Topic: Cairnsmore1 - Quad XC6SLX150 Board - page 110. (Read 286370 times)

Thanks for the update Yohan.

kind regards

Let's clarify the position.

First there is no up/down problem. No one outside of Enterpoint really knows the whole picture of what we are doing with this interface and all I will say at this point is that I think you will like what we are doing here.

On carriage you have the choice to go and buy elsewhere if you don't like our prices. We are not making profit in this area. It's easy to compare what big shipping operations like say Amazon can do but they get a hugh discount over what we can get. They also have specialist packing and shipping operations that are very cost effective. That's not the same for a smaller business running on a tiny fraction of the shipping volume.

On the TX/RX between the 2 FPGAs we won't change the PCB. The Icarus bitstream compatibility was only ever a "get going" solution to give us time to work on our way of tackling this. To respin PCBs would be expensive in money and shipping schedule and it is better to move directly to our planned second stage of having our own build of bitstream which costs us a few days of work but not necessarily in the shipping schedule. We don't need the TX/RX link at all for this and it was our plan not to use these ourselves. Outside of this minor issue the board design is holding up well in our testing and we are very pleased with the results.

We are working on the in-field reprogramability features as well as a back up to having a working bitstream and for any bug fixes needed. If those features work we don't have to load a working bitstream at shipping at all and it can be done in a simple fashion when a customer receives the product. It won't need a programming cable just the normal USB data cable.

At software level we are still looking ok for Icarus type interface compatibility. We understand a lot of this interface already and learning more every day we work on it.

We are not supplying power adaptors. These are add 60-100% more weight to a shipment and the shipping costs more than the adaptors. I am sure someone will complain if we jack up shipping more than the power brick cost. However we are going to try and obtain samples and recommend a few e.g. we can see one we think suitable at Walmart for our US customers. There are also others in Ebay that come from China but ship worldwide. You also can use ATX (needs switch on mod) or anything with the PCIe or HD Drive power connectors and these can be easy options. We are looking at doing a ATX adaptor that will give the ability to use ATX power supplies standalone and give the switch on feature that is the biggest barrier.

Yohan

You wish...

Did you miss "total cost" ?

or you completely dont understand?

Why not? I doubt they are padding their shipping prices, so if they get a discount, you do too.

I am wondering about this question as well. if the one board I bought is like this I just happen to be handy with a soldering iron and could cut the traces and re wire the lines.

It doesnt matter if your deal with them is cheaper. The total cost coming out of the customer's pocket dictates your sale.

DHL express is probably the best for international shipping. In Asia, they're the most preferred one.

Couple more questions - will these come with a power adapater?  Secondly, since there's that up/down problem at the moment, I don't feel comfortable paying until it's been resolved.  Any ETA on that?  Thank you.

No, not you

yohan, will all shipping boards have a new design (fixing the early RX/TX problem making the second FPGA incompatible with existing bitstreams on your prototype). If not, do you plan to ship boards with a new design in the future ? If yes when ?

A lot of this depends on the contract we have with individual couriers and they price based on your profile. Taking FEDEX as a case we can actually send more cheaply on International Priority than International Economy and that is peculiar to us. DHL is getting a lot of our business currently but they are being competitive and wanted our business. We are talking to the courier companies to see if we can do better based on a raised volume.

For those of you within the first 50 orders you should have got an email today asking if you wanted your first board on an early shipping slot i.e. this week or next week depending on how things here work. We are now taking payments for people that want the early shipment. After this first week of shipping and a bit of the next we will revert to shipping purely in order we received orders. It is then all down to how fast we ramp up output and when those large amounts of heatsinks arrive.

Yohan

For shipping to Canada, please use dhl as its probably the cheapest when it comes to brokerage fees. With  Ups and fedex pls use international economy express services which include brokerage fees.

Warranty is 1 year.

Postal charges have gone up significantly here and it is not much cheaper by postal service. It also means someone has spend 30 minutes going to a Post Office that costs us and that is way more than the difference to a courier who picks up at our shipping dept. never mind the disruption to the flow of orders out of the door. Tracking on postal services is also very poor and on an item of this value we need to ensure that something actual arrives.

We will be using a mixture of couriers DHL, FEDEX and probably UPS depending on where they are going to. Depending on the service we use most places in Canada would normally be delivered anything from next day to 3-4 days.

Is there any warranty on this?  Also how will you be shipping them?  For us Canadians, shipping by postal service would be much cheaper than courier.

There is a benefit drawing air over the rear surface of the board so back to back possibly isn't a great idea. We made some special provisions in the PCB design to improve heatflow to the back surface from the chips. That effect is additive to the more conventional top side heatsink and fan and would benefit for air over the back of the board or even water cooling. However the side blow push-pull option should work fairly well and keeps the stack height down to 39mm on the first release of boards and possibly 29mm on the boards with a smaller height heatsink although on the latter a bit higher might be better for rear cooling. There is experimentation still to be done there. We also have some other ideas as well to play with although they may not make an appearance until Cairnsmore2 where we have bunch of new ideas to show you all.

We are looking at brackets now for the side blow option and more on that in the next week or so. As that is a retrofit option it is not high on our list to sort out in the very short timeframe.

Yohan

I wouldn't worry about it

Would you mind naming those competitors? Just wondering if you're talking about FPGA Mining LLC, since we work in a team. If you are, what was the problem?

That's true. Some competitors who work alone with ngzhang do provide excellent support as well considering. I just really appreciate the highy detailed updates and keeping the community in the development loop. Some of the competitors who work in teams (whom shall not be named) have abysmal track records and could learn a lot from enterpoint.

I would assume that there is some kind of "verification" process you'll have to go through to lift the limit, similarly to PayPal.
If not, this is a massive hindrance to those who want to utilize this great service.

I'm guessing they have some way of increasing it, since BFL uses them, and each single is more than half that. 2 orders would put them over the limit, or one order of 2.