Quote from: Mattzees on December 06, 2015, 01:47:29 AM

Quote from: qberty on December 05, 2015, 11:13:56 PM

...I seen a couple posts about the jup and nep having similar physical boards but the titan is a whole other ball game. It has a cyclone microcontroller on it, which i'm in the process of reverse engineering but it's a new one and it's not as simple as the cyclone III. I can see why KnC decided to go with it for the controller board. If I can pull out some compilable binaries from from the chip than I should be able to duplicate the whole controller like I did with the bridge.

Why does the controller need to be duplicated physically at all? It should be doable in software. At that point, it's just a matter of hardware bridging to serial cables, which can be bought off-the-shelf.

I'd love to be able to control my cubes via ethernet or USB, and eliminate the controller entirely.

Edit: Let me also say I seriously doubt that KNC runs their cubes on same little turd controllers they gave us to use. I would imagine that KNC uses some other form of cube control in their data center. We should be able to replicate that somehow.

The problem is, they put the software that knows how to communicate with the cubes, on an encrypted chip sitting on the controller board. Most ASICs (not just miners) have controllers that communicate with the hardware much faster than a computer's available bus will allow.

Having the controller not be part of the host allows the titans to be independent and their efficiently won't be reliant on the host computer (raspberry pi in this case). The controller is definitely needed when dealing with these kinds of things.

If you compare and contrast with the BFL monarchs, they directly connect to your host PC, but rely on modified BFGminer binaries.