Fun thread and project!
Will this be plug and play or you need to put the thing together yourself? Might be in for the minion if I just need to plug it into the wall. Never gonna get it up and running otherwise
Also, any ball park numbers what the price will be?
The Hive and Wasp System
Wasps and their hives are USB-connected peripherals to eCoin mining computers.
Those computers might be as small as a RaspberryPi, or as large as a fully rack-mounted
industrial server PC. Each Wasp is a potentially stand-alone mining assembly, with its own
local work generation, hasher configuration monitoring, and Stratum-II reporting. As a
peripheral, a Wasp can communicate over its USB 2.0 compatible, Full Speed (12Mb/s)
link to a program such as bfgminer, running on either a dedicated linux-board
(R-Pi, BBB, etc) or a consumer PC with one of linux or Windows or Mac OS-X.
Some features of a Hive and Wasp system:
Wasps can be put into service as stand-alone hashing peripherals, in which case the
stand-alone-Hive is a simple board to apply power and provide a connector for the USB cable.
Wasps can be stacked - they have mounting holes for things like brass standoffs, and up to
four Wasps can be attached to a stacker-Hive, which would provide both power and USB hub
for consolidating the 4 USB connections into a single USB peripheral.
Hives usually, however, are full industrial rack-mountable containers for Wasps and their power
supplies. These containers allow multiple varieties of Wasp to live and work together
(unlike the real-life wasps!), providing scalable, redundant power for up to 8 Wasps, with full
hot-plug capabilities, graceful, programmable degradation in the case of power supply failures,
and full industrial strength monitoring and control of Wasps, down to individual or small groups
(4) of hashing chips.
Current Hives are designed for air cooling; water- and oil-cooled assemblies are proposed,
which will increase density somewhat.
Wasps are currently designed as USB peripherals to a 'mining computer', but the hardware
is designed to allow in-place upgrading to fully stand-alone headless blades, using a 10/100Mb
Ethernet link built into each Wasp. Firmware space for this mode of operation is also already
present on the current design.
Ballpark... as we stated before all we have currently are just internal prototype base calculations for us to produce 20 Wasps prototypes and nothing yet for the hives. As soon as the Gerbers and BOM are released anyone will be able to get a quotation on these units so rather that post a number that will ultimately be superseded in a few weeks we will just wait for those to be released after we have working prototypes. That is expected in Late December or Early January 2014 and will be BitFury Wasps and BitMain Wasps varieties and a beta version of our Hive. Sorry we can't be of more help yet on pricing but we really do not want to put out anything that isn't 100% accurate.
Right now though we are focused on getting are prototypes done and we will share it with all of you and getting partners on board to build end user units. BTW If you build Miners we want you! PM or E-mail me and I will get you the info you need when it is ready. We really want to know how much interest there is out there for our little upgradeable miner. 
