[CLOSED] Bitmine CoinCraft A1 28nm chip distribution / DIY support - page 8.

zefir

donator

Activity: 919

Merit: 1000

Quote from: silver71 on February 27, 2014, 11:06:45 AM

Quote from: giorgiomassa on February 27, 2014, 09:08:01 AM

The base files for building the OpenEmbedded/Yocto-based rpi image will also be committed soon so that everybody willing to develop forks based on it is very welcome to do so (and share back)

Is there any possibility for SD-card to be accessible from the front/back, in case change/new yacto-image or improvements are to be deployed, so that rig/desk can remain hashing with old SD-image and new-one is prepared offline, and just cards swapped and rig/desk restarted. I think this will improve overall reliability of the machines and make rigs/desks ready for future improvements and it also saves time, in case SD-card is damaged.

Stuff like this might be very handy, and will not violate warranty in case of SD-card malfunction. Blockchain file will grow more and more in the future, so one day, user might need to insert biger SD-card, and if it's unaccessable from the outside, it might make problems.

a) what is the advantage of having a secondary SD card slot over flashing the new FW image to your miner's primary SD card once you are done creating it?
b) the SD-card is almost read-only, i.e. only configuration changes are written, everything else goes into memory mapped temp file systems - with that, risk of wearing out the SD card is minimal
c) the FW image is tiny (like 30-50MB) and won't grow significantly in the future; the blockchain is not stored on the SD (for what?), so the smallest SD-card available is still orders of magnitude too big for the FW - we won't run into space issues

Quote from: shaohui on February 27, 2014, 08:17:45 PM

A1 28nm chip microarrays How to buy this? Provide technical item? I come from China

Quote from: shaohui on February 27, 2014, 08:25:03 PM

I want to produce 1T or 2T machines, can provide what help?

This is the DIY thread, i.e. meant for those who are doing their own design and needed chips in smaller quantities to test prototypes. Chips will remain available at Bitmine's online-shop, either in production volumes or in single sample chip quantities.

As for the board design: if you are not going to design your own board, you might want to contact one of the various projects that are working on A1 based mining gear.

shaohui

newbie

Activity: 5

Merit: 0

Quote from: cwfabc on September 16, 2013, 04:29:51 AM

good news

I want to produce 1T or 2T machines, can provide what help?

shaohui

newbie

Activity: 5

Merit: 0

A1 28nm chip microarrays How to buy this? Provide technical item? I come from China
[email protected]

silver71

member

Activity: 101

Merit: 10

no avatar for now

Quote from: giorgiomassa on February 27, 2014, 09:08:01 AM

Thank you Zefir for handling this process, as for all the DIY people we wish you a great success with your designs and thanks for all the feedback given, we are working on fixing the reference design files and committing them to the git repository soon.

The base files for building the OpenEmbedded/Yocto-based rpi image will also be committed soon so that everybody willing to develop forks based on it is very welcome to do so (and share back)

Is there any possibility for SD-card to be accessible from the front/back, in case change/new yacto-image or improvements are to be deployed, so that rig/desk can remain hashing with old SD-image and new-one is prepared offline, and just cards swapped and rig/desk restarted. I think this will improve overall reliability of the machines and make rigs/desks ready for future improvements and it also saves time, in case SD-card is damaged.

Stuff like this might be very handy, and will not violate warranty in case of SD-card malfunction. Blockchain file will grow more and more in the future, so one day, user might need to insert biger SD-card, and if it's unaccessable from the outside, it might make problems.

This might be a solution. at least as an idea, for possible hardware forks.

http://www.amazon.com/46cm-Card-Extension-Cable-Case/dp/B007X0GV5S

giorgiomassa

full member

Activity: 222

Merit: 100

Thank you Zefir for handling this process, as for all the DIY people we wish you a great success with your designs and thanks for all the feedback given, we are working on fixing the reference design files and committing them to the git repository soon.

The base files for building the OpenEmbedded/Yocto-based rpi image will also be committed soon so that everybody willing to develop forks based on it is very welcome to do so (and share back)

loshia

legendary

Activity: 1610

Merit: 1000

Quote from: vs3 on February 27, 2014, 05:22:46 AM

Zefir - thanks again for all of your work and helping the community with this project!

+1

vs3

hero member

Activity: 622

Merit: 500

Zefir - thanks again for all of your work and helping the community with this project!

marto74

hero member

Activity: 728

Merit: 500

Thank you for the opportunity to start our design.
As usual it was pleasure doing business with you.
Looking forward for future projects.
We wish you and the Bitmine team all the best.

zefir

donator

Activity: 919

Merit: 1000

Update: Chip Distribution closed

That's it, I assigned all remaining chips for assembly and with that this DIY chip distribution is closed.

Chips will remain available through Bitmine's web-shop, even in sample quantities.

Thank you all for your trust and support. Good luck with your projects, especially since times became more stormy in bitcoin land recently.

Bicknellski

hero member

Activity: 924

Merit: 1000

Quote from: zefir on February 20, 2014, 07:52:22 AM

Quote from: silver71 on February 20, 2014, 07:10:08 AM

Why 16, when you already have ref.design for 8, and 8 is easier to cool...

Even when you think about immersion cooling, if enything goes wrong, your whole chain (16) goes offline...

Wouldn't it then be smarter to stick with 8 ?

16 was just a number I pulled from thin air

As for the technical challenge: with the experience collected so far, I'd say once you have an 8-chip chain working, it is not a huge step to move to 16 chips. At least from the A1 side, I don't understand the DCDC part of it to state it would be easy.

The immersion cooling idea follows DaT's approach here, where due to the high costs of the fluid it is essential to stuff as much hashing power into as little volume as possible. I think one could get a 4x4 A1 matrix onto a 10x10cm^2 PCB and stack them with 1cm distance. Resulting in a 6kW burner in a 1 liter cube.

That would be more of a fun than a serious project and I proposed this to be added as a challenge for Bitmine's planned design contest - which for obvious reasons was put at the back of the priority queue and might never leave the announcement phase Sad

Takers? I'd supply the chips and the fluid.

Ice Wasp is something we are keen on doing... just need to get our Wasps finished first.

jbcheng

newbie

Activity: 40

Merit: 0

That's really bad news for Bitmine do not accept BTC payment. We can use the realtime exchange rate and this shall not be too complicated?

drinkmorecoffee

newbie

Activity: 58

Merit: 0

Why is Bitmine no longer allowing payment in BTC? I was just about to order a couple samples and the BTC payment option is just... gone. Is this a temporary thing, or what?

I wrote their support people but haven't heard back. Anyone know anything?

silver71

member

Activity: 101

Merit: 10

no avatar for now

Quote from: zefir on February 21, 2014, 04:10:54 PM

Quote from: drinkmorecoffee on February 21, 2014, 04:00:39 PM

Very good, thanks for the quick reply. I've heard a couple comments that the RasPi is not suitable for this sort of thing, but hearing that it's used in the Desk product (a professional, commercial product) is reassuring.

I guess what you refer to is the known problem of the RasPi wearing out the SD-card if you run it over standard Linux system over long time - which I personally did not notice working ~3 months mostly compiling with continuous write access to the card.

To be on the safe side, the FW provided with the Desk is mostly read-only, i.e. it writes to the SD-card only on re-configuration, while everything else goes into memory mapped filesystems.

With current SD-card prices this would not be an issue, if reasonable user, clones SD-cards prior of using them, and swaps them if they fail...on the other hand I would rather choose Arduino over Pi, but...that's me...now it's all - whatever works first...

...and when talking about sharing mutual knowledge and learning from it...

maybe something usefull comes from Scrypt-ASIC teams...and their open-source PCB's :
https://github.com/losh11/aura-asic

zefir

donator

Activity: 919

Merit: 1000

Quote from: jbcheng on February 21, 2014, 04:26:27 PM

hi Zefir
Our team also stuck on this part at the moment, Known you are quite busy, while would you please take some time and help to develop a version over a PIC? as this is a important step for multi modules integration. Thanks

Jbcheng

Hi,

'quite busy' is quite some understatement - I am out of this world for at least the next 4 weeks to finalize the SW for the CoinCraft products and clean up the mess I will have been left behind me until then.

I'd support the community as best as I can (like I have been doing so far), but working on another driver / FW now is completely out of reach for me.

But this is exactly the idea behind the open source DIY approach: stick together and share your potential. There are at least 20 projects working on something, and while at some point we all are competitors, we at the same time profit from cooperation. I know marto74 did his firmware for a PIC, as well as the WASP team is working on some framework for mining endpoints. There are also at least 2 teams working on a USB->SPI bridge approach. I'm pretty sure that if one party starts to publish their work on FW as open source, everybody else will join to be the second. It only takes one team to step up...

Cheers,
zefir

jbcheng

newbie

Activity: 40

Merit: 0

Quote from: zefir on February 21, 2014, 03:19:00 PM

Quote from: drinkmorecoffee on February 21, 2014, 02:22:22 PM

Quote from: -ck on February 20, 2014, 06:40:14 AM

Code merged into master cgminer, thanks.

zefir previously mentioned that cgminer has support for MCP2210-based boards (with USB comms to a PC rather than a RasPi). Does this merge now mean that a current-version build of cgminer will run the A1 chips direct from a PC, if the MCP2210 is included?

That would be sweet...

No, the current version runs exactly the CoinCraft Desk which is driven by a RasPi over its SPI interface. To make it working over MCP2210, one would need to wrap the SPI interface (which is abstracted over spi-context.c already) over MCP2210. Should be easy to implement, alas I currently am too busy so look at.

hi Zefir
Our team also stuck on this part at the moment, Known you are quite busy, while would you please take some time and help to develop a version over a PIC? as this is a important step for multi modules integration. Thanks

Jbcheng

zefir

donator

Activity: 919

Merit: 1000

Quote from: drinkmorecoffee on February 21, 2014, 04:00:39 PM

Very good, thanks for the quick reply. I've heard a couple comments that the RasPi is not suitable for this sort of thing, but hearing that it's used in the Desk product (a professional, commercial product) is reassuring.

I guess what you refer to is the known problem of the RasPi wearing out the SD-card if you run it over standard Linux system over long time - which I personally did not notice working ~3 months mostly compiling with continuous write access to the card.

To be on the safe side, the FW provided with the Desk is mostly read-only, i.e. it writes to the SD-card only on re-configuration, while everything else goes into memory mapped filesystems.

drinkmorecoffee

newbie

Activity: 58

Merit: 0

Quote from: zefir on February 21, 2014, 03:19:00 PM

Quote from: drinkmorecoffee on February 21, 2014, 02:22:22 PM

Quote from: -ck on February 20, 2014, 06:40:14 AM

Code merged into master cgminer, thanks.

zefir previously mentioned that cgminer has support for MCP2210-based boards (with USB comms to a PC rather than a RasPi). Does this merge now mean that a current-version build of cgminer will run the A1 chips direct from a PC, if the MCP2210 is included?

That would be sweet...

No, the current version runs exactly the CoinCraft Desk which is driven by a RasPi over its SPI interface. To make it working over MCP2210, one would need to wrap the SPI interface (which is abstracted over spi-context.c already) over MCP2210. Should be easy to implement, alas I currently am too busy so look at.

Very good, thanks for the quick reply. I've heard a couple comments that the RasPi is not suitable for this sort of thing, but hearing that it's used in the Desk product (a professional, commercial product) is reassuring.

Back to work!

Thanks again!

zefir

donator

Activity: 919

Merit: 1000

Quote from: drinkmorecoffee on February 21, 2014, 02:22:22 PM

Quote from: -ck on February 20, 2014, 06:40:14 AM

Code merged into master cgminer, thanks.

zefir previously mentioned that cgminer has support for MCP2210-based boards (with USB comms to a PC rather than a RasPi). Does this merge now mean that a current-version build of cgminer will run the A1 chips direct from a PC, if the MCP2210 is included?

That would be sweet...

No, the current version runs exactly the CoinCraft Desk which is driven by a RasPi over its SPI interface. To make it working over MCP2210, one would need to wrap the SPI interface (which is abstracted over spi-context.c already) over MCP2210. Should be easy to implement, alas I currently am too busy so look at.

drinkmorecoffee

newbie

Activity: 58

Merit: 0

Quote from: -ck on February 20, 2014, 06:40:14 AM

Code merged into master cgminer, thanks.

zefir previously mentioned that cgminer has support for MCP2210-based boards (with USB comms to a PC rather than a RasPi). Does this merge now mean that a current-version build of cgminer will run the A1 chips direct from a PC, if the MCP2210 is included?

That would be sweet...

totalslacker

newbie

Activity: 26

Merit: 0

Quote from: goodney on February 20, 2014, 05:18:02 PM

Have you been able to measure the current or power consumed by one chip at 800Mhz?

Not a super accurate measurement, but it looks to be about 20A. This is when the chip is around 40C as it gets hotter the current goes up (I was seeing around 22-24A at 60C). I do have the board instrumented so that I should be able to get more accurate results, I just haven't written code to look at that yet

Oh, this was with a core voltage of 0.84V. So looks to be pretty spot-on at 0.67W/GH at 25GH/s (assuming you have decent cooling).

Topic: [CLOSED] Bitmine CoinCraft A1 28nm chip distribution / DIY support - page 8. (Read 81190 times)