Re: [ANN][BLC] Blakecoin Fast Blake-256 Cryptographic Coin for CPU/GPU/FPGA
That said, I happen to have a BFL FPGA Single. I'm sure there are other people who have also stayed away from the ASIC refund, and it could be a nice engine for Blake. The sha256 performance is similar to a Ztex 1.15y. I recall reading it has two fairly high-end Altera chips, possibly of the Stratix family. (The heatsinks are glued on, so I haven't checked.)
We discussed this on another thread (it was a bit cluttered, so I'll just quote a couple of posts) ...
Let me say, I do not think they are scrap. They do have a value, it is just pretty low. They can be used as an FPGA dev platform. That is why I say I would buy a few for $30 each. But I will never get that $30 back mining BTC.
Last I checked they were cryptographically locked to BFL's FPGA images and BFL won't provide the info needed to reprogram them. IIRC they also can't be reprogramed over the USB bus.That's useful info. I was wondering if it might be worth porting my litecoin miner onto them, but I'll stick with the Lancelot and Ztex for now. Its just a hobby project anyway as the return on mining LTC would be minimal at the sort of hash rates I'm achieving (It was a challenge ... lots of people said FPGA couldn't do scrypt, well it can, just not very well
).That can easily be fixed. The crypto keys can be removed with a JTAG.
yep ok ..... the BFL bit-files will no longer work, but it's not as if you need them.
They have two, quite expensive, FPGA chips inside. They could be recovered and used elsewhere.
According to Ngzhang they are EP3SL150F780 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=79825.0
Some additional info https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=123155.0
However the bitstream is protected (see http://www.altera.co.uk/literature/wp/wp-01010.pdf) and if BFL used the poly-fuse option rather than battery-backup, the devices may be unusable (I defer to rasorfishsl upthread, but AFAIK poly-fuses are one-time programmable and if the tamper flag is set the devices are junk without the master key).
So according to rasorfishsl it is possible, then according to kramble (me) its not (but I could be wrong). I guess the best way to proceed is to get the JTAG working first (it may need some hardware hacking), check the status of the protection and tamper FUSE, and proceed from there.