Topic: Open Source Avalon Gen2 55nm Board - page 11. (Read 35930 times)

whoops, now that i look i actually see the markings on it - makes sense! At first glance i thought it was a little antennae connector.

That is for regulating voltage. Trimpot...

looks good - whats the blue component, a wifi antenna? It may be better to scrap that component to save a few dollars on parts/assembly since most users prefer to run an ethernet line (my 2c - either way i really like the board and applaud its working!!

Some progress to report...
At 1.03 V my chips seem to run pretty stable around 14 GH/s.
I can't do power-measurements right now, because the voltage-drop on my current-meter is so big that i cannot calculate the power without a big error. (Can't measure actual voltage at the same time now, maybe on monday.)

Firmware and cgminer-driver seems to run pretty good at the moment, besides some Idle-Warnings from time to time and a decent HW-error rate of ~1.7 %.

http://my.root4u.de/avalon2-secondhash.png




Very good. If you tell me how i can gain you access to the github repo, i would be very interested.
But be aware that this is only a test-board. If i make a final one (if here is some interest), a few things will change. For example the number of chips, dimensions, or the placement of the decoupling caps and things around the chips - It would be better if the components are a bit lower then the chips or are not in the way for a topside-heatsink. I wasnt aware that the chips need more cooling from the top side as from the bottom side. At the moment i have some copper distance pieces and little chipset-heatsinks on the chips, but that just doesnt scale.


https://raw.github.com/formtapez/avalon/master/Photos/CIMG4612.JPG
https://raw.github.com/formtapez/avalon/master/Photos/CIMG4613.JPG



That sounds interesting, but unfortunately i don't own such a avalon case. It would be helpful when someone who has one, tells me the exactly dimentions of the board, heatink positions, etc. and can provide some detailed photos.

+1

Amen to that!

This probably isn't too much of a challenge if you lost the TI part. I have converted the Eagle files to Altium, they need some cleanup but would happily commit them into the repository if you like...

I have to agree.  Avalon/BitSyncom deserves zero support from the community they have screwed over repeatedly, all while continuing to show no remorse.  They even call us losers.

I personally will not buy such a board because of this, no matter how attractive the pricing.

Are you guys seriously working with Avalon who openly called their previously customers losers?

"criticisms" = "encouragement and inspiration"?  What are you?  LeBron James?  You guys are so out of touch with the Bitcoin community it is not even funny.  What's with all these double/passive-aggressive talk?  How can you expect to regain people's trust when you called your previous paid customers that you screwed over losers?  If nothing else, you guys are the one who is responsible for creating these money/bitcoin 'losers'.

You must be hurting for business to have to come crawling back here asking for more money?  And auctioning your chips off with ZERO bid.  Because of your major screw-ups you are now forced to prepaid for overprice, under-performing silicons that you can't sell and trying to keep alive developing the next gen before you run out of money.

Don't give us the BS about "decentralization" (can't even spell it right, let alone know the meaning) and "spirit of Bitcoin", and therefore you are not self-mining.  The reason you are not self-mining is because it is unprofitable by the time you can mass-producing your miner with your inferior chips for a reasonable cost, the constant 40%+ difficulty (soon to be 80% as KnC release their B2 and again in December when HF release B1/B2) increase every 10 days is killing any chance for ROI even with free electricity and you know it...   Besides, even when time is good, it is hard to scale as can attested by ASICMiner.  They learnt real quick it is much more profitable and less headache to pass on the hot potatoes (miners) to the next suckers/'losers'.  If a large and resourceful company with all these profits from previous batches can't built miner (at cost without any markup) profitable, how can you expect an individual to pay for miner with huge markups from you, board builders, assembler using your underperforming chips?  If you don't know that then you are an even bigger fool than you are or think we all are.  But I bet you are smart enough to know that don't you?

+1

Nice design but pick another chip, why would you want to support scammers with an inefficient chip.

avalon screwed enough people here already,   

please don't help them screw more.

How crappy it is! Ones who dont keep promise usually are stupid. When stupid asses design a chip, they design a chip only worth a shit. 2.5J/GH,   . It is a joke, ng. You have wasted the fabrication capacity of TSMC. If I were the designer, I would have killed myself as I could not bear the shame of this chip.

Everyone who has been burnt by Avalon, please spend 20 seconds of your time and give this stupid and evil ngzhang a negative feedback:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=38132

In our under development design, I use a 45A rated, 55A stable, 60A peak DC-DC circuit for 14 chips. I do think this is a good start.

Basic configuration is 7 chips pre bank, 2 banks share one DC-DC. Will open-source when the test is over.

By different operation voltage and clock speed, the chips power consumption is vary greatly. for example, [email protected] only consume <1.5W, about 1.9Amps. 1.5GH@1V is about 3.75W, about 3.75Amps. There is no doubt this chip can over clock to 2GH (this is limited by PLL at 25MHz XCLK input), but the voltage must increase to maybe 1.1V (NOT tested),  the overall power consumption may increase to 6W and 5.5 Amps.

So, select which DC-DC module is depend on which type of product you want. more power efficient or push the chips to its limit?

By personal views, A3255 chip is cheap, if over clock too much will go with a huge increase of peripheral (DCDC, heat dissipation, etc)cost, then it's unworthy. just add a few chips and run under lower voltage. In other words, this is an art of balancing.

In addition, use Ti power module is a good solution for fast shipping, but they are really costy. I will release a opensourced 2 phase 55A DC-DC design for reference next month(sorry, it's a bit slow but high-current DC-DC circuit is not easy to design and debug), it' maybe only cost 5$.

Yes but this is 10 chips because he has 10 chips... And 24W power usage. So yes only bit more then 50% at the moment but there is also efficiently that you need to think about. And overheating. I have a Chili board. And the biggest problem is power supply. It is on the limit and it needs additional cooling or the board slows down by 20%... So because you have save some $ on parts you need now additional cooling(fan and heatsinks) on power supply and that cost more then stronger power supply and uses more power since you need a fan and it runs in less effective part of operational range... Not to talk about lost hashes... So some parts are better if they are stronger...

for only 10 chips, a smaller 30A component would likely suffice, such as the one bitfury hardware uses:  Texas Instruments TPS53355 http://www.ti.com/product/tps53355
it serves a similar (or identical?) purpose, with a much smaller footprint and is almost certainly cheaper to source and install.

If anyone is interested I have some of thus I can sell you...

okay thats more reasonable then    any of these (unpopulated) for sale? ive got 10 chips coming next week and nothing to use them with

The entire "second level pcb" is a standalone part. 

can the 2nd level pcb be mered into a single PCB? having the extra steps of assembly will make costs significantly higher for this design. KISS method

I'd certainly be very interested in some of these boards if the price is right

make same size as gen1 unit so we can reuse the heatsinks and contact ckolivas for firmware support.

i do think its the first thing avalon will sell when they sold all g1 chips..
500 g2 chips are 12btc now.