Topic: [RUN 2 CLOSED][SIDEHACK STICK]GekkoScience Compac Official sales thread - page 23. (Read 69935 times)

Well, I appreciate the order you did make. But you can't blame a guy for defending his livelihood. Pride in accomplishment, they call it.

And to be fair, I was hoping I could build them to a $20 price tag but for what it is that wasn't possible. If I'd wimped the buck and used a different USB chip, maybe, but with a wimpier buck it wouldn't have been the best I could make it and that's not really good enough for me.

And I meant that, I do appreciate the order you did place. I hope you enjoy playing with the sticks, that's why they exist.

I was giving honest feedback from my recent and very limited experience with the miner.  That is all.  All I said was that IF there cheaper, I would have purchased more than 3.  Apparently giving some thoughts as a customer is frowned upon and placing an order is not enough.  I never said that I could or would make a better stick miner.  Hell, you can buy a used Antminer S3 for ~$100 on ebay which would obviously a much higher hashrate.  With that being said, I knew what I was buying when I bought from you.  I wanted something to play around with.  Next time you have a miner or equipment for sale, I'll just pass.

The after-parts margin for the entire batch of 1000 Compacs would just pay back the pick-and-place if I didn't have any other expenses - power bills, rent, labor, what have you. That's also ignoring all the dev costs we out-of-pocketed. Even with the robot there's a surprising amount of manual work going into making these, which is getting less and less as I iron out the calibrations on the machine and require less touch-up but there's still manual installation of USB jacks, and cleaning, and heatsinking, and testing, and packing. I work for awful close to free (to be frank, right now I'm living about 20% above the poverty line and most of that goes to rent and student loans from 6 years of college), but awful close to free is by no means actually free. Dude's gotta eat.

SOLD! (Again)  Placing order now........... sorry waited so long but I have some ideas for cooling reusing old hardware and found a neato usb hub, if it works may be able to overclock thru the roof.  Miss my flashy led thingys.

I think people underestimate just how expensive these things can get.  Even the Block Erupter USB was $13.92 in parts alone when I priced it - that excludes the BE100 chip, the PCB, the heat spreader + interface material, labor and miscellaneous other costs (warehousing etc.)  While things do get cheaper when purchased in bulk, they don't get all that much cheaper without resorting to ali et al, and 'bulk' usually means you also need to scale up production including parts storage, handling, manufacturing (e.g. in GekkoScience's case: investing in a PnP) and miscellaneous other costs.

I've got one on mine just stuck on with adhesive thermal tape (electrically insulating) with cut-outs for the test pads and the screws - it does get nice and toasty so it should help in cooling.  It's currently hashing away at 13.75Gh/s and the temperature delta is only (52.1°C - 24.5°C = 27.6°C) without a fan pointed at it.

I'd say just be careful around the vias on the backside - especially the ones at the corners of the ASIC. Those bear Vcore, and this thing overcurrents at around 20A on that rail. All the other vias, some are GND but the majority run either LDO voltages or signals. The board fab didn't do as good a job as the prototype fab did with soldermasking all those, and the holes were a bit bigger so some wicked solder through and there's a greater shorting risk than with my test builds. If you pad the backside so nothing touches metal, should be fine.

what... someone complained about the compac stick miner. I mean I have been meaning to order some but funeral costs and such trump stuff for play. But I mean damn this is like a slap in the face.... this is the cheapest, best built and fastest stick miner ever made. Hell I priced building a batch of nano furys and they will cost me ~$10 a stick not including the heatsinks, labor, or bf chips (already have a bunch of chips) and these sticks put them to shame. From what I recall this is also the cheapest stick miner to ever launch. Trust me hes not making alot per stick... but this paves a way for new and better products and gets his name out there.

BTW sidehack I acquired a stick as a gift and I love it. I am thinking of making heat sinks for the rear for better heat dissipation. Obviously a non-conductive thermal pad or notch out the heat sink for the test pads but other than that is there anything I should be cautious of? They will be bare aluminum but I may get busy and anodize them green.

What frequency were you running them at that you had to adjust the voltage up? If it's over 200MHz, of course you had to turn the voltage higher to get them to operate because the stock setpoint is closer to what standard USB is capable of.


The best stickminer I found on a quick glance at eBay for $25 or less was listed as 2.8GH. For the same $25, what you're getting is 8GH at the same power draw or up to around 23GH if you wanted to push it. Be thankful you have that option, because no other stickminer made was built to handle the power or the inherent adjustability. If you think that you can build one better and afford to sell it for under $25 (without slaves) and still keep the lights on in the shop and food on the table, I'll buy a few dozen of yours. Until then, please don't complain about the price, which is one of the best new-equipment prices ever offered for a stick miner - especially for what is, by W/GH and $/GH and total GH capable, the best stick miner yet made. If you want something better, you no longer want a stick miner.

I received my sticks yesterday and I have them hashing away.  Set-up was ok.  There was just a minor issue with turning the power pot to get the miner to run / recognized by the software.  I was using the gekko cgminer build.  Getting the miner to run was probably a 'B' experience overall.  No major issues.  The miners appear to be well built with a good heatsink.  Too bad they are ~$25 each otherwise I may have bought a few dozen more to play around with. 

I've sent them an inquiry, will share when I hear back.

Naw, it's alright. I'll probably write something up tonight.

  ok sorry about that. Im optimist on this project! Will learn to wait. 

valkir, yes I did, and Novak and I just spent a fair amount of time discussing what you were asking about over sandwiches, and I was going to write back as soon as I got back from sandwiches (approximately now o'clock) but now I have to be a grumpy old man and let it go another day.

looks like my mom wont be in by your shop till around thursday sorry for delay sir

Sidehack did you receive my pm ??

As an update - I haven't figured out yet what it was I had worked out when I set the international shipping prices. Probably I was going first-class mail, which is super slow. I have been shipping everything priority, which is 1-1.5 weeks estimated transit rather than 2-3 weeks.

But nobody's actually paid enough for that service.

So I'm going to alter the rules a bit for international shipments. All orders from now on with the current shipping rules will go out First Class mail, but I'll add in a $25 tier for priority shipments. I'll update the pricing rules in the first post to reflect this.

Today I'll be shipping out all current pending orders from the small queue. That means if, before RIGHT NOW, you ordered fewer than 20 sticks, your order will have shipped by this afternoon. The large queue was always dominant, but now it's even more so. I'll be shifting the quota queueing from 60/40 in favor of small orders to 80/20 in favor of large orders. This means that about 20% of the sticks made on a given day can be set aside for immediate shipment of incoming small orders, but the other 80% will be set aside to meet large orders. If no small orders come in before stock is met for the next large queue order, the large queue order will be shipped without holding any reserve stock for future small orders.

After today, approximately half the total sticks paid for will have been shipped. In order to make more than have been paid for thus far, we'll have to fetch a few more parts.

What kind of power do those hubs put out on the ports? Looked at those before, but never could find the power output, so forgot about them.

any more stix 4 sale?

Just got my sticks, and I had to be pretty close to the end of the list, so watch your mail!