Topic: GekkoScience BM1384 Project Development Discussion - page 14. (Read 146656 times)

We've done preorders for two products so far, the first batch of DPS2000 PSU boards and the first batch of Compacs. The DPS2000 boards started shipping I think 7 days behind schedule, but the PCBs arrived from the etch house 9 days late (2 days after our product's ship date). The Compac started shipping 10 days late, but the pick-and-place arrived about 50 days late (seven days after our product's ship date) and the heatsinks arrived 14 days late (three days after ship date).

I don't like taking in money on things I can't deliver immediately or awful close to it. But sometimes it's necessary to get enough cash in hand to buy parts for a full batch.

The problem I'm running into right now is having enough money to fund the development process. I really don't want to take on debt for that. Hopefully I can get everything working in short enough time and when sales on 750W PSUs and Compacs are doing good that we aren't put in a bind.

Also, the rough numbers we're looking at right now would put an S1-sized miner at 28 chips, about 4TH topend.

I don't like taking in money on things I can't deliver immediately or awful close to it. But sometimes it's necessary to get enough cash in hand to buy parts for a full batch.

Sound a bit convoluted since the proper way to do it would not to be to donate but do pre-orders ahead of time, imo.
You could go wild and go a kickstarter and start yelling about it on roof, and it might get sidehack money, maybe even more money than he bargained for but then we'd have competition on buying all this stuff and since i'm selfish and all, i'd rather keep all the stuff to myself

I like the kickstarter idea.

$0.2/GH is going to be hard to hit, I think. The best thing going right now is the S7 and that sells at what, about 38 cents per? I know prices are going to drop as more stuff appears, and I'll do the best I can but twenty cents is a hard target. That's about what a year-old S3 is selling for right now.

The $/GH on the stick, I've said it before and I'll say it again it's the best ever $/GH for a stick miner and I can't make it any cheaper. I know you're not complaining, but I'll reiterate the fact regardless. Something like a pod with about eight times the hashrate and only three times the price, I'd like to see that get going but my guys tell me it wouldn't sell either. I just have to wait and hope SPTech can come through for us with chips and I can do something good with 'em, and in the meantime keep selling Compacs and PSUs.

Regarding something community-funded, I do believe one of Kickstarter's rules for a hardware project is you have to have a working prototype before running the campaign. They'll fund manufacture but not development. I like that rule, and we try to run the same way. The first step on the path to BFL is conning someone else into funding your development. Well the first step on the path to BFL is apparently hiring known scammers to run your business, but the second step is getting folks to fund your development.

I don't know about doing TypeZero boards and a pod concurrently. The pod would come first since I'd much rather have something small and less complex to work on as far as ironing out control systems and multi-chip comms. The only real difference between the pod and the full-scale board would be chip count and probably a beefier power system, but all the digitals would transfer straight across so there wouldn't be much time between a pod and the full-size boards. I can work on non-control parts of the big boards while waiting on prototype parts to assemble and test the small boards.

If I had the money from a single typical vaporware scam sale (not even the whole scam, just a single customer's purchase) I could probably afford dev for the entire project.

The pod board would not be designed for S1 compatibility. They'd be two separate PCBs.

If we get far enough into pod to make it viable, I've been needing to talk to a couple people that shipped me a few cases of Freezer 7 coolers last year for about fifty Technobit Minion boards that never got shipped. The coolers are still sitting in boxes on my hosting shelves, been there over 13 months by now. I could look into buying them off the guys and making that an optional sale alongside a pod PCB.

I think four chip is going to be easiest to wrangle, which leaves a 500GH top-end for the pod. I say top-end but until I get some actual chip data beyond the one operating datapoint Spondoolies has on the SP50 product page I don't really know. Could be higher, could be lower, but I don't want to build more than about 100W into it. A decent air cooler should be good for 100W. That might mean five chips but I don't have enough info yet so we're talking over various configurations of four chips. I've talked to Novak about building it to sell in the $200 range, so a 1BTC price point I'm preliminarily confident is doable.

I'm not too much on package design, but if someone wants to volunteer to help, I can share mechanical specs as they get ironed out.

If I build something bigger than the S1 scale, it'll probably be something along the lines of the rack machine that was being discussed in another thread, using seven or eight of the same boards. I'm not sure my little shop is up to the task of designing and manufacturing a whole product line of electronics quite yet, but a pod and the TypeZero board in various configurations should meet most needs between 50W and about 2500W. I don't feel like competing in the 1200W Jet Turbine or 17KW Shipanchor market sectors.