[CANCELLED] Project Caterpillar - Open Source 3RU DIY ASIC Miner - page 2.

daemondazz

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Quote from: Blisk on July 16, 2013, 05:55:47 PM

Do you plan to make the board by yourself or it will be maded fro you?

I'll be getting the boards themselves manufactured for me and we haven't decided on the assembly part yet. I'll probably assemble the first one myself so I can test everything is ok before getting an assembler to put the remaining boards together.

If there's anyone lurking who does assembly, I'd love to hear from you.

Blisk

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Do you plan to make the board by yourself or it will be maded fro you?

daemondazz

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I've started working on the PCB layout, primarily to ensure that I should have space for everything within the constraints we've set, and so far it's looking good:

Top layer (light brown) is high current 1.2V supply (3x rails)
Layer 2 (medium brown) is low current PLL 1.2V supply (2x rails)
Layer 3 (very dark brown) is signals (currently only CONFIG lines are drawn) and 3.3V rail.
Bottom Layer (blue) is ground

The CONFIG lines are length matched to less than 0.1mm. I'm still verifying footprints for other other components, so the layout may need to change slightly as I go through it.

Foofighter

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BTC Mining Hardware, Trading and more

nice work! amazing project here, like it!

regards

daemondazz

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Hi All,

Thanks for your patience, I've finally found time to update the information on our website at http://cryptominer.org/caterpillar/, so there has been a fairly big update to the tray schematic and block diagram. I've also updated the wording on the page to reflect the design changes that have been made.

The schematic incorporates the changes that have been made to the result capture part of the circuit on the Klondike project. As a reminder, the Caterpillar is now based on the Klondike16, but (primarily) changes the analog temperature sensor for 6x I2C sensors and obviously has a different physical layout to suit our mounting requirements.

I'm now in the middle of verifying part numbers for everything in the schematic and making sure they have footprints, etc, before getting stuck into the PCB layout.

daemondazz

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Quote from: Monetizer on July 09, 2013, 04:01:39 AM

Any updates?

Sorry, yes I have been working on this but haven't had time for updates. I'll try to get the updates posted on the website soon.

daemondazz

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Quote from: Trillium on July 04, 2013, 11:33:03 PM

Any updates with this?

Also does your backplane diagram indicate that the USB hub will run off 3.3 volts? Because USB power is 5 volts.

Is a 3.3 volt reg really required? You could have 12 v, 5 v, and 3.3 v rails from any ATX PSU.

The backplane will only be connected using the Molex 8981 connectors, so we have 12v and 5v available.

I have chosen the TI TUSB2046B USB hub IC, which is a 3v3 volt part. The PIC also runs off 3.3v, so I need to take 3v3 onto each tray. Due to the fairly low power requirements on the 3v3 bus, the 3v3 regulator will be on the backplane.

Monetizer

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Any updates?

Trillium

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Any updates with this?

Also does your backplane diagram indicate that the USB hub will run off 3.3 volts? Because USB power is 5 volts.

Is a 3.3 volt reg really required? You could have 12 v, 5 v, and 3.3 v rails from any ATX PSU.

Foofighter

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n1!
keep up the good work and i hope we get results from you very soon!

daemondazz

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As stripykitteh mentioned, I have received the first sample chip:

These things are TINY! It's hard to believe that that tiny chip can pull almost the full legal current from a USB port just by itself!

stripykitteh

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We received a sample Avalon chip from SebastianJu on Tuesday. A pic will be uploaded tonight.

Meanwhile, we are also starting an Australian GroupBuy of the ASICMINER USB sticks. Head over here to check it out:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=244263.new

pitan

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Great work guys very interested will follow your progress closely! Grin

daemondazz

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware

Previous hardware I have designed for amateur radio and the rPi has been released under the CERN Open Hardware Licence. We (the Caterpillar team) haven't specifically decided on a license, but that will likely be it.

one4many

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Quote from: daemondazz on June 18, 2013, 09:53:38 AM

Quote from: one4many on June 18, 2013, 09:38:09 AM

that would be ultra sweet ... design one and make it public domain. Please! Roll Eyes

Would Open Source be good enough?

Good question ... a case design is not quite 'source' in terms of source code ... but I guess the true source (the idea) is open and not protected by some legal copyright scum

.... just bending words Cheesy

daemondazz

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Quote from: one4many on June 18, 2013, 09:38:09 AM

that would be ultra sweet ... design one and make it public domain. Please! Roll Eyes

Would Open Source be good enough?

one4many

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Quote from: daemondazz on June 18, 2013, 09:33:03 AM

As a clarification though, we are looking at the BitFury chips as well, as stripykitteh posted above, as that seems to be a very promising development at the moment.

Our design is modular, so we can switch out the actual ASICs as required on a tray by tray basis - there's nothing stopping a 24 bay chassis from have 12 Avalons and 12 BitFury trays.

Imagine a (19" rackable 4 U) case incl. dual power supplies with your controllers as a standard and all the ASIC boards which can be switched in and out without a fuzz ... for replacement or upgrade .... that would be ultra sweet ... design one and make it public domain. Please! Roll Eyes

daemondazz

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As a clarification though, we are looking at the BitFury chips as well, as stripykitteh posted above, as that seems to be a very promising development at the moment.

Our design is modular, so we can switch out the actual ASICs as required on a tray by tray basis - there's nothing stopping a 24 bay chassis from have 12 Avalons and 12 BitFury trays.

daemondazz

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Quote from: MadHasher on June 18, 2013, 09:19:13 AM

I have been following that topic closely. Seems promising. Any thoughts on adopting BFL chips? They finally seem to be dropping prices to an acceptable level.

To be honest, haven't even looked at their chips. I just figured that they'd ship sometime in 2015 and there isn't any point.

They have a huge backlog of miner orders, so either the chips are ones that failed QA and hence not good enough for their own use (yes, I do realise they have graded them based on the number of working cores) or they are selling chips that should be going into their own miners - that's gotta be a customer service nightmare.

Quote from: one4many on June 18, 2013, 09:26:26 AM

+1 .... NOT another Avalon based miner ... Wink

heh, ah, the more the merrier

one4many

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Quote from: MadHasher on June 18, 2013, 09:19:13 AM

Quote from: stripykitteh on June 17, 2013, 09:54:37 PM

For those who were wondering, Bitfury did not get hold of his chips in time to win the bet he had, so the need to distribute them for alpha-testing has passed. So we won't be getting any cool bleeding-edge hardware from him this week.

Not to worry, he has commenced testing the chips himself and the early results seem promising, though it is too early to say whether they are ready to go to full production. You can see the latest here:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ann-bitfury-is-looking-for-alpha-testers-of-first-chips-free-money-here-228677

If his chips test out we will certainly investigate obtaining a supply of them to work with.

I have been following that topic closely. Seems promising. Any thoughts on adopting BFL chips? They finally seem to be dropping prices to an acceptable level.

+1 .... NOT another Avalon based miner ... Wink

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