Topic: [BitCentury] Metabank 120Gh 65nm Pre-Order Proxy [CLOSED] - page 2. (Read 79057 times)

I was looking forward to having people post details of their own results with these.

Here is what a 2 system in 1 gets you compared with other hardware on the market today.

Site A



Site B

Same from me.

Also thanks to the Metabank team for being understanding and allowing a refund.

(note that I still plan full Metabank device support for BFGMiner, though)

Well, that explains what happened on my DHL tracking.  It got me all excited too, saying it had been delivered

This is really quite disappointing; was hoping to get the new miners in in-time to replace the current power hungry beasts.  Oh well.  No hard feelings against the BitCentury team; I appreciate the full refund and I'm sure everyone else will.  Thank you for the communication and professionalism.

Hi guys,

The last couple of days have been exhausting. I will post details as soon as I have time in the next couple of days, but long story short we have some bad news in the sense that we are not going to be able to ship any of our customer's units. The good news is that you will get a full refund from us.  This morning we got a call from DHL regarding the first 4 units we shipped a few days ago which got stopped by export customs due to lack of an "FSB" (Federal Security Bureau... aka. the new KGB) notification ID# (I will explain what this means when I get a chance).  Today we picked up the units from DHL, and headed straight to Metabank along with all the other units that we spent days testing and packaging carefully. Metabank has already issued us a full refund late this evening, and we'll do likewise with all our customer in order of who paid first as soon as we're able, but likely after I head back to Canada which will be this week . Refunds will be performed in bitcoins and for the amount you paid us. We still need to sort out some internal details but generally speaking, that's the plan.

Our sincere apologies this did not work out as intended.
I will write more details soon, but I just wanted everyone to be notified immediately of the situation.
Kind Regards,
Luis

Keep up the great work, BitCentury!

Hi guys,
Status update:
- Went to Metabank tonight with 4x sub-par triple units. Swapped out for 4 others which they say they've tested at ~300GH/s. I have started testing 2 of them, and will test the other 2 tomorrow. As soon as we see these are good to go, we will proceed to start shipping them.

Either way, if all goes according to plan, expect more shipments late tomorrow (Sun) Moscow time.

Cheers!
-Luis

The above mentioned units have been shipped. Tracking numbers will be emailed out for the first 2 orders in a few hours.
Thanks,
Luis

Hi guys,

Status update:

1. We missed Friday's DHL time of day deadline for out of country shipping, so we just held off until today (Sat) so as to save time and manage logistics.
2. We have the first 2/23 orders fully packed and ready to ship today. This consists of 4/32 units. We've scheduled a DHL pickup.
3. We finished testing all customer units. The outcome was that as previously stated, we have 4x triple boxes that are significantly under performing, and we are going to get Metabank to swap them out; however, this may take another day or two.
4. Some of the units will have to ship slightly out of order. This is for two main reasons. First, metabank aggregated individual 120GH units into doubles and triples. So customers that ordered say 3 units, but across 3 separate days, may now receive a single triple unit on 1 day. We are delivering these units based on their first order date. Secondly, for a few customers, Metabank provided the above mentioned triple units that are not quite performing to spec (getting as low as 150 GH to a max of 260GH, when according to metabank they should be hovering around 290-330 GH).  I hope this is not a big deal in the sense that I still plan to ship all units by early next week. So we're talking about 2-3 days delay at most, not weeks.
5. We are starting to optimize our packing & customs process, so I hope to ship a few more units tomorrow, then probably by Monday a large amount if all goes according to plan.

Kind regards,
Luis

I'd like to invite every new owner of a BitCentury/Metabank unit to join HHTT pool.

This is a small pool and needs to grow to reduce variance.

Now, if just one or two of you join it it will help but it won't make a big difference, but if ALL of us (I'm waiting for a unit as well) join it, well, it will become a medium sized pool and every one of us will have a few added benefits:

- very small fees
- half of each found block's transaction fees goes to the user that finds it
- low variance
- rock solid

and we will help the bitcoin network spreading our hashing power to a different pool (than btcguild  ).

Think about it! 

spiccioli

ps. for sabd question, I use this one lately: http://www.btcinvest.net/bitcoin-mining-profit-calculator.php

Great progress guys! I'm looking forward to mine (pardon the pun) soon. Can anyone suggest a pooled mining profitability calculator that takes into account the increasing difficulty so I can figure out break even and stuff like that?

Thanks for all the hard work, BitCentury crew! 

Some other info I got on Wednesday from Metabank, that I havent had a chance to pass on yet.

1. The Metabank web interface hashrate display for cgminer is not reliable for accuracy. It's better you rely on your pool's hashrate, or run cgminer from the raspberry pi's shell via ssh.
2. One nice thing about the web interface is that you can easily change pools with it.
3. Next version of the web interface will display performance per hash card. No ETA at this time. Metabank is a tad busy getting all units out the door.
4. There is a temperature sensor on each card. There are 2 LED's on each hash card. One green and one red. Either can blink or go into solid state. Right now, if the red LED goes on (except during boot procedure), it may mean that card's temperature is too high. One of the metabank guys actually touched the sensor while the unit was on (not that I'd recommend doing that), and the heat discharged to his finger, and then the red light went away. Obviously this doesnt change the temperature or solve any overheating problems.
5. FANs:. The Single and Double units have 3x 3000 RPM fans. The Triple has 3x 4000 RPM fans.
6. Power Usage: The Singles will use aprox 160Watts, doubles ~350W and triples ~500W.  This is all at default hashing speeds out of the box, and at 230volts. Expect a bit less efficiency at 120V for North American customers (i.e. more watts will be used).  So this should help you buy a power supply. I'd like for some of the more electrical experts chime in, but what I heard is that if a device needs, say, 80 watts of power, the absolute minimum power supply size should be 100W. So the basic rule is never exceed 80% of the rating of the power supply. That said, different vendors will have different efficiency ratings, and to be safe, you may want to have it at even much less than 80%, although some may allow for higher safely. Also expect about a 5% variance of power usage upwards during bootup procedure as compared to normal operation.

There's an entire science to optimizing energy efficiency, and so I'm not going to pretend to know what I'm talking about here, so please speak up if you understand these sorts of details and can help your fellow miner

7. When you connect your units to your LAN's, the raspberry pi will acquire an IP via DHCP. You can find out your unit's IP by either by doing a subnet ICMP sweep (google angry ip scanner), or by connecting to your LAN router and checking the ARP table. Some routers may actually identify the unit as raspberry pi as my asus here does.

8. After you get the IP, simply http to it, or ssh to it.  In either case, ID=pi PW=raspberry

9. You can view cgminer logs via web interface or by command line: tail -f /var/log/cgminer.log

10. You can stop or start cgminer as follows: (via SSH only)
sudo service cgminer stop
sudo service cgminer start

I've noticed a few times during testing that when we first power on the units, lights on all cards remain solid green indefinitely. We've learned this is because cgminer didn't start properly for some reason. You can either reboot the unit (takes about 1 minute or less), or ssh in and restart cgminer.

Well done guys.

The postcard is a nice touch. 

Hi guys,
When I spoke with legkodymov on Wednesday face to face, he explained that he is working with Lukr-Jr to have a BFGminer version for metabank units in the near future as there's several bugs with the existing cgminer as per above. Luke-Jr has some early beta's, but I'll let him speak about his own software. In short, it sounded like it would be more reliable. Also Metabank said there will not be a second batch of units; however, they will be making more units for themselves and thus will be improving their products and software and my understanding is they will release most of that info.

Status update:
1. By the end of today, all customer units will have been tested.
2. We had one of the first singles that appeared to have random booting issues, but it may have just been a particular plug on one of our powerbars. We will re-test this unit more thoroughly. We also found 2 triple units that had sub-par hashing rates, around 200Gh-250Gh. We will analyze these in more detail after all remaining units get tested. Our gut feeling is a few poorly performing hashcards in each of the triple units. If we can identify these, then maybe we'll just swap some around to at least get 1 unit upwards of 300GH, and then take the other back to Metabank as soon as we get a chance.
3. We have packed 1 unit for shipping so far, and plan to still ship 2 units later today.
4. After today our shipping volume should ramp up significantly each day, as that will be our primary focus. Until now, our #1 priority was unit testing.

And now for packing pics... This was our first attempt...

I am almost confident we could drop this thing down a small flight of stairs and the unit would still hash afterwards, but don't worry, we don't plan to do this level of unit testing ;-)

There is a problem with the metabank miners. Specifically the rPI runs out of memory after awhile when running cgminer. I have created a watchdog script to monitor if cgminer is running or not and to reboot the rPI if cgminer dies or is not running.

Login to rPI via SSH

type "sudo su -" to gain root access.

type "nano cgminer-cron.sh"

Insert the following code:

Save the file and exit (ctrl + x)

type "chmod +rx cgminer-cron.sh" to make the file executable.

type "export EDITOR=nano ; crontab -e" to edit the crontab scheduler.

Insert the following code at the bottom of the file:

Save the file and exit (ctrl + x)

.....

Additionally.. Modifying the server / pool information from the web panel does not save it on disk. In order for your configuration to survive a reboot you will need to modify the cgminer.conf file on disk.

To modify the cgminer.conf file on disk type (as root) "nano /home/pi/.cgminer/cgminer.conf" and edit the cgminer.conf to your liking.

Save the file and exit (ctrl + x)

@Bogart, I sent you a pm. Please reply when you get a chance. Thanks.
Luis

That sounds pretty good.  If you can fill any large voids in the inner box (and outer) with some kind of packing material, that would be even better.

We will be removing each card from its slot, putting it inside an antistatic bag, bubble wrapping it, laying it horizontally inside the box and taped down if required (likely for singles and doubles). Then the box itself will be bubble wrapped, and surrounded by instapak foam, inside a triple carrugated cardboard box, with an extra lid on the top and the bottom. Then more duct tape. One can never have too much duct tape
Luis

PS. Time permitting, I will try to make an unwrapping instruction video, so you will know how to get mining within 15 mins or so. Failing that, I will provide text instructions and answer questions here.

Peanuts are for peasants, I want mine packed in Cashews!

Awesome.  It looks like mine's in testing now.

You can ship mine without the power supply also.  Maybe you can sell the power supplies back to Metabank.

Are you shipping them with the hashing modules connected to the backplanes so that they're ready to mine?  It doesn't look like there is much physical support holding them in place.

I would prefer to see the modules individually ESD-bagged and bubble-wrapped and shipped each surrounded by some kind of cushion (peanuts, foam, paper, etc.)