Topic: [BOUNTY] PCB designer & More, for project ToFu ( For dead V2 blades ) - page 3. (Read 4787 times)

Watching. Not sure what skills or resources I'll have available by the time this is moving, but I'll do what I can.

Reserved

Ladies, Gentleman, and lower earth dwelling life forms, It is with great pleasure that i announce the start of what i call project ToFu. What is to follow is probably a page of me rambling trying to make this all make sense. So to start off on the right... or is it left...... foot, i will summarize first then get into detail.

What we need: An experienced PCB designer well known in the community. ( * this is me winking at you Mr Teal and Chip Geek )
                      A community accepted Escrow holder with a proven track record of delivering what is pomised
                     The backing of the bitcoin community holding those dredded dead V2 blades or AM chips.
                     Someone to help me write the assembly instructions
                     An experienced software / firmware developer


The Project: Design a PCB for a 2 AM chip DIY USB miner.

Now the story, explanation, and endless ramble, feel free to stop reading whenever you want. Just donate to our designers.

How many of you are holding dead V2 blades? How many of you have noticed the sudden up-rise of posts with people having problems with dead V2 blades? How many of you like zebra cakes? ok that last part was for my own fascination.

At last estimated count just on this forum alone, i estimate there are about 5000 viable chips on dead V 2.01 boards floating around these days, and that number increases daily. The one thing i see in common with every post about a dead blade on this and other forums is the want to find a PCB for our viable chips, and the kicker is THERE IS NONE..... True, you can spend days triaging your board, make several posts on the forum, hope, pray, cuss a little, wish, then finally cuss some more, put it in a box and then on a shelf. or if you are like me, you pray to find another dead Sapphire miner on ebay for a couple dollars and you harvest a chip and fix the USB miner. But the truth is for the majority of the community, once you have a dead board it gets put up, or sold on ebay for pennies on the dollar in hopes of getting back a small part of your investment.

So what is project ToFu?

Project ToFu hopes to harness the collective knowledge of a great community to resolve a common problem that many of us are suffering from. Project ToFu aims to design, prototype, and test a DIY kit, and instructions on how to harvest your ASIC chips from your dead V2 blade and assemble a 2 chip USB miner which is viable to start (slowly) mining bitcoin again and reclaim a small portion of your investment on your original purchase.

What the final product aim's to include:

1x PCB board ready for you to start to assemble
1x shopping list for parts you will need to order to finish the board ( hopefully with item numbers from digikey )
1x assembly manual giving you step by step instructions on how to harvest your chips, and assemble the board
1x micro SD card containing the firmware for the board
1x project ToFU thermal color changing sticker for your heat sink.
You will need to provide your own chips.

People and positions we need to fill:

Escrow Manager: This person will hold the donations as they accumulate towards the bounties we will offer to a few of the key developer's needed to complete this project and then release the bounty once their portion of the project is complete. The escrow manager must have a long and well documented history of successful escrow transactions and must have the full support of the community. The Escrow Manager will receive 2% of the total bounty/donations received for their services.

PCB Designer/Engineer (s): This person, or these persons will be the lead designers and engineers of the PCB itself, The PCB designer(s) must have a well document history in PCB design involving bitcoin ASIC miners, and must have a fair amount of time to invest into the project / design of the board. This person / people will receive a yet to be determined bounty payment for their time and services.

Firmware Designer: This person will be in charge of coding the firmware and drivers for the Project ToFU DIY board and must have experience working with ASIC firmware. This position will as well receive a yet to be determined bounty payment for their time / services. I myself will be helping with this in my spare time, but will require no payment for my time.

Instruction manual writers: These people will all collectively work together to write a simple, small, step by step instruction guide for how to remove chips from bad boards, and how to assemble all the components of the new Project ToFu USB miner. These positions are volunteer positions and we will rely on the community to help get this step done.

Graphic Designer: This person will be in charge of designing a logo for project ToFu, this logo will be used on the packaging and the color changing sticker for the heat sink. This position is a volunteer position and we will again rely on the help of the community to find a suitable logo for our little pet project.

Donors: Any and all of you that can contribute even .00000001 BTC to the bounty pool to reward the lead designers, Once we settle on a person to hold our escrow, a donation address will be set up, as well as a donation mining account on BTCguild where you will be able to donate even 10 minutes of use on your miners to help the cause. all mined donations will pay directly to the escrow address. More details to come.

If you are interested in filling any of the positions above, please message me with your qualifications (and payment requirements if it is a position with bounty)

Now for every pre-teen's favorite game... NO not 7 minutes in heaven, get your dirty minds out of the gutter..... 21 QUESTIONS

Q: Why a USB board instead of just a new 10.7 GH/s design?
A: The several chip design is what got us in this situation in the first place. a small cheap DIY USB will be easy to assemble, easy to diagnose if there are problems, small, and have very few components to break, and in the worst case scenario if it does break, you lose two chips a very little hashing power. Also, USB's make great gifts to help attract new people to bitcoin. Besides, lets face it, the more hashing power and nodes we keep in our control and out of the hands of cloud mining companies, the more control we have over keeping bitcoin the way it is.

Q: How much is this going to cost me?
A: We are hoping to keep the cost of the Project ToFu kit between $10 and $15 usd. or free. lesser the actual PCB, its up to you.

Q: How do we know this isn't just a way for you to make money?
A: Because i am not selling these, In the end we will all either go in on a group buy from a PCB manufacturer to have the boards made, or leave it to others in the community to have them made. this whole project will be open source, and if you know a PCB manufacturer you will be able to have them make the board for you, but rest assure you will pay a ton for 10-15 boards where as a group buy we can probably get the boards for a few dollars each. Furthermore, for testing purposes, someone has to pay for rapid prototyping on the board to test them before finalizing the design, that person will probably be me, and a few other donors i am sure.

Q: When do you expect to have these done?
A: I have no idea, we have just launched this project today 12/24/13, and are still looking for designers, engineers, and programmers. I will update as each spot is filled.

Q: Why did you call it Project ToFu
A: because we all have a ton of blades that are Totally Fu**ed

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More updates coming soon, If you are interested in helping fill any of the needed positions, please message me directly and we will get something figured out.

Donation address will be posted once we find an escrow manager.