Last change: 28th May 2013

https://sites.google.com/site/groupbuyuktrader/home

Quote from: friedcat on May 04, 2013, 01:39:52 PM

Introduction

The Block Erupter USB series is the second major product of Bitfountain. Its experimental batch (Emerald) has passed all tests. Each one mines at more than 300MH/s, powered only by the USB port.

It serves as a replacement of GPUs for mining hobbyists. Your GPUs could be freed from calculating hashes and resume rendering for you. It is also a perfect gift for getting people knowing about Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining.

The Emerald Batch

This is our experimental batch, and consists only a few number of devices.

This is a picture showing the relative size to the laptop. One with heatsink and one without.

We also tested it on the USB-hub. Seven in a row run over a whole night and are all very stable.

This is the picture showing its size against a coin.

Specification
Color: Green
Hashrate: >300MH/s
Mining Protocol: Icarus

This batch will be given away to miners, fans and hardware/software developers made the assignments to us long before. It has some issues working with cgminer (Already Fixed), but the modular python miner works fine. We will fix this in the first mass production batch (Sapphire). It also exceeds a bit of the USB spec of max current (560mA vs <500mA), but in our experiment most devices (PC, laptop) could power it up.

The Sapphire Batch

This is the first batch under production in quantity. Its lead-time is conservatively 15-20 days.

Changes and Improvements
Color of PCB changed to blue
Adding a LED which blinks when a share is found
Fixing the cgminer compatibility problem
Reducing the heat generated and the current to <500mA

This batch will be for group-buy and retailers. The quantity of each order should be more than 300 devices. The price is fixed at 1.99 BTC. We will start the group-buy threads as fixed-price auctions in the auction subforum. When your order is fulfilled you could pay and ask for refund anytime before the tracking number is generated (trackable on internet). After shipping we do not refund, but still guarantee a six-month warranty of free replacement like our blades. However the replacement should also come in batch (10 at one time).

Interested purchasers could contact me even before the group-buy threads are created.

Quote from: friedcat on May 21, 2013, 03:41:36 PM

The first mass production batch (sapphire) has finished its PCB production and assembly today.

It has significant improvements in:

Heat reduction: 560mA (emerald) -> 500-510mA (sapphire).

Stability: We stressed it with 9 Block Erupter USBs in a row without heatsinks heating up each other in a very dense USB hub with 25C without active airflow. No unexpected (non-probabilistic) HW errors ever happen.

Speed: This comes after better stability. Now the hashrate converges to its theoretical value of 336MH/s.

Appearance:
  Manual assembly (emerald) -> SMT machine assembly (sapphire)
  Standard heat-sink (emerald) -> heat-sink front-case 2-in-1 logo-ed (sapphire).
  LED added.

Four types of front-case:

All of them are eager to be powered up and hashing!

We had shipped the first 200 USBs today immediately after they are out of the factory. Soon more than 10,000 shiny little stones will be distributed international and quietly erupt blocks.

Quote from: friedcat on May 27, 2013, 03:54:50 AM

This is the information thread of sales for our Block Erupter USB sticks.

The specs of our products could be found here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=212085.0

Sales
The USB devices are priced at 1.99BTC each. The minimum purchasing amount is 50 sticks. We reduced the bottom-line quantity because we would like to see them in people's hands as soon as possible, since the expected difficulty rise continues to happen.

One extra stick for every 50 sticks will be provided with the package for redundancy. We will do a 6-month warranty for broken USB devices that exceeds the number. For example, if the buyer bought 50, we will ship 51. If three of them breaks she/he will need to send all three back and we will replace with two new ones. And we would like to emphasize that this policy is merely to reduce the time wasted on international delivery, and by no means an incentive to downgrade our internal quality requirements.

Another 1.7% extra sticks (rounded-up) will be provided to purchasers placing orders larger than 300 at once. They serve as discounts instead of redundancy.

Here is the service (shipping) priority order:

1) Existing groupbuy organizers and resellers on bitcointalk.org or contacted us before the thread is created.
2) Purchasers with quantity of 300 or more.
3) Rest purchasers.

Also, if you have really large (>1000) order requests, or want to be a mid-term or long-term distributor of our devices, please get contacted to us to make detailed deals.

To place an order, please send mail about your name, postal address, zip code and telephone number to asicminer.usb@gmail.com. We will provide you with your payment address.