Topic: FPGA development board "Icarus" - DisContinued/ important announcement - page 13. (Read 207285 times)

Hmm - well:
1) Where did you get that cgminer.exe from?
I've no idea who made it so I've no idea what code is in it.
2) There's a commit/patch for windows for Icarus that I've got in my git and has been sent to ckolivas that might fix that if it isn't in your version.
3) For now it's probably better to find who made that cgminer.exe and get them to build a non-BFL Icarus version (with that commit)

Some effort needs to be spent on BFL and Icarus (and I will be doing more Icarus stuff soon) but until ckolivas re-appears and starts putting the changes into his git I'm at a stand still there (for a bunch of lame reasons)

Is anyone else having this kind of a problem getting CGMiner to detect Icarus?

The answer to that question is a resounding NO. Well, at least not for me, but I'm not such a big baller so I only ordered a few.

Did Canada charge anything extra?

watchiing.

and much more durable than the original platform cable USB ii, the original one really sucks... 

Lol, not at all. It looks much like the original though. I didn't care if it wasn't original (as I said I expected it). But I was surprised that it looks like the original lol.

Good job!

They work fine. I have a sharp eye for details

start change to this heatsink for the last half of batch 3. 
they come too late, so the first half is using the old one. 

New heatsinks ?

 

hi, above.
if i tell you, that platform cable is one of my home made product, will you disappointed?

I just wanted to say THEY ARE HERE! lol

(yes, giddy like a kid on christmas). SUPER fast shipping from EMS to Canada. I was shocked actually.

The order of 17 Icarus boards that we bought for this batch, which was shipped on the 11th was delivered this morning!

First I'd like to say, FANTASTIC packaging job ngzhang! Very professionally and well packaged. Nicely done.

The package included each board wrapped in an oversized static bag, and sealed, and then 2 of those packages packed in a small box. Several of these boxes were then packed into a larger shipping box lined with bubble wrap.

In addition in one of the boxes there was 1 Icarus (since we had an odd number) along with the Xilinx platform cable and dev kit from ngzhang. (and I had suspected at first a "third party" platform cable, but in fact it's the original xilinx package).

In addition the box contained a healthy pile of power connectors/leads (I ordered these without the power bricks to cut down on shipping weight, and plan on powering the cluster from an ATX supply). And a big bundle of USB cables as well. Also several bags of assorted size brass standoffs was included as well.

I have to say, I'm thoroughly impressed!

Unboxing photos attached below (sorry for the bad pics, they were taken on my cell)
I'll post more pics of the finished cluster once I have it up and running

Of course no if I can buy it for reasonable price. It is easier for me to buy ready-to-go solution instead of developing one.
What is estimated development time of your carrier board?

hummm...

if i tell you we will develop a own mother-board far different form this one, will you be angry? 

My goal is to develop complete mining system for up to 16 Icarus boards, including carrier motherboard, CPU board, 350W PSU, fans, and fit it to rack mount case. There is nothing impossible, but using USB or RS-485 to communicate inside the rig is impractical at my point of view.
The CPU board will work under embedded linux and will be provided with precompiled cgminer and all necessary tools to compile your own application if needed. This is why I want to use something like 35$ Rasbperry board.

I really doubt that many users will want to set this platform just for mining. And it's obviously much more difficult to get.
Everyone already has at least one PC that can be used for this without any significant CPU load, also any old PC can be bought almost for free.

There are also many mini-ATX solutions based on Atom, VIA or even AMD. Just plug it in and use any OS, including Windows.

ngzhang, below is my proposal to interconnect Icarus boards inside the rig.

Initial conditions:

boards in the rig: up to 16 (4-bits address)
physical interface: SPI (four 3.3V or 5V TTL signals - MOSI, MISO, SCK, /SS, all parallel between all boards and the CPU)
protocol: TDM over SPI

Communication flow:

Master CPU asserts /SS signal each macrocycle to reset all internal FPGA counters to zero state.
On the falling edge of /SS the macrocycle has started.
Each macrocycle cosist of 16 TDM frames and has a length of 16*64*8=8192 SCK clock cycles.
For first TDM frame (512 clock cycles) master CPU transmits via MOSI 64 bytes work buffer for board #0, for second TMD frame - for board #1 and so on.
Board can return found 8 byte nonce to master via MISO at any 64 bit boundary of its TDM frame (at clock cycles 0, 64, 128, 192, 256, 320, 384, 448 for board #0), OR only at beginning of each TDM frame, if we do not care about small delays in results reporting. If it is nothing to return it returns all zeroes.

With SCK frequency 10MHz full communication macrocycle for all 16 boards will take about 0.82 ms.
Of course you can add additional registers (FPGA status register, FPGA temperature, command register, etc) to a TDM frame if needed. Also we can add a CRC word to each TDM frame to check workbuffer contents and so on.

Note: FPGA can drive MISO line only inside it's assigned TDM frame, otherwise it should be HiZ.
MISO line will be pulled up on CPU side, so if CPU reads all 1s from the MISO for full TDM frame therefore corresponding board is not connected to the slot.

Because it is 35$ ARM platform, possible working (who knows . Please advise me another cost-effective solution for command&control of FPGA boards.
I have several linux-based dev.boards on my desktop now (TI OMAP, Atmel's AT91RM9200, Atheros MIPS) but they all are over-sized and cost more than $300 each. 

@ngzhang    If it is simple and does a good job at investment protection, then great.

PHY spec for RS-485 is 32 Mbps at 10m and full-duplex using 4 wire.  

RS-485 is reliable and fast enough for mining.
But why would we even care about Raspberry Pi ?