Topic: AMT users thread. - page 47. (Read 60097 times)

Once again, more Graduates from the Underpants Gnomes School of Business. To succeed follow thusly:

1) Steal Underpants (or other Great Idea)
2) ? ? ?
3) Profit!!!

IMET, Joshua Zipkin is on record in stating that he shipped out 100s of 1.2 TH/s miners. Can you shed some light on that subject?

It's always amused me how incredibly bad most of the miner manufacture's are at the business side of things.  It's like they all assumed that the incredibly lopsided supply and demand scenario would last forever.   These guys wouldn't last 5 seconds in the real world, they have no concept of customer acquisition cost and the value of a good loyal repeat client (hint, repeat clients drive CAC way down!). 

All these companies appear to have a single fatal flaw from a business PoV, they were all under capitalized.  Because of this they had to resort to tactics that were down right illegal and moronic just to try and stay afloat.  Not surprisingly it isn't working to well and it isn't likely to start working better any time soon, that's probably why the real world doesn't use that particular business model.

The piper is coming and he wants paying from them all, it's really just a matter of when and how much, oh and how many lawyers are getting new swimming pools and BMW's 

Expect more of this with other companies. http://www.coindesk.com/missouri-secretary-state-halts-mining-business-deceptive-tactics/

Hey fellow AMT victims, just for fun I am betting my two cents (.02 BTC) that AMT will actually outlast Black Arrow in my dead pool.  Any takers? https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.7118991

Thanks for this info.  I'll do what you suggest.

Might as well put a copy of this here as well so folks can refresh themselves on the A1's timeline..

Worth a try.  Send them an email demanding that working boards be sent.
I've said all along that if legal action is taken Bitmine.ch should be a part of it. All the rights & wrongs of the pre-order model aside it was the delays in Bitmine's A1 chip production itself not to mention Bitmine's wildly over optomistic production/delivery projections that upset the apple cart so badly. They set the stage for was was to follow for all players involved. AMT included.

From what little I've seen of the timeline from announcement/taking pre-orders for A1 systems from Bitmine much less AMT even if everything went 100% right with the A1's conception and birth process there is no way anyone could move a new design through GF fast enough to hit those targets. Get 1st spin chips made - yes. Characterize what was given birth to much less come up with an at least workable 8-chip board as well? Much less an entire system done right to deal with the unexpected power/thermal issues? Then source all the parts (that you just now determined the values of)? Say oh, high kw PSU's - that's gonna put a huge dent in the world's supply chain for a bit... So in short, anintagonna happen.

Bitmine *may* have had a very basic board designed to run it but it could have hardly been ready to take what the A1 would really put it through.

C'mon folks, how many times we gotta say read the A1 dev thread to know the timelines! https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/closed-bitmine-coincraft-a1-28nm-chip-distribution-diy-support-294235

It does not excuse what has happened but at least it gives a picture of just how screwed up the promised sales/delivery dates were. Dates were primarily set by Bitmine.ch. Not like AMT or other Authorized Distributors are gonna have miners before them.[/quote]

Here is what I suggest you do for proof:

- Mine into a BTC address using a pool that allows you to mine directly to a BTC address (like Eligius, but there are others)
- Shoot a video of your working miner using that address (show a newspaper in the video to prove the current date)

We (including AMT) can all then monitor the miner live and confirm its history.

FYI, my guess is that your rPi controller has an incorrect date.  You can easily fix that with the "date" command as follows:


OR, run raspi-config and setup all options:

Its possible for the boards to run...and from what I understand they got cherry picked....is it possible this is just a small batch of good boards? What was done to resolve the obvious engineering flaws? The problem here is that this really proves nothing. I had a working miner for like a week before cards started to die (now I am down to a single working card from 10).

Is there anything we can do to bring the cards back to life? That would be a HUGE win if that information could be published if it is indeed possible. To me it seems the cards have working chips. But something else caused them to die out.

I'm working on it.  We have been bringing boards and systems up and down from the pile that AMT left to see if there is anything that can be done to recoup our loss from the bounced check.  I'm committed to keeping this one up for the long term and I'm confident that it will run based on the time I have spent with this hardware.  I am not an expert on these types of systems, but I am an experienced EE.  Hardware is what I do.  Software/firmware is another story hence I don't understand the date discrepancy.  I also hope that AMT comes around and pays their bill so they can learn of the work that I have done on my own time/dime to try to make something good happen.

IMET, that is really very interesting (and troubling).  Can you give some evidence that the boards work for an extended period of time?  I think others have seen the boards work for a few days and then die so showing it working at one moment in time is interesting but not dispositive...

These pictures were taken live today and the system is currently running in my shop.  I'm not sure why the date shows February.  I would be interested to know why.  We did not start building PCBs until mid February.  The only thing I did back then was verify that the design worked after various changes kept coming from AMT and Bitmine. 

Good catch on the date though the diff is showing current... Hmm.
Just one or even a few working back then does not mean much. We are still talking only a couple weeks from when the chips first got into Zef's & others hands (early Jan.) to see if they even work at all and figure out how to talk to them.. I'd barely call that time frame Eng. prototype phase much ready to go out the door.

Nonetheless, good start there.

Date shows 2/23/2014  That is February.  Is this an old photo.   So the system was working back in February?

I like how they are stacked in a cube, what is supporting the boards? I've used Legos for test setups....
Default software & settings? Got a chip Vdd voltage & clock settings for us?

Here is what was brought up today and has been running for a few hours.  I'll keep posting on a daily basis to hopefully convince AMT to pay their bill to IMET so I can show them what to do to make things right or at least point everyone in the right direction.  Again, there is nothing wrong with the PCBs or PCB assembly.  We did not make any mods to the boards.     

This is indeed crazy.  Many AMT customers (myself included) are stuck with non-working hardware and a completely unresponsive AMT.   Now as their manufacturer, you are claiming that you have a solid working system?!

Can you send/post a video (use youtube) of the working AMT miners?

During the initial hash board bring up (one at a time), we would run them without Ethernet connected and without heat sinks to verify that all 8 chips in a chain were detected.  Without Ethernet connected, the board will not hash and thus not heat up.  We would then record the amount of cores detected.  As long as the chips were detected and the amount of cores were acceptable, we would put them on heat sinks and let them hash for a few minutes in front of a hefty desktop fan. 
We found that when chips were detected and the core number was acceptable, hashing was never a problem; therefore, this testing task was ultimately transferred to AMT as they were responsible for the heat sinks.  I did have a few boards running for days, but again in front of a hefty desktop fan.  We just brought up 10 boards that were left at the shop with 100% yield.  These have been running for over a week.  I also have multiple variations of the hash boards running as AMT made us change some caps and in a few spots did a no install.  All are working.  I am confident that the electronics design is solid.   

From a technical standpoint I'm very curious to know during testing how the chips were cooled and how long the boards were tested. Specifically, if AMT was responsible for the thermal and heatsink design/assembly after IMET's end, were the boards tested bare? Top & bottom cold plates used in lieu of heatsinks?