It's coming along. Most of the basic mining functions are working well now. The speed is correct. I'm still only testing with 4 chips but Terrahash has a full 16 chip board and are working on getting that running better. That screen shot above is running off my Raspberry Pi. On my notebook it gets higher error rates. So there is some debugging to do as to why that happens.

Chaoztc took my basic I2C code and re-wrote and debugged it. He sent me that and I just need to integrate it in. He tested with 3 PICs, 1 master and 2 slaves and says it was working ok like that. So after I get the hardware revisions done and boards ordered then I have two main tasks to do before I get new boards back.

#1 priority is getting a bootloader written. There's lots of examples, and it's not so hard. I don't expect that to take too long but this one is different as it needs to support bootloading via USB and I2C in Klondike protocol, so that users don't need to disassemble their rigs to upgrade. It should be a fairly transparent process that only takes maybe 10-15 seconds per device, and can even be automated within the cgminer driver so that downtime is minimal. In fact, it's not really a bootloader per se, because you don't need to reboot anything manually.

#2 Integrate the I2C in so that when I have a few boards at hand I can test how that works while mining is active.

The bootloader is first because any one who buys/builds a board is going to want an easy upgrade path. We don't want users having to send boards back to be re-programmed. So even very basic firmware with a bootloader allows for upgrading on the fly as more stuff gets debugged and tweaked with improvements.

A but pricier? I looked on mouser and it seems to run about $4-5/chip unless I got the wrong one. Thats 3x the price of the PIC controller. Anyway, I'm not going to start into that at this late time.