Topic: [RUN 2 CLOSED][SIDEHACK STICK]GekkoScience Compac Official sales thread - page 29. (Read 69935 times)

I placed my order, will I receive a confirmation that I did it correctly?  I'd never signed a message before, and not knowing what the "from address" was I just generated a new address in my wallet and used that to sign the message.  Looking forward to upgrading my usb sticks with these which start at 4x faster than what I'm using, thanks!

This is the best explanation so far regarding your method of operation. Big fabs are the way they are because they are run by people that must report to someone else profits. Hence the pressure to sell half baked goods with high markups.

The picture of 9 sticks running in the first post, the 10th port is powering a Pi with Minera and they're all running off the stock cgminer on it (as U3). It'll be better when Novak's cgminer driver is done, but it does work. Not sure if the latest version has U3 support.

Breakeven hasn't really been a thing with stickminers in what, a year and a half? The point of this guy isn't to make bank. Really it was a dev step on the road to bigger things, but enough people wanted it to be an actual product that now it's an actual product. The price is as good as I can make it. By manufacturing in-house (and nobody's really getting paid to do that) we're saving a lot so the price is basically materials and some margin to keep the lights on at the shop. That said, I understand it's still not low enough to get ahead (with the best efficiency, highest hashrate and lowest $/GH of any stickminer ever) but it's priced to be fun. The feature set of variable voltage and variable clock makes it probably the least boring stickminer ever, and it's intended to be good for n00bs who want to get a taste for mining without an expensive or cumbersome setup. You get to play with cgminer integration, learn about voltage setpoints and how they affect your error rate and overall hashrate, see some flashy lights and maybe decide if you want to move on to bigger better machines now that you've gotten your feet wet.

So, if you want to break profit you shouldn't be looking at stickminers. But if you want a lottery ticket or a gift to get a friend hooked on mining, this'll do.

EU pricing is higher because it's not the same stick. I licensed the design to a guy in EU who is building sticks in Germany and selling there. His price is his own to set. It's higher for a couple reasons which I think he explains in his sales thread - including VAT on parts, assembly labor, stuff like that. If I wasn't building Compacs myself but had them done in a regular fab house our sticks would be a lot more expensive. But I prefer to do things myself, and we bought that fancy pick-and-place so that we wouldn't have to rely on (or more specifically, pay for) someone else to do assembly for us. Not everyone has that option, or is willing to take that option. Novak and I are just a special kind of different.

How come the price for EU lads are higher than the price for e.g. US blokes?

This is the way to think about it!

You will get your ROI right away when you turn it on and start smiling.

You won't - these are not intended to break even, let alone give you a profit.

Calculators are whack, but you can start with this sample simulation:
https://coinplorer.com/Hardware/Simulate/55e83fe0226bf410a453eeb0?key=4802c38f-0b0d-42da-a01c-5c288480c125

It assumes $25 to buy it (no shipping added), 16Gh/s at 0.35J/Gh (you can over/underclock), a constant difficulty (won't be so), BTC25/block (won't be so come half-way next year), no pool fee and no electricity costs.  You can see that the time for it to break even in those unrealistic circumstances is still 2 years from now.  Almost all of the aforementioned assumptions changed to more realistic values is only going to make that worse.

Can somebody tell me how much time does it require to get your money back (ROI) ?

You'll just have to add the adapted version to the raspberry, but then you're golden. I'm going for that option too!

Will this work with Minera? That would make it nice and simple for some of us.

This is actually a very nice result from just one chip! Makes one think what you could achieve with a big series of them as in the S7 with decent cooling!

bfgminer tested working on the compac branch.  I haven't had time to test a lot of options or anything since I just have my craptop at home but I can confirm that bfgminer is working on my setup as well.

I've been using Luke-jrs hex file script to reflash the cp2102s as well and that is also working.  The way it should work is, on stock or old cgminer you will not be able to set freq > 250 MHz, and it will enumerate as an antminer u3, although it should run just as well.  On bfgminer or our branch of cgminer (still in the works, I'll try to post it fairly soon) you can set any frequency and it will enumerate as a compac.

--
novak

I mentioned that to Novak. He implemented the same ID thing in his cgminer driver and it's working fine. We haven't looked at the new BFG yet but I'll make sure it gets done tomorrow and let you know.

Can you test that the working production units are good to go with BFGMiner's "compac" branch on GitHub?

Three of them are mining. One of those three is the first off the line and I'm gonna keep it forever. The other two, well Novak needed something to test his driver with multiple devices. Yeah it's a bit cheating, but we aren't stressing them I promise. The one we pushed to 450MHz this afternoon was one of my old V0.3 test sticks.

This is pretty exciting stuff! Even with the mystery failure.

I've never had a (nearly) front row seat for manufacturing before. Thanks for letting us be part of this. It's very cool!

I find it interesting that you're actually mining with the working units. Who do you think you are, Bitmain? (Totally joking of course)

Well, it just took 31 minutes to place 5 boards. Admittedly I had to stop it quite often to splice tape. I don't have full reels of everything so I didn't have the foot and a half of blank tape and the end this thing needs to start out with for the auto peelers to work, so I ended up scrounging up spent tape and, well, taping it together. I think I have it ironed out now where I shouldn't have any more breaks, but I ended up burning a lot of time.

Of the five individual test placements (with refined calibration on each one) four of them work and three are currently mining on the Burger address using Novak's custom cgminer driver (still experimental of course). The fifth, well it was giving me fits. I could get either power or data but not both. Not sure what's up. But the most recent two sticks took all of five minutes each to touch up, verify and install heatsinks. It's bedtime so I'm not going to snap apart and test the next five sticks coming out of the oven. Been here long enough already.

I don't know how many we'll be shipping tomorrow. If all 5 work, I'll have nine working which knocks off the first three orders. I'll immediately start working on the remaining 20 on the board, which knocks off the next six. After that is the first bulk purchase, which the next panel will cover (it'll also hit the next 4 individuals. I need to update my queue with recent sales. Anyone that's purchased in the last day, my wallet has to reindex (grumble grumble power outage) so I can't confirm purchases until it's caught up. There are at least two pending.

Well, like you said, nothing a small knife (or a non-penetrating drill hit) can't fix  Literally 5 minutes after I sent out for some boards and started to order parts I realized - from the order process summary - that I had used a part with internal workings exactly opposite of what I needed (think N vs P junction).  Finding a replacement part with similar or better characteristics, same footprint and same pinout was a good hour wasted.  From seeing random jumper wires, PTH resistors crudely soldered onto an otherwise entirely SMD board, parts flipped upside down, etc. in various teardown videos of even high-end electronics, it seems it really can happen to anyone

I'll have to actually find some pink heat sinks now... or see if I can find a place to anodize (or, well, powdercoat more likely) these bare aluminum ones in pink...

I should have seen it. I made a few changes and sent it off to manufacture before getting test boards because I didn't have an extra two weeks or couple hundred bucks. The changes were entirely cosmetic (like getting the reset cap out from under the heatsink, or aligning the Tx resistors properly, or labeling the backside test pads) and that pot was the only one appears to have not worked right. Friggin' silkscreen layer.

The worst of it is, I bet it wasn't caught on German Guy's fab either so his sticks will probably have the same problem. I've already emailed him about it and hopefully it's easy to take care of.

Yeah, the green heatsinks are pretty darn sexy. I can't wait to get nine of these little suckers lined up in my test hub and see 'em flashing away.