Topic: Community Miner Design Discussion - page 24. (Read 34221 times)

It seems that this project is suffering by comparison to WASP.  It also is apparent that people think we are time crunched.  Sidehack and I have been discussing this project for about 4 months and only now have the stars lined up for us to start moving forward.

This is NOT WASP - We are not asking for 1 penny. There is ZERO financial risk to any community member.  Sidehack has a great track record and will not release anything that is done half ass nor would any other person involved in the project.

As far as I know I am bank rolling this project with the intention of it being open source and making miners available to the community.  There are no deadlines, there is no roadmap and there is no business plan.  The objective is simple:

Produce a miner that is affordable and efficient to allow home miners to continue to mine bitcoins. 

I have spoke with a lot of people about ASICS for the project and have received promising responses. A lot of that info I am unable to discuss presently but Will as soon as I am able to do so.

I appreciate all the responses on this thread and I am excited about the project.

I'm really not sure what you're talking about. We're definitely moving away from S7, and nobody has mentioined doing anything at all with S7 so far. No chipsinks, no 3 boards per machine, no reusing boards or chips.

Also, remember that "lessons learned by the WASP project" bit from the first page? Coordinating 20-30 engineers "even on different continents" would be a disaster. The thing is not that complex and doesn't need that many people bickering and wasting time.

What my basic plan is, is to use a basic USB-capable AVR microcontroller as a board-level brain. The chip Novak liked had a decent array of IO bus, including UART, SPI and I2C. We can interface to sensors and controls using I2C, use GPIO for fan speed, and interface to ASICs on UART or SPI.

I'm in the same boat for my electricity price I got rid of all older generation miners.  I felt it was best to sell and buy BTC vs mining when I did calculations I came out with more BTC this way.

So I would have to buy them for this.  And chances are as soon as you say X miner it fit's parts miners take a jump in price on that model.   It might not be possible but I would love to see a complete miner without using other miners gut's cases.  And that might be to hard of a feat when keeping prices low I do realize that.

But best of luck with project.  

Very exciting project...thanks

Just a side note: Personally, i don't have S1, S3 or S5-had all three types, but sold them off as they became obsolete.
Buying used S3 or S5 again just to fit the new board?
Miner might have higher demand than boards, but I might be mistaken.

A miner which can be volt-adjusted has a much longer viable lifetime. The BM1384 chips on the S5 could be run down to 600mV and 0.25J/GH versus the 800mV/0.45J/GH setting of the S5. If the machine was undervoltable it could run as efficient as an S7. Sure you'd only see 500GH at that setpoint, but that's not bad for something you paid for a year ago and it's probably already paid off. Look how long the SP20 was around - some are still around, because you could run it hot or run it cold. When did that come out, October 2014?

I don't like the idea of designing a board for a specific controller, because then either I have to make that controller or design around one that already exists (in which case you have to have one or get one). And then you limit the software to using exactly that controller, especially if you're using low-level IO. I'd much rather put the extra $2 in parts directly onto the board to make it more generic, able to connect and run off anything with USB and cgminer. If the software and hardware package is going to be generalized or in any way reusable, that is a mandated requirement. Why build a reusable framework that requires you to hook up to a Pi, when some folks would rather have something that hooks up to a Cubie or an old XP laptop? I can find no convincing reasons to settle on that arbitrary limitation when it's no more difficult to make it a lot more flexible. And then if you wanted, you could hub a dozen boards together and run them off a single controller instead of requiring a Pi for every 2, or 4, or whatever.

Heck, with that flexibility, the same controls framework for the TypeZero boards could be used on a pod or a stickminer as well.