I've been following this thread very closely as i'm interested in making a bulk order.
So far, it doesnt make any business sense now. If you think this as an investment, then its terrible. How many ppl have got these board worked at intended speed? and if you did, for how long? I'm not a technical person but spending a month of tinkering is not acceptable. Maybe we should now know why BFL had a long waiting for their production.
As a potential customer, may i know exactly why you sell the boards without a working bitstream?
I know it won't be easy to convience you otherwise of your view. How ever I will do my best to try.
Quick turn around, they are using the same chips and a similar design than what is already been done. However the made it a bit bigger, using 4 chips. Enterpoint are veterans in the market of making FPGA's, but relatively new to bitcoins, it was their first board. They made it from scratch quicker than any other manufactor, so I got to give them credit there. They had lots of people interested in seeing this as a development board, even if it meant us making the bitstream, so they went ahead with it.
A fully working bitstream was not the problem it should of been, it was a oops in the complication of combining 4 of these chips. It was a calculated risk and hasn't turned out that bad. If I had made orders with another manufacter, I know it would of cost me more, also I'd paid in advance for most of them (not all) and many of them I'd still be waiting for my product in hand. To me, I've come out better off for it. I don't like waiting 3+ months for an item, I certainly don't like waiting that long for an item I already bought. Enterpoint delivered what I expected.
Enterpoint (Yohan) and his team with the CM1, it allowed us to be mining on a development board, which we knew about in advance when we order at a lower than normal price. We saved money buying hardware and only paid when it was ready to ship.
As a programmer/developer this does not bother me, sure there are a few frustrating moments, that is part of being a programmer, you get little irratiable when debugging a problem. Many in this thread are also very technical people, that is the target whom jumped in early before a bitstream was fully ready. The FPGA market is filled with people just like me, so it does make business sense, it did work, he sold quiet a lot of them.
Average Joe, sure this might not be ideal for you, unless you prepared to start learning all what it takes to get a FPGA to work. It's not plug and play, anything more advance than a GUIminer is not, so it should come to no suprise that these won't be.
