have the same hub and will be curious to try these bridge. 

[sidehack]

Minions are also BGA and require ~100A VRMs. We very likely will never design a miner around that type chip (which appears to rule out Spondoolies' gen3 chip) because it makes literally every step of the process unnecessarily complex. Complexity means added cost and also increases the odds of machine failure.

[philipma1957]

Hey philipma1957 where did you get these bridge?? I have the same hub and will be curious to try these bridge.  

I need to go back through a lot of pm's to find it. I will look to see maybe


 klintay ?


I checked here does not look like it was him.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=418087.0;all


maybe this instead?


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=418087.msg10125710#msg10125710

[ManeBjorn]

I got those bridges from ASICRunner.
He has lots of different things to get the most out of USB miners.
https://www.asicrunner.com/

Hey philipma1957 where did you get these bridge?? I have the same hub and will be curious to try these bridge. 

I need to go back through a lot of pm's to find it. I will look to see maybe


 klintay ?

[philipma1957]

I got those bridges from ASICRunner.
He has lots of different things to get the most out of USB miners.
https://www.asicrunner.com/

Hey philipma1957 where did you get these bridge?? I have the same hub and will be curious to try these bridge. 

I need to go back through a lot of pm's to find it. I will look to see maybe


 klintay ?

this looks very interesting

https://www.asicrunner.com/5V-USB-Power-Injector_p_14.html

[hurricandave]

Eyeboot used to sell those bridges but it appears he just has the dippo hubs and 49 port hubs at the moment.
http://www.eyeboot.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=68

[Unacceptable]

Yes wondering what you paid for those chips.

Currently you can buy the Minion chips for $20 but need to order half a million dollars worth

http://www.blackarrowsoftware.com/store/minion-asic-manufacture.html


They are each 120Gh/s

and they are not very good for power anymore.

High failure rate too if I am not mistaken.

Also,IF YOU EVER GET THEM   

Forget BlackArrow   

[adaseb]

Instead of building USB Miners why won't you build something like this.

Put the most chips you can on one board, since its lower power it probably won't start a fire like the Prisma. I can see it running at 5-6Th/s and using only 1000Watts.

[Bicknellski]

Yes wondering what you paid for those chips.

Currently you can buy the Minion chips for $20 but need to order half a million dollars worth

http://www.blackarrowsoftware.com/store/minion-asic-manufacture.html


They are each 120Gh/s

and they are not very good for power anymore.

High failure rate too if I am not mistaken.

Also,IF YOU EVER GET THEM    

Forget BlackArrow    

We never received the samples they promised even after giving them a heads up on some design errors in the chip and that was before the shit hit the fan with them. Best to avoid anyone with a history of screwing over the community.

The USB gekko is building is stepping stone I think to something a tad bigger.

Question is if the chips continue down the Spondoolies like path there would be no "simplicity" left since all future chips would be geared to a larger more powerful board. So that dead ends this project unless you are willing to adapt to those types of chips. No one is going to be able to compete (those who would be willing to sell chips) with Spondoolies if the trend continues as they seem to be ahead since they have the team. It is doubtful that a new Avalon or Bitmain chip will be able to compete given the claims of Spondoolies next chip. Meaning this is probably the last chip iteration from Avalon and Bitmain will definitely be very careful not to finance a losing chip.

Which likely means you have about less than a year to build on the chips that exist.

[AJRGale]

Instead of building USB Miners why won't you build something like this.

Put the most chips you can on one board, since its lower power it probably won't start a fire like the Prisma. I can see it running at 5-6Th/s and using only 1000Watts.

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/20141022_211933-1200x520.jpg

yes, $1000 mining hardware, where as someone like me looks for 10 times Less on the cost, i don't have thousands to throw at a few hundred chips on a board or 4.

i want to see miners back in the hands of the "hobbyist miners". if not, lets all "Cloud mine" off one or two companies with 100PH/s, that will centralise the Bitcoin protocol.

If i can get 100Mh/s (ehem, i meant GH/s) for $50-100 Shipped to me, im good with that.

[kilo17]

I love this thread, probably the most interesting on the forum right now.

I am working on a project as well, although my expertise is not in designing but it brings up important questions.  I have dealt with cooling as a hobby for a long time, DI and N2 setups.  I am in talks with Spondoolies about getting some chips for a project with a little different concept.  I also want to increase headroom by down clocking the chips but in a large format - i am planning on putting emphasis on the cooling aspect to allow the system to be clocked for maximum efficiency. 

The reason I am using a large number of chips is to offset the cooling costs. 

Couple of pics of Overclocking an old school C2D to over 5000 Mh with a locked multiplier using a little DI

[sidehack]

Instead of building USB Miners why won't you build something like this.

Put the most chips you can on one board, since its lower power it probably won't start a fire like the Prisma. I can see it running at 5-6Th/s and using only 1000Watts.

Please RTFT before asking questions that have already been answered all over the place.

FROM POST #1:

The primary goal is to build a simple board which would be USB-connected to a controller, and capable of adjusting both core voltages and clock speeds using cgminer flags. We're looking at a single board capable of 300GH at 150W, downclockable to around 150GH 50W. At mid- or low-range settings it could be run off a brick with a quiet 120mm fan and heatsink and be a decen Jalapeno-formfactor home desk miner. The board will be designed specifically so that four of them would mount to an S1 chassis. Couple that with a 4-port USB hub and a Pi or something as the controller, and you have an "S1 Upgrade Kit" which will aim for 1.3TH at 600W clockable down to 600GH about 160W.
...
A secondary goal would be to design another board which could mount to a Prisma chassis. Modifying our design to a similar power density as a Prisma (1KW board-level) we could see a 2.4GH miner downclockable to about 1.1TH at 300W.

Regarding large-form chips, Spondoolies is the only company that's actually had good luck with 'em. Everyone else (well, I guess except KFC sorta) has pretty much crashed and burned. ASICMiner, Bitmain, Avalon all did quite well with small distributed chips instead of single giant chips. I'm hoping most outfits keep doing things that way, as it reduces complexity, increases modularity and flexibility and decreases requirements for cooling and power density. So basically, from where I'm sitting it looks pretty stupid to keep using that chip type. I like to think our design is the best design and our design is approximately impossible with giant chips.

[novak@gekkoscience]

Question is if the chips continue down the Spondoolies like path there would be no "simplicity" left since all future chips would be geared to a larger more powerful board. So that dead ends this project unless you are willing to adapt to those types of chips. No one is going to be able to compete (those who would be willing to sell chips) with Spondoolies if the trend continues as they seem to be ahead since they have the team. It is doubtful that a new Avalon or Bitmain chip will be able to compete given the claims of Spondoolies next chip. Meaning this is probably the last chip iteration from Avalon and Bitmain will definitely be very careful not to finance a losing chip.

Which likely means you have about less than a year to build on the chips that exist.

Entirely possible, but I think maybe a little more unlikely than you make it out to be.  Spondoolies is doing very well right now but several of their design decisions really up the price on any design using their chips.  Sure, right now they're cleaning house with their rockerbox stuff stacking up well against an S5 (if not really the BM1384), and everyone loves them as their support is second to none- but the required components on a Spondoolies miner besides the chips are typically more expensive than a design which uses smaller chips with standard protocols (basically all other companies).

We'll have to see if they continue killing off the competition, I can't imagine that they have lower parts cost per hashrate.  Then again, the quality support they provide goes a long way.

--
novak

[novak@gekkoscience]

KFC

All of the bonus points for that "typo."

--
novak

[kilo17]

I understand that the components to support the Rockerbox are more expensive but the number of components to support a bunch of smaller chips may offset it.  I was wondering if you have done a comparison in that manner.