Over sandwiches today (it is Tuesday after all) Novak and I talked over how to properly integrate the microcontroller for tertiary control (PWM fans, voltage and such) with minimal trouble, and power and topology considerations for a four-chip miner for pod sector. As much as it would be fun to build a board to fit into one (or more) of the popular pods (RK Box, U3, Gridseed 5-chip) I honestly lean toward just building a thing that'll attach to a generic CPU cooler and call it good. Why try to work within a set of custom-made geometries for someone else's product when you can work with a widely-distributed standard for off-the-shelf parts instead? As much as it'd be nice to reuse existing pod heatsinks, I think the best option for flexibility and reuse is to build around mounting a basic CPU cooler. Seriously, with a top-end dissipation of maybe 50 watts, even a crappy low-profile i3 heatsink would probably do the trick.
I'll probably focus on that board in the short term, and use some of our BM1384 one- and two-chip boards for testing the microcontroller integration. All of the digitals would transfer directly from the 4-chip pod to a 30-chip board; I've already got a good handle on the power systems and layout for the 30-chip board so if we can ever get some BM1385 samples to play with (I'm kinda leaning on PlanetCrypto to pull that off), probably after the S7 is in the wild, it shouldn't take long to accomplish something.
On reading this, I'm glad the 12 Chili miners with those Massive Evo 212 coolers are still living in the shed. They oh so nearly went onto Fleabay at a fiver each.
