GekkoScience BM1384 Project Development Discussion

[sidehack]

None of the above. We're not selling breakout boards, nor have we ever stated an intent to do so. We're making them for in-house use for testing and prototyping. If enough folks are interested in playing with BM1384 themselves, and if the boards work as intended, I can release the design files so folks can make their own.

We will not be selling breakout boards. We will not be selling chips. We will be selling complete miners only. I'm just keeping people updated on progress, since this is a project discussion thread.

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[notlist3d]

None of the above. We're not selling breakout boards, nor have we ever stated an intent to do so. We're making them for in-house use for testing and prototyping. If enough folks are interested in playing with BM1384 themselves, and if the boards work as intended, I can release the design files so folks can make their own.

We will not be selling breakout boards. We will not be selling chips. We will be selling complete miners only. I'm just keeping people updated on progress, since this is a project discussion thread.

Thank you for doing this.  I know you don't have to.  But as a bitcoin miner it is neat to see this project develop.

[chiguireitor]

None of the above. We're not selling breakout boards, nor have we ever stated an intent to do so. We're making them for in-house use for testing and prototyping. If enough folks are interested in playing with BM1384 themselves, and if the boards work as intended, I can release the design files so folks can make their own.

We will not be selling breakout boards. We will not be selling chips. We will be selling complete miners only. I'm just keeping people updated on progress, since this is a project discussion thread.

Ok got it  i'll be back to my corner in silence and watching you plug away at this 

[sidehack]

It's quitting time now, but I was just looking at ~8A buck chips for those crazy people that want to crank their stickminers up to 5W output (or more). We sent off for the breakout board PCBs and I expect to have them in hand hopefully end of next week; I want to have an initial stickminer PCB already done by then. I probably won't get any work done on this tomorrow on account of I'm way behind on a router setup I owe a guy, and maintenance on our own hosting network.

Also, tentative stickminer model names are Compac (single chip) and Amita (two-chip). Likely we'll shoot for a green heatsink, top-mounted if possible.

[valkir]

Great job! Let me know when you have some feedback from bitmain.

Can wait to see the real proto board. 

[sidehack]

Okay, guess I should clarify (by repeating a few oft-repeated points). We will be selling complete and fully functional stick miners, and also miner boards which will require cooling and power. The initial board will be designed to run standalone if you have a heatsink and fan for it (we might look into sourcing some of those if there's enough interest) or strapped four at a time onto an S1/S3 chassis. I don't care what fans you use.
A stretch goal would be making boards designed to fit on a Prisma chassis. These could also be dropped in a 3U case with appropriate heatsinking and make a 5TH 2KW miner adjustable down to 2TH 600W or so, if someone was into that sort of thing. I still don't really care what fans you use for it. Initially we're only really worried about making the boards functional.

[Biodom]

Okay, guess I should clarify (by repeating a few oft-repeated points). We will be selling complete and fully functional stick miners, and also miner boards which will require cooling and power. The initial board will be designed to run standalone if you have a heatsink and fan for it (we might look into sourcing some of those if there's enough interest) or strapped four at a time onto an S1/S3 chassis. I don't care what fans you use.
A stretch goal would be making boards designed to fit on a Prisma chassis. These could also be dropped in a 3U case with appropriate heatsinking and make a 5TH 2KW miner adjustable down to 2TH 600W or so, if someone was into that sort of thing. I still don't really care what fans you use for it. Initially we're only really worried about making the boards functional.

Thanks. yeah, that's clearer...complete boards, not finished miners, although who has those s1/s3 chassis? not me, but i guess some people still have them and/or could purchase.
EDIT: The point being that you will probably sell much more fully assembled and functional miners, but i get it.

[sidehack]

Everyone who ever bought an S1 or S3 and didn't resell it or throw it away. I've got about 15 running around the shop. Or you could fetch one for about $30 and refit it.

[Unacceptable]

Okay, guess I should clarify (by repeating a few oft-repeated points). We will be selling complete and fully functional stick miners, and also miner boards which will require cooling and power. The initial board will be designed to run standalone if you have a heatsink and fan for it (we might look into sourcing some of those if there's enough interest) or strapped four at a time onto an S1/S3 chassis. I don't care what fans you use.
A stretch goal would be making boards designed to fit on a Prisma chassis. These could also be dropped in a 3U case with appropriate heatsinking and make a 5TH 2KW miner adjustable down to 2TH 600W or so, if someone was into that sort of thing. I still don't really care what fans you use for it. Initially we're only really worried about making the boards functional.

Thanks. yeah, that's clearer...complete boards, not finished miners, although who has those s1/s3 chassis? not me, but i guess some people still have them and/or could purchase.

Ebay has a bunch of S1 for like $20 + shipping 

[chiguireitor]

You could also splash those sticks on an oil tank and call it a day 

[sidehack]

The TypeZero boards will be just about right sized for a 120mm fan, if you screw one down to a square heatsink and mount a fan blowing into it it could be a decent quiet machine. Or you could dump them in an oil tank, yes.

[daddyfatsax]

Luckily I have a bunch of S3's laying around. Nice work!

[philipma1957]

Everyone who ever bought an S1 or S3 and didn't resell it or throw it away. I've got about 15 running around the shop. Or you could fetch one for about $30 and refit it.

I am still running 2 s-3's in my friends office.  he has limited power of 2.4cents a kwatt.

your gear would make for a perfect upgrade for the two of them.

[klondike_bar]

Everyone who ever bought an S1 or S3 and didn't resell it or throw it away. I've got about 15 running around the shop. Or you could fetch one for about $30 and refit it.

I am still running 2 s-3's in my friends office.  he has limited power of 2.4cents a kwatt.

your gear would make for a perfect upgrade for the two of them.

at the cost you pay for electricity, why would you upgrade an S3? its probably churning out a decent profit at ~0.8w/GH

I have about 6 empty S1 frames (i run the boards undervolted without heatsinks to save space) that id love to make use of though

[philipma1957]

Everyone who ever bought an S1 or S3 and didn't resell it or throw it away. I've got about 15 running around the shop. Or you could fetch one for about $30 and refit it.

I am still running 2 s-3's in my friends office.  he has limited power of 2.4cents a kwatt.

your gear would make for a perfect upgrade for the two of them.

at the cost you pay for electricity, why would you upgrade an S3? its probably churning out a decent profit at ~0.8w/GH

I have about 6 empty S1 frames (i run the boards undervolted without heatsinks to save space) that id love to make use of though

It is those two still make money but down the road an upgrade to these would make sense.

Or I may move 2 avalon 4.1 's to his place and run the upgraded s-3's  in my house in the summer.

It all depends on prices. 

[Driveon]

We likely will be building one- and two-chip stickminers. They're great for learning, which is one reason we want to make even the USB sticks with adjustable clock and voltage. Noobs can learn the basics of pools and wallets and cgminer CLI and even a bit of hardware tweaking for $20 instead of having to buy a $400 machine.

Sure it makes no financial sense to buy a stick miner if all you're looking at is the bottom line profitability. But not everyone looks only at the bottom line profitability - myself included. I made more coin from learning about the hardware itself and using that knowledge for repairs and upgrades than I ever made mining. Some folks just want a first-tier tool to play with and try to understand how a thing works before going big. Why tear down a Corvette to learn about engines when you can take apart a lawn mower first?

Hi, would be interested in one or two of the two-chip stickminers   To play with and fund the Boards.

Question will people that purchase the sticks get first dibs for boards since I would guess first run would be limited?  Not trying to cause any issues just asking. 

Also, are you saying with current chips and all things going smoothly you might have a first batch of Zero Boards by mid June or July?

[sidehack]

I'm not sure yet how we're going to want to do sales for TypeZero boards. We'll figure it out once we're closer to having a working prototype board.

One option, since I have had a few messages from people wanting potentially a hundred or more boards, would be to have a back-room preorder for large buyers and use overhead from that to buy a larger-than-required batch of everything so we have plenty of in-hand boards to sell direct to non-preordered regular consumers. We'd stage manufacture, probably on a 60/40 basis or so, which is to say for every 100 boards made, 60 would go to the next large preorder customer in line and 40 would go to consumer sales (whether direct sales incoming or if we have a small-customer preorder queue as well). This makes sure that everyone gets products in a relatively timely manner, shifting the priority slightly in favor of the people that put up large sums to help the project happen at all but not sticking it to the regular folks and making them wait until all the high rollers are fed first. All customers would be serviced in the order purchases were made, probably not taking in orders before a specific date to be announced once we actually know what we can do. That's pretty much the same way we did our initial server PSU board sales and it seemed to work okay.


A factory order of chips from Bitmain is enough for 5500 TypeZero boards (Spec1 S1-chassis boards; this number will change depending if we make a TypeZero Spec2 for the Prisma chassis and/or custom large units, which would run 30 chips per board instead of 18), which is quite a bit more than we'd planned on producing. But if the demand is there we can look into it. How big a batch we can run out will depend heavily on interest from the community, but even more so on chip availability from Bitmain. Right now I know nothing past we can get exactly 1000 chips for stick miners. Everything else is up in the air.

[Driveon]

Thanks for answering so quick.

Glad you are trying to be as fair as possible with both big and little guys. 

Another question, about how many Zero boards would a Pi be able to control and would it be able to control both the Zero boards and the Stickminers or separate Pi's for each?  My first thoughts are both would work but with the Pi controlling fans it would be best to keep separate.  But I know nothing about this, I understand that you might have to do testing before you might know.  But just want to get the question out there. 

[novak@gekkoscience]

Thanks for answering so quick.

Glad you are trying to be as fair as possible with both big and little guys. 

Another question, about how many Zero boards would a Pi be able to control and would it be able to control both the Zero boards and the Stickminers or separate Pi's for each?  My first thoughts are both would work but with the Pi controlling fans it would be best to keep separate.  But I know nothing about this, I understand that you might have to do testing before you might know.  But just want to get the question out there. 

Probably fan control will be on the board, done by a microcontroller also performing temperature measurement.  Additionally our board should be capable of being controlled by any USB cgminer so the only limitation on driving miners is going to be the Pi's buggy USB stack.  You could certainly have multiple miners per Pi but you may not be able to run more than about 10 or 20 reliably.

--
novak

[sidehack]

The short answer is, hopefully a single controller/cgminer instance would have no trouble handling both boards at once and several of each - but at this point I have exactly zero certainty until we have both hardware and software to test with (which we have neither right now).

Or, you know... what Novak said.