Topic: The Wasp Project Collective Information thread. - page 12. (Read 38733 times)

Sorry for bring out of the loop-
Chips have been sent off to Dick, he will have tomorrow.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.4601166 <-- Please read here.

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1. We will start selling licenses after we release the gerbers, BOM, firmware and software. We are trying to make sure we have hardware, firmware and software working before releasing this to anyone. Note we are not going to be the primary point of sales for these Wasp Hives there will be others that will do that.

2. See number 1. We will accept BTC for licenses.

3. Anyone can price these units out as soon as the Bom / Gerbers drop. You can send the information to an SMT and get them to give you a production cost sans chips. We have multiple Wasps: A1 Wasp, BitFury Wasp and BitMain Wasp so prices that fabricators come up with will indeed vary.

4. No line. No Pre-ordering etc from us and we are hopeful that with a release of the gerbers and bom there will be no more lines or pre-orders. Here is hoping that production to consumer hands is truly a short time.

Keep your eyes open for our website launch and note we are currently in talks with a number of groups who are interested in our designs for both their own farms but also for sale to the community. We hope to have some good news this week but we all know what Robert Burns said in a poem to a wee mouse.

Hi,

only 4 things.

1. when will you start selling?
2. will you accept BTC as payment?
3. approximate assessment of price/prices?
4. how can i get in line in a couple of first spots?



Thx,
Gologuzan

We will worry about that when / if we reach that hurdle as we have more than enough talent inside the WPC to work out the scrypt ASIC firmware based off Gridseed's or other scrypt chip specifications if it is available. If it is not then we would have to see if there is any value in working with undocumented chips. We would use the same software unchanged. Too many if's right now and we are really focused only on the  the SHA256 Wasps now and into the February and March when the Minion chips are supposed to ship.

Hmm, just to be clear, the original cgminer author supports only bitcoin mining. So if scrypt asics come out, either another coder takes over (like the sgminer fork) or bfgminer? Unless CK decides to come back and accept litecoin. I don't remember what the position of Luke-Jr is on scrypt / GPU, but his software currently supports it.

Wasps and Hives: Features and Facts

• Reconfigurable in operation
• Able to programmatically adjust voltages and circuitry for newer, lower power modes of operation
• A Hive can simultaneously host any mix of kinds of Wasp that it has sufficient power for
• Wasps are self-identifying to the mining programs, and all share a common protocol with miner programs - there's only one type of driver ever needed for cgminer or bfgminer, no matter which kinds of Wasp are attached to the controlling PC.
  
• Those protocols are written to be extended, when new requirements evolve, and all the Wasps' firmware loadouts can be updated in place, without powering them down and removing them from service.
• So long as the PC-to-Wasp communications don't fail, Wasps can be diagnosed, identified,and re-configured without ever having to touch them.
• As components age, and hashers develop more and more hardware based errors, remote management tools can take remedial actions to recover as much functionality as remains, again hands-off, even in the face of complete hasher-ASIC failures.
• As more demands are placed upon the local micro-controller (or 'MCU'), Wasp design can be updated to supply more computational power, without discarding the existing firmware, software, or protocols.
• Hives span the gamut between single boards powered by consumer ATX power supplies to crates of boards with redundant, load sharing server supplies. The same Wasps can be used by hobbyists and datacenters.
• Wasp and Hive schematics are freely available; the Wasps can be used in a shared-mining configuration in payment of licensing fees, if desired. Hardware cloning is encouraged; license piracy is effectively discouraged.

BTC Background: BTC Mining Systems, Past, Present, and Future

• Maturation from CPUs to GPUs to FPGAs to ASICs
• Evolution from individual miners to pools of miners
• The Power of Pools
• Difficulty, and its impact on large scale Mining operations

Mining Software: Directing the hordes

• Miner Software - supervising the Hordes of ASICs, for the Pools
• Miner Firmware - translating the supervisors' jobs into work the hasher hordes understand

Hashers The Crypto-Hordes: Basics of Hashing Asics

• Chips created for one purpose only - to perform the double-SHA256 hashes in BitCoin mining as fast as possible
• Chips developed on smaller and smaller geometries, to get more circuits and higher speeds at lower power
• Eventually, the fastest ASIC at the lowest power wins the race, and will dominate the field as power costs dominate the overall costs of hashing

Industrial Quality Mining Systems: Extending the lifetime of mining systems

• As all the ASICs are migrated to the most current technologies, the performance race will slow
• As the delivery of faster hashers abates, the lowest power-per-gigahash/second becomes the winner.
• As difficulty stops rising exponentially, mining systems will have longer useful lifetimes, and so must be robust  enough to last for years in continuous operation.
• As new coin types evolve, mining systems must be able to integrate multiple kinds of hashers without requiring more investment in mining, maintenance, and support hardware, software, or operational support.
• We are reaching the tipping point, where the cheaper, less robust, short lifetime implementations typical of today are giving way to higher quality, designed-to-last, re-configurable systems that won't require the operations staff to re-learn everything every few weeks.
• Hives and Wasps are designed to live a long time, and work in new modes as those modes are discovered, without taking them out of service for replacement or upgrade.

Design Goals:  Achieving disruptive innovation

• Designed for re-usability, from the most basic circuitry and firmware up
• Designed to protect the expensive hashing ASICs continuously throughout all operating regimes, with continuous monitoring and lifetime logs
• Diagnostics can be run on the hardware while it is hashing.
• Designed with high-power, high efficiency, programmable power supplies to the ASICs
• Full environmental monitoring for temperature and voltages allows the units to automatically reduce their footprints to safe operating areas when the environment changes, while still getting maximum use of the degraded environment.

What Are Hives and Wasps?

The world of BTC mining is a fast paced, ever changing one where one week's King of the Mountain is the next week's Court Jester, good for a laugh but little more. As companies develop increasingly powerful BTC mining ASICs, those chips are rapidly designed into boards and systems for delivery to the eagerly awaiting throngs of miners who aspire to lead the way in hashing capability, and thereby in profits. Because of the feedback built into the BTC universe, each iteration of mining hardware is only maximizing its profits in the first few weeks after its ASICs are delivered, and before the next round of faster chips reaches manufacturing and delivery.

The WPC Wasps and Hives are an attempt to ride the crest of this racing wave, by building a common basis in hardware, firmware, and software for incorporating each new hashing device as it appears, with maximum re-use of all the assets of a new ASIC's predecessors. By reducing the amount of intellectual property that must be re-engineered, WPC reduces its time-to-market for each new revision, and reduces the engineering charges on each new miner version, as well. This, along with a significant re-use of hardware components, produces a low-cost, high capability system that is worth investing resources in to ensure industrial levels of reliability, maintainability, and management in large scale deployments.

Hives and Wasps are the racks and rack-mounted servers of the PC world, trading minor cost increments for major gains in scalability, configurability, and manageability. This, along with the quick turn deployment of new ASICs, extends the lifetime and lowers the operational costs of large scale BTC mining operations based on Wasps and Hives.

We have not made an ASIC chip (yet).

We are using / going to use the following to build our Wasp Prototypes:

A1 Coincraft: http://bitmine.ch/?page_id=863
Minion: http://www.blackarrowsoftware.com/store/minion-asic.html
BitFury: https://megabigpower.com/shop/index.php?route=product/category&path=33
BitMain: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitmains-bm1380-chip-is-open-for-ordering-10000-chips-for-999btc-36btcth-364236 | https://www.bitmaintech.com/about.htm

I'm confused, you have your own chips and you'll use others?

If there are chips available from Gridseed... it might be in line after the Minion Wasp.

Congrats  dzarmush! I was hoping mine may take home the prize but his is a good looking logo, should look mighty fine stamped on the first wasps and hives.

I hope to see a Gridseed wasp in the mix 

We won't produce DIY kits but someone might. We can do a single chip board as well 1 chip miner if you are really keen on that.

so no DIY kits out ? aww allright im really down for the A1 chips there need to be more usb miners coming out with them lolololollololololololol jk

1. Build it yourself.
2. Buy from a fabricator.
3. Buy from a reseller or group buy.
4. ... time will tell maybe a chip fabricator might just use our designs and slot their chips in.

I suspect that there will be plenty of opportunity to buy these units from already established DIY type fabricators here. Or you could do like we did start a collective and pool your resources and start building these miners locally.

when and how will i be able to buy any of ur products?

As an open source hardware design we will release it to everyone as soon as we are happy it is fully functional from software, firmware and a hardware perspective for each chip that we design into Wasps. Fabricators or end users will license their miners from us and that is how we will recoup our investment by providing a solid long term modular miner that anyone can build and upgrade. We are keen to work with fabricators large or small anywhere in the world who are interested in our designs. If you would like discuss and plan further, once we have working prototypes, feel free to contact us via PM or via our website once our working prototypes are hashing.

Of course our own members will be producing some prototypes for our own needs but the WPC itself will not likely going to be fabricating and selling units as we want to license and support as many people, cooperatives and individuals in this as possible. We feel that if we concentrate mainly on bringing more Wasp designs to the community, as new chips become available, then we can help people get miners faster, that are in stock and not have to see this ugly cycle of pre-order nightmares continue. We want to open up the market to as many people as possible with our designs.

As we have mentioned in the other threads pricing will be quite transparent and can be easily calculated by anyone willing to send out our Gerbers and BOM to a fabricator as well as getting chip prices which are widely available right from Asic chip fabricators here in this forum and on their website. We believe that our modular design will be competitive with the bigger companies in this competitive marketplace.

How are you planning to sell the "kits"? Will it be selled by resellers across the world, or just one selling point? The initial plan was to design a platform and sell the licence to other people/companies for producing the kits. Is that plan still up? _{I am just a miner} 

will definitely be watching this.

Just let me know when I can purchase any of them.