Topic: X6500 Custom FPGA Miner - page 20. (Read 220101 times)

P2Pool should work fine with current master / testing tree. However it looks like p2pool is running into performance issues on the pandaboard as well, causing ~6% DOA for me. If I host it somewhere else it's running fine.

The panda board acts a a full size desktop with a full size ubuntu distribution.
It is running the mpbm miner and cotrols the boards via one or multiple USB hubs.
( and is using 8,5 W with panda board plus hub mouse etc)

It is also capaple of fully running a bitcoin-qt client( i recompiled one for ARM boards) and also act as a p2pool server at marginal cpu usage levels.
But p2pool is not recommended for the current mpbm version as this will cause high stale levels due to timing constraints.
While it is used as a board running the miner connected to a pool its mostly ideling. The cpu is really bored.

The board most on the left is my first ARM board  the "Gumstix"  it also ran the miner without major computation problems whe connected to a pool.(It consumes 4 W on the wall for a full ubuntu)
But it encounters performance limitations when you try to run a p2pool server on it. 


I am currently working to provide a full working image  for the panda board and the gumstix as well.
I also started creating a server to distribute .deb packages with fully ported ARM aplications.

Furthermore i want to publish similar things for the rasberry pi ( wich would be perfect as a host pc for mining in an pool)
as soon as i get my hands on one.

Time flys you know, so i cant give a certain date for publishing now.


I also took thermal imaging of the bitforce box today an redid the power measurement.
But more of that tomorrow.

Awww you know that you will end up with oil on you desks? And u lost your warranty btw.

It's called cappilar effect .... i did that once with my computer and the oil crawled up the mouse cable and after a short while my mouse began to bleed oil ...

For the Cooling you could try some parts from Watercooling projects. A pump that moves the oil through a radiator and back into the tank; or stick a small Fan in there that moves the oil thru the x6500 cooler.

Looking at the thermal data of the FPGA, I'd say that a heatsink temperature of 50°C and a board temperature of 60°C should be perfectly fine. 10°C more might cause invalids but shouldn't really hurt it. So as long as the oil stays around 50°C it should be fine.

I'm not sure if the heatsink (and thermal adhesive) improves or worsens the situation here though... If you manage to establish oil convection across the FPGA's package, you might be better off without a heatsink at all, if the oil at the FPGA's surface stays at 50°C that would be ideal.

I also wanted to point out a few things I ran into when setting up the software side of things, as it might be helpful to others as well.

This is on Debian Linux: When I first connected the board using USB, I used 'lsusb' to see all connected devices and did a 'lsusb -v -d 0403:6001' to show more details about the board I just connected. That gave me some infos, but also a "Operation not permitted". To be able to access the board using my user account, I added this udev rule: /etc/udev/rules.d/90-fpgamining-x6500.rules with this contents:


and created the group 'fpgamining' and added myself to it (you have to logout and login again for the change to show up):


MPBM still remained silent though and after I added some debug output about what exceptions are thrown, I got "could not set config 1: Device or resource busy". This, as I was quickly informed in the IRC channel, is because of the module "ftdi_sio" which is loaded automatically and grabs access to the device. So I did a 'rmmod ftdi_sio' and added "blacklist ftdi_sio" to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf to prevent the module from loading again in the future.

After that it was smooth sailing with MPBM and this cool piece of hardware. =)

Some mining rig photos: I went through with my plans for a mineral oil cooled setup. :-)







What you can't see here: The USB and power cable is rising up to the top, as I placed a nail there above the whole setup to run the cables along that. This is an attempt to prevent oil from trickling through the cables. So far the oil stays where it should, hopefully that will last.

All in all it seems to work fairly well. I would like your input though on what is an acceptable temperature to run the FPGA at. First I tried running without a fan and the oil would slowly start heating up and after about 30 minutes the thermometer showed 46 deg C (you can see in the picture that the thermometer is measuring in the middle of the heat sink). At that point I stopped and added a fan. It's not really helping all that much, but it is keeping the setup at about 43 deg C right now.

On the other hand I have yet to see a single invalid share. The system has been mining for over a day at 200 MHz (per FPGA) with 0 invalids. So would that indicate that I can risk a slightly higher temperature? I would really like to run this completely passive.

I was also thinking that this might be a good excuse to play around with 3d printing a little bit and maybe build something that would increase the surface area for the oil to cool down and maybe even have some kind of circular setup driven by convection. Although if I do that, which seems like a fun project, it would probably be just me guessing how to do that rather than being based on actual physics. =)

Yes, he is using the pandaboard to control them, and I'd guess that it should be able to handle around 10 boards. Haven't done any actual measurements with that combination though.

Do you use the Pandaboard to control the FPGAs?
How does the Pandaboard cope with the workload? What do you think, how many FPGAs could you manage with it?

Looking good

Hello everybody,

As promised i release some images and data of my FPGA family at its daily work.

The setup (please excuse the messy workbench)                                                                                                                                                                    
   
 
[From left to right: ARM board "Gumstix" (the first i developed on), Icarus(rev0),120mmfan ,x6500(rev2),120mmfan,Pandaboard ES(revB2),Bitforce single(1.0)]

And the mining data thanks to TheSeven

Thanks, everyone, and sorry that stock has been so limited. We made the intentional decision to not accept payment for orders until we knew we could fill those orders in less than a week or so. We would prefer to have less sales and happy customers, than more sales but a huge backlog of orders and people angry that they haven't received anything yet.

That said, shipping should be ramping up a lot in the next week, so we hope to keep Cablesaurus stocked up and make everybody happy real soon.

I have to say thanks to everyone for the huge amount of interest we're getting on this new board! I'm sorry for the delays in getting answers to emails and PMs. I'm surprised my inbox hasn't exploded yet! By the way, if you really want to get in touch with us, the forum PM system really isn't suited to managing lots of messages. Much better would be to send an email to [email protected].

Thanks!

But only accept a certain number of pre-orders, or tell them "first 100 will ship then, next 100 will ship then", so you're not totally over encumbered. Limiting the number of pre-orders might completely defeat the purpose of them, though

Perhaps set up an "I'm interested" mailing list, so people who have signed up know right when the boards will be restocked?

+1 Accepting pre-orders allows for impulse buyers.

I think you'd sell more in the long run, and be able to plan the size of your manufacturing runs better if cablesaurus simply accepted pre-orders.
I've been checking the cablesaurus site over the past weeks and have always been unlucky.
I bought ztex & icarus boards in the meantime.

Well, they're in stock here right now, but we can't seem to supply enough to Cablesaurus to keep them in stock (selling out within hours of listing them). Because each board needs to be tested, then packed up and shipped to Cablesaurus, there's a bit of a lag. They will have more stock later this week.

Sorry, but you guys are just buying these up too fast to keep up!

When are you planning on getting more in stock?

Yes, there are two fan headers on the Rev3 boards, directly connected to the input voltage.

So, just to check: those white pins on the new red boards are for fans, right?

Excited for that