GekkoScience BM1384 Project Development Discussion

[sidehack]

If by "focus on the project" you mean "sleep in and play baseball", then you're mostly correct.

Friday I noticed that part of the speed issue I was seeing pool-side from the seriaL-board on the S5 controller was rejected shares. I had about 25% rejected, which accounted for the ~4GH (of ~16GH) missing poolside. So I swapped the paralleL-board onto the S5 to see if it was a hardware or software issue. I immediately started seeing 25% rejected shares, which snuck up to about 50% later in the day. Right now the ~17GH poolside is from the 50% non-duplicate shares on the USB controller and the 50% non-rejected shares on the S5 controller. One of these days we'll have software capable of doing something right, I promise!

Today I'm gonna test out some ideas for cleaning up the Compac regulator output. If we can get a functional design this week with a low-noise output prototyped I'll probably send off for proto PCBs end of the week. We'll have 'em in hand for testing a week or two later. I also should have some more heatsinks inbound, samples of the final version which I can attach to some Compacs if they work and get 'em out to my testers. I also have to focus on some hosting stuff at least one day this week, and actually next week I'm off for two days (yep, vacation - first one since Christmas week when I didn't come in to work for a couple days because of debilitating illness) so hopefully I can make progress before Friday. But the weather was really really nice all weekend and it felt like a waste to spend it working instead of out running around doing fun stuff since it's not like I get paid anyway.

Also, and I'll be honest, my weekend slacking was somewhat motivated by the knowledge that, even if I made progress, I had no means by which to report it.

[philipma1957]

well Slacking off can restore ones mind.  Playing a baseball  game can be fun.

[sidehack]

I started work today on an 18-chip board which should mount to one half of an S1 heatsink. It'll be designed to wire up to an external power source and controller. Basically it'll be used as a testbed for software, cooling and such. I'm going to be working on a better regulator for it than the stickminer uses, though to be honest the stickminer's so overbuilt that, with a better inductor and increased output caps, that thing could actually do it. Which is pretty sexy. But I can make one more efficient, and that's sorta the key, so I'm gonna try. The controller I'm eyeballing won't be as easy to adjust the output voltage as the one on the Compac, but that doesn't mean it'll be in any way hard. Just it won't be as easy. That buck driver (TPS51219 if anyone's wondering) is a pretty decent little part.

We also need to work on integrating fan speed, voltage control and temperature sensor into both hardware and software. That's gonna rely a lot more on Novak than the project has so far, but he's also got his own projects that I need to help with so we'll probably be trading back and forth a lot more in the coming weeks. I'm hoping to have the 18-chip base board ready to send off for proto PCB by Friday, but I also have to do some renovations in the hosting room before this weekend. The next couple days are going to be fun.

And one of these days I'll take the time to do some more experimenting on the Compac stick and see what needs to change to get the Vcore noise down. I have an idea or two I just need to get around to testing.

[SLEI]

I'm interested to uprate some of my undervolted S1s, summer has arrived and heat is not anymore needed.
Do You have a deal for big patch of chips?

[philipma1957]

I'm interested to uprate some of my undervolted S1s, summer has arrived and heat is not anymore needed.
Do You have a deal for big patch of chips?

be patient hold on to the s-1's and he will have the upgrade kit ready for you and me and a lot of other people.

[SLEI]

I'm interested to uprate some of my undervolted S1s, summer has arrived and heat is not anymore needed.
Do You have a deal for big patch of chips?

be patient hold on to the s-1's and he will have the upgrade kit ready for you and me and a lot of other people.

I haven't seen any post that chips are available and deal made of them?

I have two S5s from early batch and would like to have some more but price of miners + shipping + 24% sale tax ( +possible 3% import tax and low value of BTC) kills ROI totally.

[Mikestang]

I'm interested to uprate some of my undervolted S1s, summer has arrived and heat is not anymore needed.
Do You have a deal for big patch of chips?

be patient hold on to the s-1's and he will have the upgrade kit ready for you and me and a lot of other people.

I, for one, can't wait!  I recently turned my S1 off, it wasn't worth it to me any more to be running it even as a solo mining lottery ticket.  Can't wait to see what this upgrade will do for it!

[sidehack]

Me neither, and I really hope we can work stuff out for chips. Bitmain never responded to my last couple emails so I'll have to hit them up again soon. I also have about a dozen S1 that were undervolted last fall I finally turned off about a month ago. If I can get an 18-chip test board drawn up today will be a big step toward the TypeZero.

[philipma1957]

http://eligius.st/~wizkid057/newstats/userstats.php/1BURGERAXHH6Yi6LRybRJK7ybEm5m5HwTr


nice numbers above a stable 19 gh


 6 to   7 watts  for this testor?

[sidehack]

That's actually two four-chip units running. One's on a USB adapter with the U3 driver, which for some reason sends duplicate work to the second chip so though it's running 16GH I only see 8GH worth of shares. The other is off the S5 controller, which I think is thrashing or wasting work somehow (probably due to some lines not being connected and it only having 2 of 30 chips present) so about 1/3 of its shares are rejected stales. If both were working I'd see 33GH off about 12W but since I'm losing 8GH + 6GH between the two (probably software) issues the pool only sees 19GH of good shares.

Same reasons as explained about nine posts back. I haven't changed the setup at all yet. Given what else is on my plate the rest of this week, and being gone half of next week, it might just stay there and run for a while longer before I mess with it again.

[pekatete]

..... Bitmain never responded to my last couple emails so I'll have to hit them up again soon. ..

I can't blame them for not responding given the depressed value of BTC of recent .... and seeing you are no where near a sellable product it'd be a simple case of asking them to speculate on the possibility of selling a certain size batch to you.
Saying that, labelling them unethical in their practices may already have put paid to any possibility of getting a decent sized batch of chips from them at a competitive cost, if ever (even if at all!) you came up with a real challenger to their very own S5 design .... and who'd blame them.

[philipma1957]

..... Bitmain never responded to my last couple emails so I'll have to hit them up again soon. ..

I can't blame them for not responding given the depressed value of BTC of recent .... and seeing you are no where near a sellable product it'd be a simple case of asking them to speculate on the possibility of selling a certain size batch to you.
Saying that, labelling them unethical in their practices may already have put paid to any possibility of getting a decent sized batch of chips from them at a competitive cost, if ever (even if at all!) you came up with a real challenger to their very own S5 design .... and who'd blame them.

when did sidehack label them.  I do not recall that in any of his threads.

Bitmaintech was not and is not terrible or unethical .

As of this moment pretty much the best asic company in the game.

[sidehack]

I had no qualms at all about voicing my opinion regarding their price gouging on the S5 a while back. If they don't like me saying their chips are the best available and their hardware is well made but their greedy/opportunistic pricing strategies are unfair to everyone, well, not much I can do about it. I would like to work with them but I'm not gonna be a yes-man and pretend that everything they do is right (leave that to the Apple fanboys). I'll honestly say that most of what they do is right - my opinion, I like more of what they do than all the other currently-operational manufacturers. But if speaking against their price-gouging two months ago gets me in hot water, well, this project will have to go somewhere else.

[pekatete]

when did sidehack label them.  I do not recall that in any of his threads.

Well, now you've heard the condensed facts from, so to speak, the horse's mouth, you do not have to recall at all.
But that was a side issue, the main point being, as we speak, there is no sellable product for which to request batch pricing on the chips, so I am not surprised they have not prioritised responding to speculative emails (bearing in mind BTC value ..... and its fluctuation).

[sidehack]

Well, as soon as I get around to ironing out the Compac issue that product will exist. And once I know it works, about a day later I can be sending off for Amita prototypes. And as soon as I can successfully test prototypes of the 18-chip board I'm 80% done designing, and using that as a base we iron out the hard/soft requirements for fan speed, temp sensing and voltage adjustment on it, that product will exist as well.

[pekatete]

I had no qualms at all about voicing my opinion regarding their price gouging on the S5 a while back ...... But if speaking against their price-gouging two months ago gets me in hot water, well, this project will have to go somewhere else.

I do not believe realising the ills of your ways (and taking the right turn) two months ago won't hold you in good stead ..... just don't go gouging that healing wound two months on as I am pretty sure they would neither mind price gouging you nor ever seeing your project come good !

[PatSNL]

Well, as soon as I get around to ironing out the Compac issue that product will exist. And once I know it works, about a day later I can be sending off for Amita prototypes. And as soon as I can successfully test prototypes of the 18-chip board I'm 80% done designing, and using that as a base we iron out the hard/soft requirements for fan speed, temp sensing and voltage adjustment on it, that product will exist as well.

This is exciting.  Great progress.  Although you've mentioned you don't things have been moving along quickly, I really think, in a big picture, they have been moving right nicely.  Look at how close you are now to having multiple products.

In a way, it's a compliment if Bitmain didn't want to sell to you.  It would be most likely, that they're concerned you are a viable competitor to them.

Thank you Sidehack & Novak.  Keep up the GREAT work!

[sidehack]

It is definitely going to be fun to have a full product line with two stick miners and probably two full-size mining boards for around $1000 in R&D budget. I think we've spent about half that much so far, maybe a little more. By the time all the TypeZero boards are done we might be up to $1500.

It's quitting time now, pretty sure I got the 18-chip initial board done. It's set up to take in an external Vcore and external drive signals from either USB/UART or S5 controller (requires changing a jumper to switch from one to the other). It's all one-sided, so initially we'll be testing how well it cools through the board (and hopefully nothing shorts out). If necessary I can shim the ASICs, switch the node-level bulk caps to the backside and reinstall it with top cooling.

I'll probably have to strip down some of those donated dead S5s if I want to populate more than one board; I think I only have chips enough for one. Actually, I got one intact S5 working out of the batch and it's mining for the museum, which is fun. The other four full boards I have should hopefully yield enough non-smoked chips (one board sorta works, so that's 30 right there) to populate a whole S1 worth of boards, if we can get software working to handle multiple chips and multiple devices. Unfortunately I probably won't be able to go over this board and verify everything before sending it off to prototype until early next week, but if it works is gonna be pretty great. All we have to do after that is design all the peripheral controls and tack them on in the extra space at the top. While waiting for the protos to come back from the etch house I'll probably jack with Compac and maybe take a look at some of the stuff Novak's working on.

In the words of the science guy from Independence Day, "this is a very exciting time."

[sidehack]

So, looks like my vacation next week will be cut short and I'll be gone for 1.5-2 days instead of 3, which means I'll probably have time to doublecheck the new 18-chip test board and send it off, and maybe play with Compac tweaking as well. We just got a parts shipment in which includes stuff to play with the big regulator for the TypeZero boards, so I might make progress on that next week also. Should be fun.

[Bicknellski]

Take 3 days...

You need the time off to enjoy yourself n'est pas?


Edit: Vacation Pic.