GekkoScience BM1384 Project Development Discussion

[sidehack]

If someone in Europe wanted to license the design and manufacture it themselves, sure. But anything with our logo on it will be Made in USA (specifically, Missouri). Keeping things local - within our own oversight at least - also means quality control. We can't make sure that someone 8000 miles away is doing things right all the time.

Girlfriend? Wife? Obviously you don't spend enough time working on awesome stuff if you have time for friends and things better than friends.

[AJRGale]

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

I sure hope you meant 100Gh/s

nah! i meant KH/s !!!

[goodney]

Snazzy board. What regulator controller are you using? I haven't really found one with the features I want but I can work around what I got.

TI TPS51363.

[Biffa]

I understand what you are saying and it is perfectly fair, but I said "why not also manufacture in Europe or China"

If you can't sell into Europe or elsewhere because of taxes or delivery charges then you lose nothing by also manufacturing elsewhere.

However, I applaud what you are doing.  Bitmain's U3 device used items that the home miner could easily source for themselves making it uneconomic to ship.  Do what you do best of all.

Delivery costs from the US shouldn't be too bad. What happens in Europe is you get hit with VAT as there isn't any duty.

But its a misnomer to think you can get miners "Tax Free" by assembly or manufacture in Europe, whoever sells it still has to charge VAT on top.

[Unacceptable]

As long as the United States still has people that need jobs, we will never outsource manufacture to a different country.

Wow  

Could you contact GE & several other large corporations & get them to see things that way  

This thread brings back awesome memories of summer of 2013,when 1000's of us got involved with the Avalon Group Buys 

Let's hope it dosen't turn out like them...due to Bitmain chips being late or not delivered 

At least we don't have "preorder" money on the line!! Thanks sidehack!! Best of luck man!! 

[sidehack]

Yeah, funny you should mention... My contact at Bitmain hasn't gotten me any good info about getting chips, but recommended I wait until their next-gen chip is available but I won't get any info about designing with it until it's released so when you factor in dev and prototype time I wouldn't have a working board to test until probably August, so sellable machines about September. I'm gonna see if I can find someone higher on the food chain to talk to.

I um... I did get ahold of Canaan-Creative and they'll probably have a new chip out about the same time, maybe sooner. So if they're any more reasonable about getting datasheets and samples I might switch it up.

[Spotswood]

Please add 4x mounting holes at the corners of the board.   

[dunand]

I want to cool them with a waterblock instead of a heatsink.

[pekatete]

Yeah, funny you should mention... My contact at Bitmain hasn't gotten me any good info about getting chips, but recommended I wait until their next-gen chip is available but I won't get any info about designing with it until it's released so when you factor in dev and prototype time I wouldn't have a working board to test until probably August, so sellable machines about September. I'm gonna see if I can find someone higher on the food chain to talk to.

Thats what I call being strung up properly! I suppose a lesson for all, not everyone that passes off as a bitmain representative is anything like they'd want you to believe, but then again, that is the art of passing off.

[daddyfatsax]

I want to cool them with a waterblock instead of a heatsink.

Please no more watercooled miners. I loved my Habaneros, but dealing with a cooling loop is a little much at times.

[sidehack]

Please add 4x mounting holes at the corners of the board.   

You mean like the holes that are already going to be there?

I want to cool them with a waterblock instead of a heatsink.

Okay, strap 'em on a C1 waterblock.

[sidehack]

I'm emailing Janet. Several folks told me I should go straight to Yoshi so I'll look into that.

[sidehack]

Are you talking Bitmain or Avalon? The guy talking from Avalon is xiangfu

[sidehack]

Yeah, I know Marto is the Technobit guy. I've not seen a Technobit product that had Bitmain chips on it. I have not actually seen any Technobit products personally, though we were supposed to have about 50 boards for hosting last August. I'd just as soon not do business with Technobit if I don't have to. I don't trust them at all.

[sidehack]

Yeah, using a CPU cooler makes zero sense for the chip style that everyone except Spondoolies uses. We likely won't be building any boards conducive to CPU coolers anytime soon.

[novak@gekkoscience]

Yeah, using a CPU cooler makes zero sense for the chip style that everyone except Spondoolies uses. We likely won't be building any boards conducive to CPU coolers anytime soon.

So what would the plan for the Blackarrow chips be? Underclock the hell out of them and use a lot? That's the only thing I could think of.

Probably to not use them.  They are obsolete and made by scammers.  I think when sidehack said "except spondoolies," he meant current gear.  There are a few larger chips like KNC from the past.

--
novak

[sidehack]

Please RTFT before asking questions which have already been answered.

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.

We have never expressed any interest in working with BlackArrow chips, anywhere, at all.

[sidehack]

I never said BlackArrow. I said Bitmain and Canaan-Creative (Avalon). You couldn't pay us enough to work with BlackArrow hardware at this point.

[sidehack]

So, looks like we'll be able to at least get a short run of about 1000 chips from Bitmain. The price is higher than I was hoping but still in the neighborhood of "reasonable" for a stick miner - which most of them will go on. We'll keep some for building probably ten TypeZero boards so we can send them out to some reputable tester/reviewers, and then have about 800 chips to put between one- and two-chip USB sticks. I've looked back over and verified all the breakout board PCB, so hopefully we'll be ordering a prototype batch of them today and have them in hand probably end of next week. Between now and then I'll run out a tentative stickminer PCB and get dimensions to heatsink people. Once the breakouts are populated and tested, we can finalize our stickminer design (having had a chance to find any problems with how we understand things to work) and get some test PCBs of them, and then finalize the TypeZero board and get test PCBs of it as well. We're probably looking at having stickminer prototypes in 3 weeks would be nice, but 4 is more likely.

So, question. If it's going to be about 5 weeks before we have a prototype TypeZero board, even if we ordered a bulk run of chips at that time (with 2 month leadtime before delivery) it'd be about 3.5 months before we had chips and boards in hand to start building. That puts us right around the time Bitmain will be announcing the next better chip. Would anyone buy the TypeZero Spec 1 board with BM1384 chips, or would we end up sitting on them and going broke? As soon as information is available for the new chip we can start designing for it instead, but we wouldn't have access to samples and prototype PCBs until later and it'd shift product availability back to maybe September instead of July.

[MrTeal]

So, looks like we'll be able to at least get a short run of about 1000 chips from Bitmain. The price is higher than I was hoping but still in the neighborhood of "reasonable" for a stick miner - which most of them will go on. We'll keep some for building probably ten TypeZero boards so we can send them out to some reputable tester/reviewers, and then have about 800 chips to put between one- and two-chip USB sticks. I've looked back over and verified all the breakout board PCB, so hopefully we'll be ordering a prototype batch of them today and have them in hand probably end of next week. Between now and then I'll run out a tentative stickminer PCB and get dimensions to heatsink people. Once the breakouts are populated and tested, we can finalize our stickminer design (having had a chance to find any problems with how we understand things to work) and get some test PCBs of them, and then finalize the TypeZero board and get test PCBs of it as well. We're probably looking at having stickminer prototypes in 3 weeks would be nice, but 4 is more likely.

So, question. If it's going to be about 5 weeks before we have a prototype TypeZero board, even if we ordered a bulk run of chips at that time (with 2 month leadtime before delivery) it'd be about 3.5 months before we had chips and boards in hand to start building. That puts us right around the time Bitmain will be announcing the next better chip. Would anyone buy the TypeZero Spec 1 board with BM1384 chips, or would we end up sitting on them and going broke? As soon as information is available for the new chip we can start designing for it instead, but we wouldn't have access to samples and prototype PCBs until later and it'd shift product availability back to maybe September instead of July.

Have they given any indication that the new chip will have the same package and pinout as the existing chip?