Topic: FPGA Mining Contract - page 19. (Read 38737 times)

Has anyone considered forming a research group as a non-profit and ask for some chip sample of some hardware?
The rules are pretty simple and easy. Basically, we cant use the chip its self in a item for sale. We can however use that chip in the design or a demo unit to show and test applications. Detailed information regarding the projects using donated and sample hardware would have to be detailed, but would totally be worth it.

Companies will give out products like this. 3M over years has sent boxes to my door without even letting me know what it is until I open it and find its a resistor kit with some advancement, or sheets of polycarb with only a paper saying thank you and not to resell.

I have workshop commcial space in Southern California near LAX, if anyone is interested in building a hardware  building club related to FPGA and other hash/bitcoin based hardware, I would be willing to provide the work/meeting spot.

haha, i see. Just something i came across and thought it might be interesting

We have been discuss this in another topic. This chip costs 30.000$ So, propably we will never see it in our whole life

I'm not the most technical with this but i thought this might be interesting....

http://semiaccurate.com/2011/10/25/xilinx-sets-new-fpga-record/

Yeah, that seems like a major flaw with the web client. In the future, I'll remember to put in the asset name.


Good idea! Right now, the plan is as follows:

1) The next week or so should be spent ironing out the software and setting up a robust mining operation with failover, public monitoring, etc.

2) Get a few more prototype boards built and mining. We already have a few extra PCBs from the prototype run so this can be done more quickly than it will take to get the large order finished and shipped to customers who have pre-ordered. This is important to test the stability of a multi-board system. I hope to have these in about 2 weeks, maybe slightly longer.

3) Get the rest of the boards made. These will be a part of the mass produced order we expect to start in about a week. The finished boards should arrive back here about 3 weeks after that, or 1 month from now.

4) Assemble the system and turn it all on! Lots of photos will be in order at that point, as well as a celebratory beer, I'd say.

The finish line then appears to be in 4-6 weeks (to be conservative) to get the system mining at full capacity. Until then, I'll be distributing all earnings we get, however small. I'm making no promises of repeat bonus dividends like that first one, but who knows!

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/806/how-do-i-develop-web-applications-for-bitcoin

I've been getting a lot of questions from people that are confused by GLBSE's unusual web site. I can't seem to find a definitive guide to this anywhere, so I'll write it up here.

Here are the steps to create an account and purchase shares on GLBSE.

Create an account in the web client.
The web client can be found at https://glbse.com/client/glbse/index.html
1) On that page, create a password and you will then be logged in to the client.
2) On the Account Management page, click "Register a new account."
3) Enter a name for the account and click "Generate new key pair" at the bottom.
4) Click "Register." You'll then be taken back to the Account Management page.

Login to the account.
From the Account Management page, click "Use" next to your new account.

Buy the shares.
1) You can look up the outstanding sell offers to get an idea of the share price. You can also make a lower bid. To look at the orders for an asset, click "Asset" on the left side. Enter the asset ID, which is the ticker code for the asset. Ours is FPGA.contract, and this is case-sensitive. A good place to look for historical prices is the charts page: http://charts.glbse.com/markets/
2) After deciding on the price you will offer and the number of shares you want, you need to deposit some BTC. Click "Deposit" on the left side and send some BTC to the address shown. There are no fees to deposit or to buy shares, so you can send the exact amount you will need.
3) I believe it will wait for 6 8 confirmations before the balance will show up in your account.
4) When the funds are available, click "Buy" on the left side. Enter the asset ID, the number of shares you want, and the price per share you are willing to pay.
5) Click the "Buy" button.
6) You can then check on your order by clicking on "Order" on the left side.

Backup your account.
The next thing to do is to export your account to somewhere safe, because it is not saved on the GLBSE server.
1) Click on "Account List" to go back to the Account Management page.
2) Click "Export Accounts."
3) You can copy the text shown to a file on your computer, but I recommend you first encrypt the text. Click "Encrypt" at the bottom and enter a password.
4) Paste the text into a plain text file on your computer.
5) If you want to access the account from other computers, you will need this file the first time you do this. I recommend emailing the file to yourself so that you can easily access it from anywhere, and to keep a back up offsite.

Please let me know if I left anything out or you have any other questions!

Edit: Fixed the number of confirmations. Thanks, Arsen!

I want you to publish road map (which tasks should be done in which order) and main milestones.
When boards will be purchased, when farm will be physically assembled, when software will be set up, when operation starts, when additional miscellaneous works will be done.

I saw this motion on glbse. Unfortunately that web interface doesn't seem to tell you which Asset the motion relates to

I agree, as well. I especially like 8 because it's an even number. Let's wait until we settle how to release this additional 500 shares, then we can begin a new motion for an extra board. I thought the 500 shares would be a no brainer, because what will we do with a fraction of a board, but this is a democracy, so we need to agree on what to do (at least 2/3s of us do).


What I'd really like to do is set up a public monitoring page which pulls from the API for whatever pool(s) the system happens to be mining at. This is what I did for my GPU rig originally, so it wouldn't have to be completely from scratch. I'll definitely have this up and running by the time the full system is built.

For now, you can see the hashrate on the http://www.nmcbit.com/statistics under user 'fizzisist.'

thanks for the info. can I check the balance/hashrate there, too?

did mining stop? http://eligius.st/~artefact2/5/1FPGAxkfHskMq9fg2gbAWhPrnqwXydbX93

I don't understand the difference between
issuing more shares to buy 7-th FPGA and
issuing more shares to buy 7-th AND 8-th FPGA.

If the design allows to attach more cards, why not to add them up to complete initial design ?

I hear that the limit is around 128 usb devices for one computer

So, I want to see the thing in operation for some time,
and then to invest in more FPGA-s (might be much more than just 1..2).

I agree, but I also understand the desire to wait until the vote is more definitive. The current tally is 4418/361. This is 86.8% of shares voting, and I'm sure CNN would call it for the yeas at this point. Still, I want to give more people the chance to chime in with an opinion about the share price before I go and do anything rash. I'll check in on it again later today.

Thanks for the tip about btcserv. I switched to nmcbit as of now. I'll try to get merged mining on Eligius going tomorrow, as well as set up mining proxy. I never had the need for that with my little GPU rig before. I always just relied on a a few cron jobs to make remote monitoring easy, but it would be better to have a more reliable fail over setup for this system. This also gives me the chance to thoroughly test the mining software, which is still very alpha.

Once a price per share is decided I don't think it makes any sense to wait until the end of November to issue the shares since the vote has passed.  It doesn't make sense to wait a month to bring the additional mining hardware online, and based on the market trades there is some demand for the shares.

I think $0.26 is a fair price...close to the 12h moving average, rounded up.

I haven't used BTCserv, but if they have payout problems that could be a problem for us.  If we are looking for a way to convert the mined namecoins to BTC easily, the nmcbit.com pool has a button in the interface to cash out NMC to BTC automatically.  It might save you a step in the process, and I haven't had any problems getting payouts from them.

Slush's pool also good, and support merged mining

Btcserv is nice small pool but they have problems with payment. I'm waiting over 1 week for my 3 BTC. Becuse this round last almost 15 days the buffer was drained... They don't have enough hashing power to solve blocks quickly and resupply buffer. So it's better to get back to eligius.

That's great!

Now we are lookingreading forward to the information about farm building progress.

This is a good point. I'll wait for now, especially because the price per share isn't settled yet.

In other news, I moved the mining to btcserv.net because of the high PPS offered (due to merged mining). The fact that it only pays in BTC eliminates the need for the NMC->BTC conversion. This simple move increased our earnings by 13%.