Topic: Community Miner Design Discussion - page 13. (Read 34275 times)
I dialed in on it a year ago - S1 chassis.
I went back and reread the first couple of pages but I imagine this may have been discussed/agreed on earlier.
Have you dialed in on exactly what old hardware these new hash boards are going to fit into? I'm sure the price is going to shoot up on whatever it is you decide on and I'd like to get my hands on a couple while they're still cheap.
Have you dialed in on exactly what old hardware these new hash boards are going to fit into? I'm sure the price is going to shoot up on whatever it is you decide on and I'd like to get my hands on a couple while they're still cheap.
$700 a month? That'd be nice. I haven't had a power bill that low in a year and a half.
and we complain about our normal 300 dollar bills just ruing 4 miners off and on thu out the month . lol
I like smart meters but hate them because i don't trust the power company because it has been off some times but i can't prove it but once i get the kill o meter im looking at install in my main panel I'll have the smart meter BS removed, i can keep better track of it and im getting quotes for solar for home to off set the power like a few here are, even if i have to rent it at first . anything is better then letting the power company control what i do with smart meters, they can, and do, no mater how much they say can't Ive heard story's others wise BE and G has shut off different parts of houses, because there bill was last or they didn't pay it one month with analog meters they can''t .i believe them more then the power company because of all the lame shit BG and E tries at times but Ive been very luckily so far . i know that.
yeah the game is changing to:
best power + okay gear = winner
more so then okay power + best gear = ?
Soon my 12.7 cents - 3 cents for heat savings = 9.7 cents home power goes to 16.7 cent + 2 cents for cooling = 18.7 cents May 1 or June 1
I forgot basically because I will be solar.
Last 3 years I would sell almost everything in March and April to get ready for summer power rates.
this year I will keep the compac sticks on PPC solo mining in my garage fr the late spring+ summer.
The rest will all be in the array.
best power + okay gear = winner
more so then okay power + best gear = ?
Soon my 12.7 cents - 3 cents for heat savings = 9.7 cents home power goes to 16.7 cent + 2 cents for cooling = 18.7 cents May 1 or June 1
I forgot basically because I will be solar.
Last 3 years I would sell almost everything in March and April to get ready for summer power rates.
this year I will keep the compac sticks on PPC solo mining in my garage fr the late spring+ summer.
The rest will all be in the array.
$700 a month? That'd be nice. I haven't had a power bill that low in a year and a half.
This is just an amazing project!
Can't wait to see/buy the final product.
Can't wait to see/buy the final product.
yes I held off filling the solar array. we have 13-16 k-watts of power for mining and right now I have 7 avalon 6's marked for it. 2 actually running 4 in my garage and 1 on a ups truck coming to my home as I type.
so that is 7 kwatts
this means buysolar and I will be looking to add 6 to 9 k- watts worth of this gear.
We are hopeful that we will have 22th avalon + 60th bitfury = 82th
By July 1
Now you have me looking at solar at least at home to offset my miners here (now ~3.9kw). At 15-cents/kWh - ouch.
Just got the bill for last month when I was running 6.5 kw of s7's here (for winter heating ya know), um we had many days over 65 here so my AC had to run to keep the house below 80F. $1,054 worth of owwie there... The upside to that is I think my furnace only came on 2-3 times over the winter so normal heating costs for the gas & electric to run the blower were near zero.
In looking around just found http://www.ecodirect.com/ who carry tones of goodies and - they take BTC.
Inverters, controllers, LED lights, you name it.Methinks I'll peruse their wares for a bit... I like the micro-inverter idea and prices look rather good. Hmm...
wow 15 cents I'm like 10 after fees my assnut power company is able to push in they are tiring to get 15 $ more a month in hearing last one i think is Friday then everyone has till the middle of next month to submit more info or bs proof . as to why they don't need it or do ,if they had there way here we all would be paying 700 dollar + bills each month no mater how much was used even with energy saving days in the summer, we also pay back in fees they don't explain well unless you call and hate to think what they would try to heavy users, if they had there way.so far ive been luckly the most i did last summer was 460 $ dollar with 3 engry saving days if i remember my total useage for that month was 2.9 k very small farm that actually paid for it self last year . so Ive been lucky but if all goes well with the new stuff im sure ill be hitting close to 4k each month but making enough to cover it then some till july at least .
This is just an amazing project!
Can't wait to see/buy the final product.
Can't wait to see/buy the final product.
yes I held off filling the solar array. we have 13-16 k-watts of power for mining and right now I have 7 avalon 6's marked for it. 2 actually running 4 in my garage and 1 on a ups truck coming to my home as I type.
so that is 7 kwatts
this means buysolar and I will be looking to add 6 to 9 k- watts worth of this gear.
We are hopeful that we will have 22th avalon + 60th bitfury = 82th
By July 1
Now you have me looking at solar at least at home to offset my miners here (now ~3.9kw). At 15-cents/kWh - ouch.
Just got the bill for last month when I was running 6.5 kw of s7's here (for winter heating ya know), um we had many days over 65 here so my AC had to run to keep the house below 80F. $1,054 worth of owwie there... The upside to that is I think my furnace only came on 2-3 times over the winter so normal heating costs for the gas & electric to run the blower were near zero.
In looking around just found http://www.ecodirect.com/ who carry tones of goodies and - they take BTC.
Panels, inverters, controllers, LED lights, you name it.Methinks I'll peruse their wares for a bit... I like the micro-inverter idea 'specially since they output 240VAC and prices look rather good. Hmm...
This is just an amazing project!
Can't wait to see/buy the final product.
Can't wait to see/buy the final product.
yes I held off filling the solar array. we have 13-16 k-watts of power for mining and right now I have 7 avalon 6's marked for it. 2 actually running 4 in my garage and 1 on a ups truck coming to my home as I type.
so that is 7 kwatts
this means buysolar and I will be looking to add 6 to 9 k- watts worth of this gear.
We are hopeful that we will have 22th avalon + 60th bitfury = 82th
By July 1
This is just an amazing project!
Can't wait to see/buy the final product.
Can't wait to see/buy the final product.
Oh yeah, also chig volunteered to help with the coding. So hopefully that need is met.
Good to hear the pieces keep falling into place.
"Are we there yet?!"
"Soon™"
Oh yeah, also chig volunteered to help with the coding. So hopefully that need is met.
Good to hear the pieces keep falling into place.
"Are we there yet?!"
Oh yeah, also chig volunteered to help with the coding. So hopefully that need is met.
...
IIRC your experience was 8051. This is not representative with respect to modern architectures like AVR or ARM. With those the difference between hand-coded assembly and C/C++ is about 10%-20% at most. And not always hand-coded assembly wins, especially on ARM.
...
IIRC your experience was 8051. This is not representative with respect to modern architectures like AVR or ARM. With those the difference between hand-coded assembly and C/C++ is about 10%-20% at most. And not always hand-coded assembly wins, especially on ARM.
...
This is because ARM has thumb mode, which does mad compression on code on a static manner, and can rearrange code blocks so you get large swathes of code compressed on thumb code.
At least according to those quotes, it looks like we agree on comms topology.
And like I said, there should still be plenty of code space for the not-a-whole-lot I intend to do on this micro. It's not gonna be like an AM Blade or Cube where I have an ethernet stack and stratum implementation built in. If there's enough RAM to buffer USB packets that get relayed out to the bus, it should be fine.
And like I said, there should still be plenty of code space for the not-a-whole-lot I intend to do on this micro. It's not gonna be like an AM Blade or Cube where I have an ethernet stack and stratum implementation built in. If there's enough RAM to buffer USB packets that get relayed out to the bus, it should be fine.
I have used SEEED for my nanofury boards..... it was a little wait but was by far the cheapest and their metal solder paste stencil was dirt cheap. They also give coupons that you can use on the next order, or at least I know I got one but it expired a few months ago.
I don't think any miner has ever used more than one port out of the micro. Most chips are daisy-chained; ASICMiner used address-decoded chip selects on a common SPI bus (which I really like). It looks like this and the previous generation of Bitfury chips use a comm multiplexer that probably only needs one bus connection to the micro and then breaks out a couple dozen data pairs that would each go to a single chip.
We had this discussion about a half-year ago:2) Star topology vs daisy-chain topology. On this I prefer star because the ICs need to be running at the edge of failure (thermal or noise), otherwise the project is not competitive.
2) I also prefer star over chain for comms.
I don't know exact circumstances of your decision-making and MCU-selection process. I'm not changing my opinion. To me daisy-chaining mining chips is still "tight" and "skating the edge of failure". Personally, I would never compete with Chinese by out-lame-ing their lame designs.
My experience with embedded was writing 8-bit assembler, where I did in about 65 bytes what the C compiler wanted about 1k to accomplish. Most of what this chip will have to do are interrupt-based timer routines, and relaying data packets back and forth. The only limitation might be RAM buffering USB data packets, but the clock is plenty fast and there's probably an order of magnitude more code space than should be needed.
IIRC your experience was 8051. This is not representative with respect to modern architectures like AVR or ARM. With those the difference between hand-coded assembly and C/C++ is about 10%-20% at most. And not always hand-coded assembly wins, especially on ARM.In my experience the C/C++ firmware gets abnormally big only when the programmer doesn't understand the toolchain: pulls needless library routines like malloc() or printf(), does unnecessary exception handling, etc.
I don't think any miner has ever used more than one port out of the micro. Most chips are daisy-chained; ASICMiner used address-decoded chip selects on a common SPI bus (which I really like). It looks like this and the previous generation of Bitfury chips use a comm multiplexer that probably only needs one bus connection to the micro and then breaks out a couple dozen data pairs that would each go to a single chip.
My experience with embedded was writing 8-bit assembler, where I did in about 65 bytes what the C compiler wanted about 1k to accomplish. Most of what this chip will have to do are interrupt-based timer routines, and relaying data packets back and forth. The only limitation might be RAM buffering USB data packets, but the clock is plenty fast and there's probably an order of magnitude more code space than should be needed.
My experience with embedded was writing 8-bit assembler, where I did in about 65 bytes what the C compiler wanted about 1k to accomplish. Most of what this chip will have to do are interrupt-based timer routines, and relaying data packets back and forth. The only limitation might be RAM buffering USB data packets, but the clock is plenty fast and there's probably an order of magnitude more code space than should be needed.
Not sure what you mean by tight. 50MHz with 2k RAM and 32KB code space is huge for what I need it to do.
It looks tight to me. But my experience with embedded systems is mostly related to medical-grade devices or with high reliability demands.Couple of weeks ago we've discussed daisy-chain versus star designs. With only 2 SPIs true star is doable for at most 2 mining chips.
I also look at it less from the production system angle and more from testing and qualification system angle. Personally, I would grossly overspec the MCU in first system to make sure that I can do serious reliability testing and essentially reverse-engineering the chip I/O protocol. Then in production I would use some pin-compatible MCU with much lower specs.
Or maybe design the board that the MCU could be tri-stated out of the real chip control and provide some pins to hook up external MCU with much better specs. Those pins could be left unpopulated in the shipping version to save costs.
Not sure what you mean by tight. 50MHz with 2k RAM and 32KB code space is huge for what I need it to do.
I moved sidehack's reply to this thread, because the original thread is going on back-burner.
They are about EUR20 in Europe, about USD18 in the United States.
LPC11U14 is now obsolete, replaced by LPC11U24, which is also soon getting obsoleted. They have a cute break-away debugging sub-circuit. It can be used to debug the included micro-controller or after breaking of can be used to debug an external board with similar compatible NXP micro-controller.
It is also supported by the free version of the LPCXpresso toolchain, no need to pay $500 for the full version. I took a quick look at the Avalon's firmware source posted on Github. They seem to be using Keil's toolchain which is very expensive. Edit: about USD5000, depending on the license details. Edit2: although Keil recently started supplying some free/subset version of their toolchain for very small chips, which I think this one will qualify.
It is going to be a tight on this MCU: 50MHz max clock, 24-32kB FLASH, 2kB RAM, 1 UART, 1 I2C, 2 SPI.
Novak chose an LPC11u23 ARM, which is USB-capable and has a variety of ports and ADCs. It's in the same family as the ARM on the Avalon Nano and Ava6 control board (which I believe is LPC11u14? Going from memory on all these part numbers). I've worked with 8051 programmed from Windows, but not ARM programmed from Linux. He had a Linux toolchain set up, and before he left I believe he shifted it over to one of the general shop machines rather than his own box. I figure on utilizing the USB bootloader supported by the chip, so I can write code to it without requiring extra hardware - that also makes firmware updates in the future more possible.
So, I reckon if someone is pretty good with ARM, and maybe also c for some cgminer drivers, and has time to work on it in the next couple weeks, let me know.
I would guess that Avalon designers had chosen LPC11U14 because of the popularity of Embedded Artists' cheap LPCXpresso development kits. http://www.embeddedartists.com/products/lpcxpressoSo, I reckon if someone is pretty good with ARM, and maybe also c for some cgminer drivers, and has time to work on it in the next couple weeks, let me know.
They are about EUR20 in Europe, about USD18 in the United States.
LPC11U14 is now obsolete, replaced by LPC11U24, which is also soon getting obsoleted. They have a cute break-away debugging sub-circuit. It can be used to debug the included micro-controller or after breaking of can be used to debug an external board with similar compatible NXP micro-controller.
It is also supported by the free version of the LPCXpresso toolchain, no need to pay $500 for the full version. I took a quick look at the Avalon's firmware source posted on Github. They seem to be using Keil's toolchain which is very expensive. Edit: about USD5000, depending on the license details. Edit2: although Keil recently started supplying some free/subset version of their toolchain for very small chips, which I think this one will qualify.
It is going to be a tight on this MCU: 50MHz max clock, 24-32kB FLASH, 2kB RAM, 1 UART, 1 I2C, 2 SPI.
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