Topic: Next consumer model miner - page 3. (Read 8926 times)

I think they are only ones looking into a small miner.  Seems to be a smaller market.

I will be excited to see Gekko's miner, I'm hoping it all goes well with making it.

Le bumpage.

Anyone else out there looking to do the next small thing other than Gekko?

I'm very much in favor of reusing existing chassis with updated boards. Saves home miners a ton on shipping costs and also saves us having to do the mechanical design and contract out heatsink manufacture and stuff. All in all it means a less expensive end product, and who doesn't like that?

The holdup on the Chuckwagon right now is efficiency and current monitoring. I've got parts inbound for measuring output current, which I can use that current measurement to change up the buck drive a bit to increase low-end efficiency, and then change it up again to increase high-end efficiency. Once that works on the existing test board, we can throw together several boards and test a multiphase interleaved design. Hopefully it doesn't take too long to get it ironed out. But we ended up working half the weekend and all day yesterday and half of today making D750 boards to get caught up on orders, and we'll have to do it again probably Friday, so no guarantees. But the Chuckwagon is priority, definitely to be finished before any TypeZero boards are prototyped and well before we think about a Prisma refit.

bolded with I want to test that out.

A nice idea  1.1th to 2.4th  300w to 1000w

So someone working on the wiki just asked for BM1384 pictures. Guess I'll have to do that tomorrow then. Also I think we have enough info to start work on a test single-chip board to start getting software ironed out. After that it's only a few stages to a test string/matrix and a working full design. Tomorrow will be a miner day (tentatively named the TypeZero) but after that I'll have to get back to the inline regulator project (tentatively named the Chuckwagon) because the prototype's been overdue for weeks because of various "this doesn't work, what the heck", "where did our R&D budget go" and "being really busy sucks" type problems. But progress is being made.

One of these days I'll start an actual dev thread for the TypeZero, and one of these days I'll have a Chuckwagon prototype for Philipma to play with. Only been promising him one since about Christmas.

But if what we want to do is possible (and affordable, and we get enough money to actually make a batch) we'd be looking at what amounts to an S1 Upgrade kit to the tune of 1.3TH <600W, which can software-underclock/volt (using cgminer flags) to a 600GH ~160W miner. Or the boards can be run individually as ~300GH 150W units clockable down to 150GH <50W and run off a brick, which if you add a quiet 120mm fan could make a pretty decent Jalapeno-formfactor desk miner. Boards would be USB-connected to a controller, so each "S1" would require a 4-port hub but several should run off one host (Pi or whatever). That's the goal, anyway.

If we were able to pull it off, how many folks would be interested in a Prisma chassis refit? I'd shoot for the same power draw (~1KW) at stock settings, so if it scaled directly with the current idea's expected limits you'd have a range from 2.4TH@1KW to 1.1TH@300W.

Its cool I can wait.

Sorry, today's primarily a "manufacturing D750 boards" day so we can ship orders out. I probably won't even be able to play with power stuff for the board until Wednesday at the earliest, and I'm not sure how long it'll be for Novak to have even a one-chip test board to play with code.

The community is just really excited to see some new mining hardware

Why? It's just a little plastic bag with a cut-tape strip of chips in it and some labels written in Chinese. Maybe once we have a sample board with one or two chips on it working I'll have something worth photographing.

pictures pleaseeeee!

BM1384 sample chips have arrived. Snazzy.

Looking forward to it.  I have an old S1 that I'm still running, as well as a couple U3s, so I would be someone in your target audience.  Good luck with this project, hope to have one of your boxes in my home mine soon.

Home miners depend entirely on either the main producers catering to that market, or at least sending out chips to third parties.
Those third parties might fail miserably, or the price might come out too high, etc.  But at least they'll try.

For that reason, I commend Bitmain for sending off some samples of the BM1384 to sidehack.

In other news, SFARDS has finally gone public on their next BTC/LTC chip, claiming tapeout.  Remains to be seen what they'll do with that.

I'm on that thread last I heard they'd like to ...but have no way at this point how they would get it to fly...just may not be feasable...at least as a home miner and
any hosting option would likely be way to expensive for ave buyer from the past

not a slam ..correct me if I'm wrong (so want to be wrong and see another possible "reasonable chance of roi" home miner either bitcoin or scrypt)

problem is if btc or ltc price pops up and it looks releasable for a home miner (5-7 months down the road to develop and on sale) then this also applies to
data halls looking at the same price pop upward and same timeline (5-7 months) so by the time both the home miners and data hall units hit the market
the home miner buyer would again be buried by 'difficulty skyrocketing' etc

again correct me if i'm wrong but so far can't see this idea of a home miner 'in the air' so to speak
 

I probably will at some point. I'll have to talk with Novak tomorrow about size/power targets, firmware code, and a few other things. We've had two big jobs fall on us in the last week or so that are going to keep us busy so hopefully we'll be able to budget enough time on this to get something going soon. I'm afraid this is going to be another one of those nights where I only sleep about four hours because I can't stop rolling the numbers around in my head. It's productive, but annoying.
Depending on what we decide tomorrow could make things run quicker, or make them wait for another project or two to come to fruition. I'm a bit torn over which is the better option right now so conferring is good.

@sidehack...It will be nice to follow this. Are you gonna start a thread so we
can follow your progress??? Goodluck!!!

I'm hoping to make something which can run quiet and fairly low power, something Jalapeno-style which is more powerful than a USB stick but not S1/S3 caliber. I got ahold of some New R-Box last week for repairs and that type thing is pretty good, but I'd like if it could run off a decent brick as an option instead of requiring a 6-pin PSU; that'd make it a bit more desk-friendly. I know bricks tend to have terrible efficiency, but with a 20V input rating on the regulators you could use a decent laptop brick. I'm pushing for 95% on the regulators instead of a current typical efficiency of 85%.
I want to make the clock and core voltage dynamically adjustable from cgminer command-line flags. Run the thing as a native USB-tethered device, and put as wide a clock/voltage range as possible on it so you could crank it up to full speed/power or turn it way down to silent and super efficient mode.
If the board is modular and practical enough, several could be put in a larger case for scaling to larger setups. I'm not sure how practical it'll be but I'm hoping we can work out building something that'd mount to an S1 chassis, basically I'd just have to ship you four bare boards and you could make your own approximately-S5 out of it (requiring a small USB hub and controller of course, like a Pi with cgminer). That's the dream, anyway.

I haven't put up a lot of details but Bitmain's rep says they're also looking forward to the project and "would like to support the good thing which is good for the bitcoin community" so here's hoping it doesn't crash and burn. Gekkoscience has always fought for the small miner, and if we can make this project happen affordably it'll be a good solid victory I think.

Very interesting. Looking forward to following your efforts.

Also, just throwing this out there - Dogie got me an email address for someone at Bitmain and it looks like they're gonna be handing off some sample BM1384 chips so we can start prototyping that. I actually was working on the prototype power circuits earlier today and hope to have it fairly ironed out by tomorrow afternoon. Pretty cool.

The model I'm currently looking at would probably have a 15V input limit. I was hoping for 20V input because a simple one-board quiet desk miner would be great for home users to play with and would run off a decent laptop brick. The requirement to keep 12V at 12V would be removed entirely from this board and input voltage variations between the listed upperbound and lowerbound would have very little effect on operating efficiency - maybe a 3% W/GH variation across the band.