Post
Topic
Board Project Development
Re: [The Wasp] 28nm ASIC Miner Open Hardware Development Project
by
Bicknellski
on 08/11/2013, 11:14:21 UTC
Totally understandable, just was wondering because I know there are people out there with BFL chips that would love to have a home for them.  I agree though, I have no intention of supporting BFL - just the miners who may have gotten screwed holding a reel of 100 chips they can't get rid of.  I truthfully don't understand the architecture of these chips and the protocols for feeding them hashes to know how inter operative a single board could be designed to be.

I am sure if people wanted us to try BFL chips and they had enough kicking around we could have one of the EE's look at them but at this point people I think would be better off doing the Chili or the other DIY BFL design groups right?

What I really like is that it looks like you are really trying to make this modular, which hasn't been a real trend with the big manufacturers (aside from AsicMiner and Bitfury).  Modular means good for the little guy and the big guy.  Its truly something that has been missing from many designs.

I think it is good for the big guys as well if you are in the game longer term you can swap in newer Wasps with the latest chips onto the existing Hive and no need to wait for software to be designed as well. But yes certainly the DIY would have ample room for people to come up with their own solutions.

Any reason these asic chips can't be fitted with pins, so that boards and asics aren't tied together?  Wouldn't it be nice to be able to buy a wasp and take a handful of A1's you had at home and place them yourself, rather than having to hardwire (some fairly tricky soldering, depending on the chip) the chip to the board, which means logistics can get fracked up due to board manufacturers having to track, mount and ship individual's asic orders as well as the boards they manufactured on their own....

We looked at socketed Wasps where you could do that but the changes in chips would make it too expensive and not really practical. A reasonably well skilled person with a reflow oven could bump ASICs and do just that with the Wasps. If you followed the Alten, Bkkcoins and Burnin builds for the DIY Avalon chips you had the potential to do Alten's as DIY kit. Bkkcoins did his pick and place by hand for all the components on the K16 I believe. But to be honest the level we are talking here is the DIYer could come up with their own Wasp design and slot it into these Hives but really with SMT technology you need a pick and place machine etc to do things properly. You couldn't do a lot of boards by hand.