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What other people's idea's on this. Is everyone thinking that they will just hook up a hardware miner to their desktop machines or laptops and leave them running 24x7? Because I was thinking it would be nice to have a totally stand alone solution.
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If people are interested then perhaps we could start a discussion along these lines with some suggested solutions. Obviously it would be possible to build the solution into the FPGA but it seems like it would be a waste of valuable space and effort and might be better (and more cheaply) implemented in other ways.
I was thinking along the lines of something like one of this tiny Gumstix boards: http://www.gumstix.com/ running Ubuntu or perhaps a more mainstream, small motherboard. Mini-itx perhaps.
Thoughts?
What other people's idea's on this. Is everyone thinking that they will just hook up a hardware miner to their desktop machines or laptops and leave them running 24x7? Because I was thinking it would be nice to have a totally stand alone solution.
[...]
If people are interested then perhaps we could start a discussion along these lines with some suggested solutions. Obviously it would be possible to build the solution into the FPGA but it seems like it would be a waste of valuable space and effort and might be better (and more cheaply) implemented in other ways.
I was thinking along the lines of something like one of this tiny Gumstix boards: http://www.gumstix.com/ running Ubuntu or perhaps a more mainstream, small motherboard. Mini-itx perhaps.
Thoughts?
This has already been discussed and is on the roadmap. Basically, the plan is as follows: First we walk, then we run.
Meaning that first we get something working that requires a computer and then we change the backplane to include an embedded, ethernet capable computer. This will leave the FPGA design completely untouched (it being on a different PCB and all). We haven't discussed which CPU to use later, because we first have to get this one working...