Topic: Official Avalon mining rig clones thread from bitmine.ch (NOW SHIPPING) - page 19. (Read 58539 times)
June 02, 2013, 08:15:20 PM
Hi,
am i right that the actual batch has no watercooling?
Greets
ImI
June 02, 2013, 06:17:23 PM
Yes, I was there. A detailed report of my visit will follow later today, I just got out of bed.
I arrived at home at 4:30 h in the morning.
There is quite a bit of stuff to write up.
Stay tuned!
one4many
Hi one4many,
Thanks for your great review, enjoy your holidays then and let's see us again when you get back!
Great news, Giorgio (&co)! And don't forget to fix the "3.3V/5V" HW bug (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140539.980) 
Thanks for pointing that out! It's already fixed in our current 1.0 clone boards
Might want to rethink that water block design. I saw a similar one proposed somewhere on the forums and it got torn to shreds, IIRC. Something about head pressure. I'll see if I can find it...
Ok please PM it to me so that I can take a look.
Why do you produce in Italy and not in Switzerland at Escatec or Variosystems?
because the business relationship with them is stronger, we were already working with them from several years
Could you not ship the final product from Italy then? This would save on import duties and tax for EU buyers.
Only manufacturing of the electronic parts is done in Italy, final assembly and tests are done here. Even if we could, we would have to sell it by adding italian VAT which is 21% now and 23% very soon, not really a good deal.
June 02, 2013, 06:07:26 PM
Scams are getting better and better...
Congratulations on this one, I almost ordered one.
Congratulations on this one, I almost ordered one.
June 02, 2013, 06:01:13 PM
Why do you produce in Italy and not in Switzerland at Escatec or Variosystems?
because the business relationship with them is stronger, we were already working with them from several years
Could you not ship the final product from Italy then? This would save on import duties and tax for EU buyers.
June 01, 2013, 01:29:38 PM
Might want to rethink that water block design. I saw a similar one proposed somewhere on the forums and it got torn to shreds, IIRC. Something about head pressure. I'll see if I can find it...
June 01, 2013, 12:58:21 PM
Great news, Giorgio (&co)! And don't forget to fix the "3.3V/5V" HW bug (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140539.980)
June 01, 2013, 12:49:22 PM
Ok kids
... as promised here my report of my visit yesterday at the binmine.ch offices in CH.
I initially wanted to meet Thursday, but Giorgio told me that Friday might be a better time, because they will have parts delivered to them. This way it would not just be a meeting where we talk and theorize about the Bitcoin phenomenon and technology.
I arrived around 16:15 after over six hours of driving from Germany. It was pouring down with rain pretty much all the way until I crossed over at the San Bernardino pass. The temperature rose from an average of 9 degree Celsius to 22 degree and the sun came out as well just before my arrival in Camorino.
Giorgio picked me up outside the office building and we walked to the offices. First we sat down in their meeting room and started talking about the clone and their current timeline.
This week the electronic parts arrived. Giorgio (as stated in his previous posts) drove to the factory near Milan that morning to pick up the board.
Here are my pictures of them ... fresh out of the shrink wrapping:
30 minutes into the discussion a courier brought the parts needed to assemble the first prototype. They have everything at the moment except the Avalon chips, the TP-Link based "motherboard" (running Linux and cgminer) and a case to house everything.
The project plan for the near future looks like this:
- Next week (week 1) assembly of the board(s) with all the electronics ... see picture
.. this is were all the magic is going to happen
- In two weeks (week 2) they get their prototype case. This case will be slightly modified from the original to optimize airflow and housing of a bigger power supply
Here a CAD picture taken from the designer workstation
- End of week 3 beginning of week 4 they wanted to have the complete prototype incl. case ready, except for the Avalon chips. Unless somebody can provide them with sample chips out of their own early order. They already had some discussions about this with various people, but nothing concrete yet.
- One they prototype is confirmed to work as expected (ideally with Avalon chip .... or at least Avalon boards). They begin mass production of the first batch. Their goal is to have everything ready before the Avalon chips arrive at their offices. The day they arrive, Giorgio will drive them down to the factory together with all miner boards and start production immediately.
- After assembly of the complete units, every manufactured unit will have a 24 hours burn-in test were it will hash nonstop to confirm stability and quality.
- Finally all orders will be shipped in an FIFO order.
- The current estimated time for arrival at your doorstop (if you have ordered one) will be end of August.
Here some topics we talked about:
- My initial question was: What does qualify you to create such a clone in a timely manner? The answer was, that they already worked in the electronics area for quite some time. They developed a WiMax base station on their own, which they wanted to sell with a partner. They developed and tested the whole thing and made a few working prototypes, but unfortunately their partner went bankrupt before they could go to market. So in the 2nd picture you not only see the part of the team, but also their former project in background. The white (heavy) box is the WiMax base station, fully packed with electronics and a FGPA driving the unit. The team designed and developed everything from scratch incl. the programming of the FPGA. So if you know somebody who wants to run his own WiMax network talk to them.
- This brought us to FPGAs and the one used in the Avalon boxes. At the moment only a bitstream image of the FPGA 'firmware' is available, because the Avalon guys used some protected code from the manufacturer of the FPGA (I believe it is Xilinx). This FPGA is worth around 20 USDs and drives Avalon boards. They reckon that they can easily modify the board in the future to accomplish two things: A) Drive up to 8 boards and B) more importantly get rid of the TP-Link board. This boards is known to be buggy and quite a bit of hackery from Avalons side went into the development to make it work (an additional USB hub on the FPGA board as well as a modified power supply and more RAM on the TP-Link board). Their way forward would actually be a Raspberry PI, something I like a lot more as well. This far superior platform compared to the TP-Link hack opens a whole new world of possibilities to make the clones at lot more useful (besides of mining).
- We kept talking about a lot of little things around the Avalons as well. So for example ... Did you know that Avalon does not apply thermal paste to the heatsink? So they heat up a lot more and the chips age at an accelerated rate I guess. So my advise to current Avalon owners would be ... get some good thermal paste, take the heatsink of and apply a (very) thin layer before screwing it back on again.
bitmine.ch's plans for the future have already partly been revealed. But here is a small outlook of what we talked about:
- They want to offer spare parts, compatible to the original Avalon Box ... so in the (unlikely) event of something breaking in the/your? Avalon you can get a spare part from bitmine.ch
- A 3U rack mounted and water cooled version is in planning at the moment. This unit is likely to be different from the Avalons and has potentially around 180 GH/s to offer. An ETA is not in sight yet ... maybe end of this year!? Here a picture of the water cooled units,
those are going to be machined out of a block of aluminum one by one.
Finally we talked about another visit in a couple of weeks for an updated report. I'm on holiday next week so I suggested to come back once they start manufacturing the 1st batch in the factory .... so I can take some pictures from the assembly line (if allowed) ... and/or when they get some Avalon chips early and they can make them run in their own prototype.
If anyone has questions about the visit ... ask them here or send me a PM.
All the best!
one4many
P.S.: Keep in mind ... the biggest risk of this project (and maybe even your investment) is the delivery of the Avalon chips!!
... as promised here my report of my visit yesterday at the binmine.ch offices in CH.
I initially wanted to meet Thursday, but Giorgio told me that Friday might be a better time, because they will have parts delivered to them. This way it would not just be a meeting where we talk and theorize about the Bitcoin phenomenon and technology.
I arrived around 16:15 after over six hours of driving from Germany. It was pouring down with rain pretty much all the way until I crossed over at the San Bernardino pass. The temperature rose from an average of 9 degree Celsius to 22 degree and the sun came out as well just before my arrival in Camorino.
Giorgio picked me up outside the office building and we walked to the offices. First we sat down in their meeting room and started talking about the clone and their current timeline.
This week the electronic parts arrived. Giorgio (as stated in his previous posts) drove to the factory near Milan that morning to pick up the board.
Here are my pictures of them ... fresh out of the shrink wrapping:
30 minutes into the discussion a courier brought the parts needed to assemble the first prototype. They have everything at the moment except the Avalon chips, the TP-Link based "motherboard" (running Linux and cgminer) and a case to house everything.
The project plan for the near future looks like this:
- Next week (week 1) assembly of the board(s) with all the electronics ... see picture
.. this is were all the magic is going to happen
- In two weeks (week 2) they get their prototype case. This case will be slightly modified from the original to optimize airflow and housing of a bigger power supply
Here a CAD picture taken from the designer workstation
- End of week 3 beginning of week 4 they wanted to have the complete prototype incl. case ready, except for the Avalon chips. Unless somebody can provide them with sample chips out of their own early order. They already had some discussions about this with various people, but nothing concrete yet.
- One they prototype is confirmed to work as expected (ideally with Avalon chip .... or at least Avalon boards). They begin mass production of the first batch. Their goal is to have everything ready before the Avalon chips arrive at their offices. The day they arrive, Giorgio will drive them down to the factory together with all miner boards and start production immediately.
- After assembly of the complete units, every manufactured unit will have a 24 hours burn-in test were it will hash nonstop to confirm stability and quality.
- Finally all orders will be shipped in an FIFO order.
- The current estimated time for arrival at your doorstop (if you have ordered one) will be end of August.
Here some topics we talked about:
- My initial question was: What does qualify you to create such a clone in a timely manner? The answer was, that they already worked in the electronics area for quite some time. They developed a WiMax base station on their own, which they wanted to sell with a partner. They developed and tested the whole thing and made a few working prototypes, but unfortunately their partner went bankrupt before they could go to market. So in the 2nd picture you not only see the part of the team, but also their former project in background. The white (heavy) box is the WiMax base station, fully packed with electronics and a FGPA driving the unit. The team designed and developed everything from scratch incl. the programming of the FPGA. So if you know somebody who wants to run his own WiMax network talk to them.
- This brought us to FPGAs and the one used in the Avalon boxes. At the moment only a bitstream image of the FPGA 'firmware' is available, because the Avalon guys used some protected code from the manufacturer of the FPGA (I believe it is Xilinx). This FPGA is worth around 20 USDs and drives Avalon boards. They reckon that they can easily modify the board in the future to accomplish two things: A) Drive up to 8 boards and B) more importantly get rid of the TP-Link board. This boards is known to be buggy and quite a bit of hackery from Avalons side went into the development to make it work (an additional USB hub on the FPGA board as well as a modified power supply and more RAM on the TP-Link board). Their way forward would actually be a Raspberry PI, something I like a lot more as well. This far superior platform compared to the TP-Link hack opens a whole new world of possibilities to make the clones at lot more useful (besides of mining).
- We kept talking about a lot of little things around the Avalons as well. So for example ... Did you know that Avalon does not apply thermal paste to the heatsink? So they heat up a lot more and the chips age at an accelerated rate I guess. So my advise to current Avalon owners would be ... get some good thermal paste, take the heatsink of and apply a (very) thin layer before screwing it back on again.
bitmine.ch's plans for the future have already partly been revealed. But here is a small outlook of what we talked about:
- They want to offer spare parts, compatible to the original Avalon Box ... so in the (unlikely) event of something breaking in the/your? Avalon you can get a spare part from bitmine.ch
- A 3U rack mounted and water cooled version is in planning at the moment. This unit is likely to be different from the Avalons and has potentially around 180 GH/s to offer. An ETA is not in sight yet ... maybe end of this year!? Here a picture of the water cooled units,
those are going to be machined out of a block of aluminum one by one.
Finally we talked about another visit in a couple of weeks for an updated report. I'm on holiday next week so I suggested to come back once they start manufacturing the 1st batch in the factory .... so I can take some pictures from the assembly line (if allowed) ... and/or when they get some Avalon chips early and they can make them run in their own prototype.
If anyone has questions about the visit ... ask them here or send me a PM.
All the best!
one4many
P.S.: Keep in mind ... the biggest risk of this project (and maybe even your investment) is the delivery of the Avalon chips!!
June 01, 2013, 09:56:09 AM
Hi!
Interested in your project.
Question - can I pay bitcoin? because I will do it faster than a bank transfer from my country ((
Interested in your project.
Question - can I pay bitcoin? because I will do it faster than a bank transfer from my country ((
June 01, 2013, 05:54:39 AM
Yes, I was there. A detailed report of my visit will follow later today, I just got out of bed.
I arrived at home at 4:30 h in the morning.
There is quite a bit of stuff to write up.
Stay tuned!
one4many
June 01, 2013, 05:49:48 AM
Due to the extremely high demand, on Monday the 3th of June at about 20:00 CET we will open the sales for batch #2 units of our Avalon clone products, along with a few very interesting news.
The Avalon clone will be available in 4 different versions:
* Basic system, that means just the control unit and case without any modules.
* The entry level, 22 GHash/s unit with 1 module, the lowest priced unit in our selection.
* The mid level, 45 GHash/s unit with 2 modules.
* The high end model with 85 GHash/s which is featuring 4 "Generation 1" modules with Avalon ASIC chips and is identical to the batch #1 units.
Also, when you will select the product you will be able to choose an option to "Supply your own Avalon ASICs". This will allow users that took part of a group buy or that bought for themselves an entire 10K batch of Avalon ASICs, to have a big discount on the units price by trading in their chips to our factory for assembly on the bought units.
Regarding timing, batch #2 will be sent out 3 weeks later than batch #1 units and, as before, they will be shipped out as "first come, first served" basis.
If you are interested in buying please take a close look at our website when the batch #2 sales will open!
The Avalon clone will be available in 4 different versions:
* Basic system, that means just the control unit and case without any modules.
* The entry level, 22 GHash/s unit with 1 module, the lowest priced unit in our selection.
* The mid level, 45 GHash/s unit with 2 modules.
* The high end model with 85 GHash/s which is featuring 4 "Generation 1" modules with Avalon ASIC chips and is identical to the batch #1 units.
Also, when you will select the product you will be able to choose an option to "Supply your own Avalon ASICs". This will allow users that took part of a group buy or that bought for themselves an entire 10K batch of Avalon ASICs, to have a big discount on the units price by trading in their chips to our factory for assembly on the bought units.
Regarding timing, batch #2 will be sent out 3 weeks later than batch #1 units and, as before, they will be shipped out as "first come, first served" basis.
If you are interested in buying please take a close look at our website when the batch #2 sales will open!
June 01, 2013, 05:47:32 AM
Just a sneak preview of the first prototype boards that came in yesterday to our labs along with all the needed components, just in time to assemble them next week
June 01, 2013, 05:44:30 AM
May 31, 2013, 05:17:52 PM
By the way,
will you be able to produce spare parts for existing avalons? Control boards, modules so that three modules ones can be converted into four modules and so on?
There could be a market for them.
spiccioli
I think they promised the modules should be available, but I hope cables and other stuff will be offered as well. will you be able to produce spare parts for existing avalons? Control boards, modules so that three modules ones can be converted into four modules and so on?
There could be a market for them.
spiccioli
May 31, 2013, 08:45:09 AM
By the way,
will you be able to produce spare parts for existing avalons? Control boards, modules so that three modules ones can be converted into four modules and so on?
There could be a market for them.
spiccioli
will you be able to produce spare parts for existing avalons? Control boards, modules so that three modules ones can be converted into four modules and so on?
There could be a market for them.
spiccioli
May 31, 2013, 07:18:21 AM
Why do you produce in Italy and not in Switzerland at Escatec or Variosystems?
because the business relationship with them is stronger, we was already working
In Italy?
I'm from Italy... an Avalon clone made in Italy... go figure!
spiccioli
May 31, 2013, 05:17:17 AM
Why do you produce in Italy and not in Switzerland at Escatec or Variosystems?
because the business relationship with them is stronger, we were already working with them from several years
May 31, 2013, 04:41:43 AM
Why do you produce in Italy and not in Switzerland at Escatec or Variosystems?
Mob connections
May 31, 2013, 04:35:51 AM
Why do you produce in Italy and not in Switzerland at Escatec or Variosystems?
May 31, 2013, 02:27:02 AM
Giorgio,
All kidding aside.
How can you commit to shipping in August? You don't even know if the chips will ship by August/September or October or...
Do you have SMT production line setup? Or you are going to be soldering all batch #1 7200 Avalon chips by hand?
All kidding aside.
How can you commit to shipping in August? You don't even know if the chips will ship by August/September or October or...
Do you have SMT production line setup? Or you are going to be soldering all batch #1 7200 Avalon chips by hand?
We belive Avalon will respect the time, otherwise we will have some delay, in any case we refund if costumer is not happy.
regarding SMT production line, as say before in this thread we have a partner with a production facility for soldering all the chips and producing the boards.
May 31, 2013, 12:29:18 AM
Giorgio,
All kidding aside.
How can you commit to shipping in August? You don't even know if the chips will ship by August/September or October or...
Do you have SMT production line setup? Or you are going to be soldering all batch #1 7200 Avalon chips by hand?
All kidding aside.
How can you commit to shipping in August? You don't even know if the chips will ship by August/September or October or...
Do you have SMT production line setup? Or you are going to be soldering all batch #1 7200 Avalon chips by hand?
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