Topic: [CLOSED] - Stumptown Miners - Avalon PCB Assembly - West Coast USA - page 5. (Read 30685 times)

As far as I know you will be the first to test the new revision PCB hardware changes.
Seem a little strange TH or SB hasn't done this already.
Or if they have they haven't shared the results.
It is possible that some minor parts changes could be necessary to improve reliability and reduce HW errors.
But because no one has tested the new board and changes we just don't know for sure.
Thanks! Bogart! Thanks! ryepdx!

Hi all!

As you may know, Zefir's chips have been received. However, BkkCoins is not yet done with the firmware for the K16s. As it currently stands, we're the guinea pigs here. Bogart has volunteered the use of one of his boards to test the current K16 design and firmware, so we should be getting validation on that later today or tomorrow. If everything checks out, Colin will solder the remainder of the chips from Zefir's batch.

However, the PIC firmware does not currently allow for updating via USB, so I will be holding off on shipping anything until BkkCoins gets that part finished. If you are comfortable flashing updates to your PICs yourselves and want your miners shipped before then, please let me know. I just figure holding off is a good default option since flashing PICs requires special equipment and knowledge.

Thanks again for your support in this! Here's hoping Avalon gets the rest of our chips to us soon.

If I didn't already have a couple of K16's lined up with ryepdx I would sell my chips like many others have form the ragin buy


good to know that zefir's buy went through and boards made and shipping but not sure why ragin's got held up

All is quiet on that front, it seems. Ragingazn628 had a bout of depression following a death in the family, but he's back now. The chips haven't been sighted yet, though. It's possible that they're among the ones being held up in customs.

tldr;  What's going on with the ragingazn group buy?

I had some inquiries regarding that, and no, I'm not willing to do an additional run at this time. Components are just too scarce. With that said, I *am* willing to sell a few of my own complete miners. I'm working for an unfunded startup right now that can't pay me, so I'm looking to extend our runway a little bit by selling things off. (I've also got some 6990 video cards I'm selling, if anyone's interested in building a gaming machine.)

I've got 28 miners in this right now and I'm willing to sell up to 8 of them at $260 apiece at this time. (This includes chips.)


That said, those of you in Zefir's group buy should be seeing your miners shipping by the end of next week.

Hey Ryepdx;

I noticed in OP:


In light of the ragingazn628 group buy issue, have you considered doing an additional run for the stranded raging participants?

Hey guys, just posting again. I will have 6 chips left over and I'm looking to sell them to somebody looking to complete theirs. My chips are from zefirs batch 1 which has since been received by zefir. PM me offers looking to sell this ASAP.

I'm hoping it's due to the family emergency he mentioned. I'm hoping he shows up again to tell us what's going on before the chips ship to him. The natives are getting restless over on his thread and they're talking about maybe having the chips sent to someone else.

Ragin is AWOL..  i guess we picked the wrong horse in this race

Out of curiosity, does anyone have a timeline of the different group buys? Zefir, Ragin, et al? I'm part of Ragin's first group buy and would just like to get a rough feeling for the time lag between group buy orders.

May the odds be ever in your favor.

The first batch of Avalon chips have shipped!
http://imgur.com/YEi58QQ

Zefir received the first batch last night, repackaged them and is shipping them out from Germany today. Let the games begin!!

True facts. I had a feeling that components would be the bottleneck for most of the DIYers, and we're starting to see that a bit on the Klondike thread.

Steamboat does have QFN PICs in hand and has agreed to sell them to us at a reasonable price. He's going to be shipping them today, along with the heatsinks he's supplying us. I am quite grateful to him for stepping in and helping out when Microchip started stringing us along. Without his assistance, 59% of our miners would have been delayed until the rest of the PICs came in on August 21st, assuming Microchip didn't bump us again.

With everything ordered and either in Colin's hands or on the way, all that's left for now is to wait. :-)

BTW, these miners should be stackable, as I've decided to go with the right-angled molex connectors. Sorry I didn't discuss that particular point with you all before making the decision. I figure this will give us more configuration options, though. If any of you are interested in keeping your Klondikes stacked, let me know. I may look at sourcing some spacers and cables for shipping with the miners for those of you who want them and are willing to pay a little extra. (At this point, though, it looks like your partial refund should easily cover the cost, if that's the way you want to go.)

Microchip is the designer, they get their chips from a fab.  The problem is they plan production a long time ahead and, unless somebody tells them, they can't plan for blibs in consumption like this.  I can see them puzzling over why everyone is buying these chips, because of the open source nature of the project, the buyers will be all over the world buying hugely varied quantities.

This is very good to hear. I wish I had the confidence in ragingazn628 that I do in this group.

In my opinion: certainly pursue the Alibaba option (since it's probably cheaper) - but don't take their commit dates for granted.

If Steamboat has chips in hand, I would trust his offer much more than I'd trust something on Alibaba. Better to snap it up if he's made a reasonable offer - it'd be quite unfortunate to be stuck without PICs because somebody in China didn't ship on time.

If Microchip didn't come through, then Alibaba seems risky. That's probably where Microchip gets THEIR chips...

Thanks for the hard work ryepdx. Not that I'm wishing chip deliveries to be delayed, but it looks like there will be some time before some of our orders arrive. Hopefully that means you'll get the opportunity to build your hard earned miners

Things are starting to look better today. Yesterday I managed to get in contact with a vendor on Alibaba who said they can supply the chips within 7 to 10 days, and then later Steamboat messaged me to offer some of his chips. I think we're covered. If both of those fall through, then any K16s beyond the first 90 will be most likely stuck in the queue until August 21st, when the PICs from Microchip should finally come in.

I'll be putting my own order at the back of the line until we've got all the PICs we need. I think it's a business's duty to do whatever is in its power to make sure its customers are not left with the short end of the stick, and that's exactly what I intend to do here.

Turns out the vendor I was speaking to earlier (Newark) didn't even get my order in their system, despite the fact that I called about it several times throughout the day. The last guy I spoke to said someone bought their entire stock of PICs and, since my order wasn't even in their system, there was nothing they could do about it.

Again, I'm pretty pissed off about this. Not only has Microchip failed to deliver on the date they promised, but Newark's broken system and crappy customer support screwed us out of our chance to get them earlier than we would have with Microchip. So right now I'm going to be able to deliver 90 miners and then there's going to be a delay while we wait for Microchip to *finally* ship us our PICs. The projected delivery date as of now is August 21st. I'm going to be calling them just about every day to make sure that date doesn't slip again.

If any of you happen to hear of a way we can get our hands on a few PIC16LF1459-I/SS or PIC16LF1459-E/SS, please let me know. Or just buy them and I'll happily reimburse you. I want to get these miners hashing as soon as possible.

Alright, I called the vendor I mentioned earlier and talked to another customer representative. Their system is apparently broken, such that orders from their website were not registering, and there's apparently nothing they can do to route me around the damage. I tried to get him to escalate my call, and got told "it's a system thing and there's nothing we can do until we get the system fixed" about three or four times. He told me to call back later and maybe they'd have the system fixed, but that they couldn't help me until then.

The guy I spoke to also told me they were seeing lead times on that part well into September, so I'm glad I did not cancel my order with Microchip. I'm still very frustrated, given that there is about a month's difference between the shipping time I was promised and the shipping time I'm actually getting.

I'm going to call Microchip again and see if I can at least fix our place in line. I have a feeling we've been getting bumped in favor of bigger customers, based on some observations BkkCoins made to me in a recent PM. If I can't get our place in line fixed, then I'll see if I can find out if any of the customers we've been bumped by are resellers.