Topic: [CANCELLED] Project Caterpillar - Open Source 3RU DIY ASIC Miner - page 5. (Read 17433 times)

That's a lot of heat in a small box. Are you sure you can cool that good enough?

You're pretty much on the money - the joke was we'd build something that would be ready before a butterfly.

As dd said, we are intending to build something for our own use. We decided to announce the project and make our work open-source to see if there are any others interested in building something higher density, that can leverage the utility of a 3 RU case. The modular design would mean that anyone wanting to copy what we do could easily produce a 27 GH/s model using 4 drive bays, for example.

The design would be hot-swappable making for ease of maintenance and expansion.

As mentioned, at this stage we're not planning on selling, although if there is demand that could be an option - this is initially for our own use.

We have a lot left to finalise yet. We're planning on making it modular and starting with a small number of trays (like 4 or so) and expanding it as the design is proven. We have ordered enough ASICs to fully populate one Caterpiller so we can ramp up quickly.

the metamorphosis of BTC from a caterpillar to a butterfly?

also, i think aiming for a rack unit is not the way to go. Bring a smaller 20 Ghash unit to market and it will sell better, be a more appropriate "version 1.0", and pave the way for putting a more concentrated and knowledged effort into a 3RU system after

I am also involved to a degree in this project.

A virtual bun for whoever can work out the inspiration for the project name!

Project: Caterpillar
Website: http://cryptominer.org/caterpillar/

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Update 16th August 2013: The Caterpillar team have had a meeting and in light of the currently exponential increase in network difficulty and the continual delays regarding the Avalon chips come to the conclusion that it will not be possible to ROI with the Avalon chips, and have hence decided to cancel our project based around these chips.

This decision was not taken lightly and it was with a deep regret that this decision was reached. I currently have the components to build a single board with 7 chips and will be looking for 1 more sample chip, if anyone has one, so that I can build one board with 8 chips to prove that the design works. Once this has been completed I'll upload my design files to github under an open hardware license and will not be touching anything Avalon in the future.

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The Caterpillar is a modular Avalon ASIC miner based on the Klondike16 project that is designed to fit into a rack mount server case using the drive bays as carriers. It is being designed by a group in Adelaide, South Australia who plan to form a small mining company. At this stage we will not be taking any orders for completed hardware, although we may be able to provide unpopualated PCBs for a small fee.

We are also investigating the feasibility of building a tray around the BitFury ASICs when they become available. More updates will be posted once details become available.

The people involved in this project are:

• daemondazz
• stripykitteh
• dancoin

Version 1 Preliminary Specs:

• Norco RPC-3116 or RPC-3216 3RU rack mount server case
• 24 ASICs per tray
• 6 temperature sensors per tray (1 per 4 ASICs)
• 16 trays (384 ASICs) per chassis (approx 108GH/s in 3RU)
• Custom USB/power distribution backplane to replace SAS/SATA backplane

The design will be fully open source with all schematics, PCB layouts and BOM parts available.


Update 7/Jun - Schematics
I have uploaded a draft PDF of the ASIC component of the schematics to our website. Components have not been numbered yet, but it does show the values.

Update 14/Jun - Sample Chip
We have been sent 1 sample chip so far from SebastianJu's group buy batch 1. Thanks Sebastian!

Update 14/Jun - Design Change
The team here have decided to simplify the design dramatically, so we're going to switch to a design that's very close to the BkkCoin's Klondike16 design. The plan is to use a customised version of his firmware. The changes from BkkCoin's ("reference") Klondike16 will be:

• 12 ASICs per bus instead of 8,
• No I²C for board stacking,
• 6x I²C temperature sensors instead of a single analog temperature sensor.

Update 16/Aug - Project Cancelled
The team have decided to cancel the development of this project and seek a refund of our pre-ordered Avalon chips. I (daemondazz) will complete a single board with 8 chips to prove the design but no futher work will be performed.