Topic: Nanominer - Modular FPGA Mining Platform - page 7. (Read 18944 times)

I know it sounds a little funky, but there are a number of optimizations I've been able to achieve, and of course that quoted number *is* an estimate, it may be lower but that still provides us with new levels of FPGA power in BitCoin mining.
Addidionally, the DE4 is a monster that is only partially fulfilling its potential.  When a second iteration of nanominer comes out, I'll implement DSP cores on the higher-end FPGAs and that will give incredible performance leaps.
I'll assure everyone that the project is in full swing, and I've had some donations, so hopefully in the near future I'll put up some screenshots.  Any delay is because I'm literally writing everything, including the SHA-2 core, from scratch.
I'll keep the thread updated, and I'm always happy to answer questions, just PM me.

And special thanks to all those who have donated, it's not in vain.

Sincerely,
Glendon aka "wondermine" aka "nonverba"
(could I get my forum name changed to "nonverba"...?)

on the site they promise 75MHASH from a device that so far was able to give just 25MHASH
looks suspicious to me...

As like many of us don't have much time to spend on going through huge configuration and testing sessions I would like to ask if there will be a 'out-of-the-box' version for us dummies?

Just plug into USB or whatsoever and go!

Jabba

Apologies for originally calling "scam" on this project.

I am tempted to help out. The DE0 nano seems like a great entry level FPGA. If I can get 30MHash or so out of it I will definitely purchase some.

@gmaxwell
Thx ! I cant wait to see those screens of nanominer working !!
This should be verry intresting.

Correct me if i`m wrong: 2mhash/1$ ? nice

This thread was locked, but I couldn't figure out why— no closing message nor anything I could find in the staff forum. People complained to me so I've unlocked it. I apologize if I've missed something obvious. Cheers.

I think I found the product:)

http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&CategoryNo=139&No=593&PartNo=1

Cool little device!!!!!

So wondermine,you will have the miner interface for this?? What a great idea!!! I'll pitch some coins your way for the interface when you show results

Hopefully they will have a warranty,no other FPGA offered has any warranty except BFL

I cant justify $500+ with no recourse for repairs or exchange if something breaks due to no fault of my own.

from a bit of searching on google looks like your 25Mhash is a world record for the DE0-nano
most people rate it at ~10Mhash (old posts from last year or something like that)

Wow. 75 Mhash/sec is fairly impressive for a DE0-nano if you can pull it off. I've got one sitting on my desk mining away and have only managed to get it to 25 MHash/sec - and that's using the entire FPGA, some slightly mind-warping optimizations, and a whole bunch of luck. (The Altera toolchain actually reckoned this'd use more resources than the FPGA had available.) Plus I had to upgrade the cooling and power regulation circuitry and power it off a wall-wart rather than USB to get that. The stock DE0-nano uses linear regulators for everything, which means that for every milliwatt the core consumes three times as much power is dissipated by the voltage regulators as heat.

Speaking from personal experience, I tend not to count anything as working until its shares are being accepted. It tends to be the most thorough test.

I spent some time talking to wondermine in private on IRC.   He shared his uni email address with me— I don't see that there is any reason to think there is overt scamming going on here (especially with the use off the shelf development boards).

That said— it's always good to be skeptical— the performance he's seeing isn't consistent with what other people have gotten on Altera, and a high apparent hash rate with rejected shares could be the result of an honest bug reporting all the nonces as shares.   "Extraordinary claims require at least ordinary proof"

Certainly there is plenty of room for improvement in HDL for FPGA miners. This is an area of work that should be encouraged (especially if the results will be opened up!) and we shouldn't let our prudent skepticism get in the way of that.

Just as an extra FYI, it was my idea to ship the bundled hardware rather than his. I felt that people would benefit from having "plug n play" hardware.

This is a project that I'm taking on in addition to university as well as a number of other large commitments.  This week has been reasonably quiet and has given me the chance to start playing with BTC mining firmware, so yes, the domain was registered recently.
I didn't realize it was in such bad form to ask for money for a project off the bat; I'm used to communities like IndieGoGo where the idea is you crowdsource and do exactly that, ask for support right away.
Additionally, me reselling FPGAs/controllers for a meager markup on my site perhaps wasn't the best way to glean confidence, but I thought it might be helpful.  If you don't have confidence in my ability to ship you bundled hardware then don't buy hardware from me, it's readily available online, and it doesn't exclude you from buying my core.  The hardware bundling was just to make it simpler for people.
All that said, this is obviously a very different community than IndieGoGo etc, and I don't mind changing the way I think about things a little.

So...

Apologies for being what is evidently too forward.  The reason I'm asking for support is this project isn't going to get off the ground without it, and I like this idea.
If your lack of confidence stems from a technological issue; i.e. you don't believe I can get the rate I claim, I'm happy to discuss why I'm saying certain numbers and what my methodology is. These rates are not written in stone, but are estimates based on what I've been seeing with my own FPGA running heavily modified fpgaminer.  The new core will perform better.
If the lack of confidence is from me having a page written in hastily coded PHP (no, I don't have time for a big production of a website), or a domain name that I registered in the last few days, then I guess you'll have to wait and see if this project yields anything.  Unfortunately in the case that most people "sit back and watch", it's a catch-22, and this won't get off the ground.
Thanks for reading.

(P.S. I don't mind if there's a link to the whois, or a portion of it, but honestly, it's a little long and gives this thread a tl;dr sorta feel, mind editing that...?)

If your worried about rep. Just google my name, check my DNS whois. It's all there. I'm very stalkable (Please, no unfriendly stalking). Some of you may have seen me in the IRC channel, I don't frequent the forums very much, but I'm in IRC.

My DE0 Nano arrived today, here's a photo.

I can confirm that I had "something" on my pool doing 4+GH/sec by my math, and from my long talks with wondermine he seems legit.
Also, yes the website is new, he set it up specifically to host the nanominer project. I was around while he was doing that

All that said, anything like this is going to come with a certain amount of risk, that much is obvious. Myself, I think that if he was trying to scam people, there are better ways than asking for $10 donations on the bitcoin forum. I've put my money where my mouth is and I've donated ($20), and gone and bought a DE0. Personally I think this is going places. I could end up looking stupid, or I could end up on the front of a FPGA revolution. For $10? It's totally worth the gamble in my opinion. But ultimately that's up to you

You're right with the thread jail, Costia. Sure could be useful to sanitize the forum whilst keeping old scam attempts visible to the general public.
Naturally, OP and his supporter have been reported and account access check-up has been requested.

this forum needs a scams sub forum - so all the confirmed scams can be moved there

Looks too good to be true... so it probably is.

Haha! Not looking good!

also, Azelphur, the guy who confirms he has a rig - was inactive since june and returned to the forums right on time.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/scam-alert-old-accounts-coming-back-61500

That's good to hear. Maybe this is a terrible launch, or it's a scam. It could of been better to get the conversation going and give more information instead of starting off asking for money. Both of the 2 post he has, is him asking for $10/3btc to get on his boat... Pretty terrible way to start a project.

We'll see where this goes.

To be fair I don't understand CSS it's way after my time.

When I spoke to wondermine it's not like he was forcing his FPGA solution on me.  I plan on purchasing the core probably by the end of the week and ordering a board through a retailer.  He suggested other types of FPGA's that I could use and where to purchase them and other possible solutions.  In fact to purchase the nano board from him pre-configured isn't a horrible deal considering it's actually cheaper through him if you consider the shipping from the retailer.  Granted having photos of it going would be nice and I still have my suspicions however from the sounds of it I'm the only person who actually got in contact with him.