GekkoScience BM1384 Project Development Discussion

[cavaliersrus]

hack keep me informed on any of the usb miners i would love to test these things out and shoot some cash your way next time im in area pm me or let me know in here sir i loved visiting the site there and seeing the early progress to where you are at now

[sidehack]

So it looks like the fix is consistent. I reseated chips on a couple failed previous stick assemblies, applied the fixes and they both work now. It's almost cheeseburger time (and other errands, mostly spending money on awesome stuff...) but tomorrow I'll be in and build some more sticks. We're running low on sample chips after all the prototype testing of various things, so I need to save the rest for the 18-board test setup which means I'll be scavenging chips off dead S5 boards for the sticks. Should be fun? And then I have to build heatsinks for them all, which means cutting and drilling and tapping.

But maybe tomorrow end of the day I'll have a hub full of sticks all blasting away I can post a picture of. Be pretty sexy.

[aarons6]

nice..

i been following this thread. hopefully by the time you get some for sale i can get a couple.

[philipma1957]

So it looks like the fix is consistent. I reseated chips on a couple failed previous stick assemblies, applied the fixes and they both work now. It's almost cheeseburger time (and other errands, mostly spending money on awesome stuff...) but tomorrow I'll be in and build some more sticks. We're running low on sample chips after all the prototype testing of various things, so I need to save the rest for the 18-board test setup which means I'll be scavenging chips off dead S5 boards for the sticks. Should be fun? And then I have to build heatsinks for them all, which means cutting and drilling and tapping.

But maybe tomorrow end of the day I'll have a hub full of sticks all blasting away I can post a picture of. Be pretty sexy.

pm sent.

[ZenFr]

nice..

i been following this thread. hopefully by the time you get some for sale i can get a couple.

+1, but for France :-)

[toptek]

So it looks like the fix is consistent. I reseated chips on a couple failed previous stick assemblies, applied the fixes and they both work now. It's almost cheeseburger time (and other errands, mostly spending money on awesome stuff...) but tomorrow I'll be in and build some more sticks. We're running low on sample chips after all the prototype testing of various things, so I need to save the rest for the 18-board test setup which means I'll be scavenging chips off dead S5 boards for the sticks. Should be fun? And then I have to build heatsinks for them all, which means cutting and drilling and tapping.

But maybe tomorrow end of the day I'll have a hub full of sticks all blasting away I can post a picture of. Be pretty sexy.

Guess you didn't see my PM yet i hope that's it just need a address I'll send off one dead S5 board in the next few days . and the other one once i get it .

[sidehack]

Not a bad nine-hour day today. Actually, no it was a pretty lousy nine-hour day today. End of yesterday I had three working sticks. End of today I have four working sticks. I started building five and got two of them going, but my original stick decided to throw power issues when I plugged it back in at the end of the day. The three other non-working sticks are also giving power issues. Probably nothing too substantial, maybe pull and reseat the buck driver. I wasted a lot of time with pulled chips; I think the whole board I started pulling from must be dead because not a single stick lit up with those chips but they started behaving a lot better when I pulled chips off a previously tested (mostly) functional S5 board. One of the primary problems I was seeing (besides "whoops there's no Vcore power) is UART stuff, and after the ASIC itself one of the most finicky chips is this stupid little SC70 level shifter that's never really worked right and it's really hard to put on proper and the thing's just stupid and I hate it. But the good news is that won't be on the next version of the PCB because after learning a bit more about chip functions and such, I figured out I can actually replace that part with a couple passives and some clever wiring and it's cheaper and better and also way less annoying. The last stick I got working today was giving me worse fits than usual with this part, so I chucked it and deadbugged the new circuit onto the board and it's currently hashing away right now.

Maybe tomorrow I'll diagnose the problems with the power on the other sticks and get some more working. I need to have a few to show off, you understand. And maybe one for Novak to gank so he can work on the code.

Sample heatsinks are on the way which I'll use on the next-rev PCBs. They're not the right color but should be mechanically as-designed so I'll need to test fit those and make sure they're right when they come in next week.

I also need to figure out what's the holdup compiling cgminer on my workbench machine. The OS has never worked satisfactorily and I need to reload the thing anyway, but right now I'm stuck testing with a dodgy XP laptop that doesn't like more than one stick at a time running without errors. So y'all biscuitheads will have to wait for the latest and greatest in stickminer orgy porn until I can get some more heatsinks worked up and shift my test hub over to something that'll support five or six sticks at once. Which actually won't be that hard since the test hub already has a molex wired onto it and the fileserver has cgminer running with one of our two-chip test setups so I'll probably just use that. On another day. Right now it's about time to pass out.

[ManeBjorn]

Just let me know when and I will buy a couple from you and give you feedback.
I am still happy you are doing this.

Not a bad nine-hour day today. Actually, no it was a pretty lousy nine-hour day today. End of yesterday I had three working sticks. End of today I have four working sticks. I started building five and got two of them going, but my original stick decided to throw power issues when I plugged it back in at the end of the day. The three other non-working sticks are also giving power issues. Probably nothing too substantial, maybe pull and reseat the buck driver. I wasted a lot of time with pulled chips; I think the whole board I started pulling from must be dead because not a single stick lit up with those chips but they started behaving a lot better when I pulled chips off a previously tested (mostly) functional S5 board. One of the primary problems I was seeing (besides "whoops there's no Vcore power) is UART stuff, and after the ASIC itself one of the most finicky chips is this stupid little SC70 level shifter that's never really worked right and it's really hard to put on proper and the thing's just stupid and I hate it. But the good news is that won't be on the next version of the PCB because after learning a bit more about chip functions and such, I figured out I can actually replace that part with a couple passives and some clever wiring and it's cheaper and better and also way less annoying. The last stick I got working today was giving me worse fits than usual with this part, so I chucked it and deadbugged the new circuit onto the board and it's currently hashing away right now.

Maybe tomorrow I'll diagnose the problems with the power on the other sticks and get some more working. I need to have a few to show off, you understand. And maybe one for Novak to gank so he can work on the code.

Sample heatsinks are on the way which I'll use on the next-rev PCBs. They're not the right color but should be mechanically as-designed so I'll need to test fit those and make sure they're right when they come in next week.

I also need to figure out what's the holdup compiling cgminer on my workbench machine. The OS has never worked satisfactorily and I need to reload the thing anyway, but right now I'm stuck testing with a dodgy XP laptop that doesn't like more than one stick at a time running without errors. So y'all biscuitheads will have to wait for the latest and greatest in stickminer orgy porn until I can get some more heatsinks worked up and shift my test hub over to something that'll support five or six sticks at once. Which actually won't be that hard since the test hub already has a molex wired onto it and the fileserver has cgminer running with one of our two-chip test setups so I'll probably just use that. On another day. Right now it's about time to pass out.

[sidehack]

Bitmain just let me know they're checking stock on chips, so hopefully they have enough that we can move forward on the build. Novak's talking to a new US-based proto-etch place we'd like to have run out the next Compac PCB, but in the meantime I reckon I'll be working on getting the last batch assembled and modified, if only to have something to play with. That and all the other stuff Novak and I have to do will be keeping us pretty busy.

[aarons6]

Bitmain just let me know they're checking stock on chips, so hopefully they have enough that we can move forward on the build. Novak's talking to a new US-based proto-etch place we'd like to have run out the next Compac PCB, but in the meantime I reckon I'll be working on getting the last batch assembled and modified, if only to have something to play with. That and all the other stuff Novak and I have to do will be keeping us pretty busy.

this is the news i been waiting for.. i cant wait.

i been watching the solar powered Raspberry Pi thread where the guy is running a couple u2s from a camping solar panel and a cell phone battery pack...

i think if i get a couple of these i will try the same with them.

[philipma1957]

Bitmain just let me know they're checking stock on chips, so hopefully they have enough that we can move forward on the build. Novak's talking to a new US-based proto-etch place we'd like to have run out the next Compac PCB, but in the meantime I reckon I'll be working on getting the last batch assembled and modified, if only to have something to play with. That and all the other stuff Novak and I have to do will be keeping us pretty busy.

 Nice looking forward to this.

[ManeBjorn]

That is very good news indeed.

Bitmain just let me know they're checking stock on chips, so hopefully they have enough that we can move forward on the build. Novak's talking to a new US-based proto-etch place we'd like to have run out the next Compac PCB, but in the meantime I reckon I'll be working on getting the last batch assembled and modified, if only to have something to play with. That and all the other stuff Novak and I have to do will be keeping us pretty busy.

[Ikron]

Can't wait to see what the finished boards are. More greatness pls!

[cavaliersrus]

im enjoying the updates there side and novak cant wait to invest some into this

[PlanetCrypto]

Bitmain just let me know they're checking stock on chips, so hopefully they have enough that we can move forward on the build. Novak's talking to a new US-based proto-etch place we'd like to have run out the next Compac PCB, but in the meantime I reckon I'll be working on getting the last batch assembled and modified, if only to have something to play with. That and all the other stuff Novak and I have to do will be keeping us pretty busy.

We'll take a couple, either proto or production.
Please indicate how much and where to send the BTC.
Thanks.

[sidehack]

So I ironed out the issues with two of the three other sticks I put together on Saturday. One still has no power, which is annoying but Novak reminded me the boards weren't electrical-tested so it could be a bad trace somewhere.

Anyway I have five of the six working sticks all running off a Pi right now, pointed at the Burger address. The sixth was throwing hardware errors so I need to figure out what's up; could be as simple as a poor heatsink fit. Which I sorta believe since, as you can see, most of the heatsinks were cut from something else. These five are putting up 41GH off about 3.5A (it was right around 3A with just four sticks and the Pi).

[Mikestang]

Beautiful!  I can't wait to convert my S1 over, keep it up!

The sticks do OK with just the passive heat sink cooling, no additional airflow needed?

[sidehack]

Right now they're drawing less than 3W (probably less than 2.7, really) at 8.25GH per stick. The heatsink gets toasty in still air (especially the already-warm air in the shop) but it's not danger-zone hot for sure. If you want to push them up past probably 10GH (estimated 3.1W or so) I'd recommend air. I've tested the sticks for starting up to 250MHz (~14GH, estimated 5.5W) but I didn't run them for endurance so I don't know how well the stock heatsink with airflow works up that high. Yet.

Proto PCBs have been ordered for a chips-only 18-board (basically, a passive TypeZero Spec1, does not have power or control on board) and for the revised (version 0.4) Compac PCB which implements the changes to the previous PCB that got these sticks working. Technically only the silver-heatsink one has all the changes, as it's the one with the deadbugged modified level shifter circuit. The rest are still using the old circuit, which has both more complexity and worse performance.

Also, to note, three of the five sticks there are using chips pulled from one of those donated dead S5 miners from a while back. The sixth stick (what with the hardware errors) also has a pulled chip, which might explain a bit.

I'll probably be sending some of these guys out to my first-wave testers, maybe tomorrow if they run overnight without issue. In a week or two when I have the sample heatsinks and fresh PCBs in hand I'll build what I hope is the final version and get them out. If we have good word from Bitmain by then about fetching chips, and the boards test out well (I'll be looking forward to a review thread, whether it's good news or bad news I like having honest feedback), maybe we can start taking orders. We'll have a pick-and-place and a nice new SMD oven up and going here soon so it shouldn't take forever+day to assemble these things.

[valkir]

  so beautiful!

Congratz Sidehack and Novak!  

You guys did what big company didnt do! You are awesome.

[sidehack]

No, "awesome" would have been if it was working a month ago. That said, the whole R&D budget so far is on par with the cost of a pair of S5, so that's probably alright.