Post
Topic
Board Group buys
Re: [OPEN] Bitmine CoinCraft A1 28nm chip distribution / DIY support
by
goodney
on 13/02/2014, 18:37:09 UTC
This was already addressed in this thread somewhere. Generally: yes I plan to push it upstream and also remain maintainer of that driver. Since that involves quite some initial and ongoing efforts, I need to be sure that it is useful for other projects. Right now, all projects I know do not communicate directly to the A1 but use FW to wrap control over the chip chain from some uC. At the same time, it turned out that for driving Bitmine's products it was required to add lots of HW specific code (like for programmable potis, i2c multiplexers, voltage regulators, temp sensors), so that I doubt the specialized drivers will be usable for anyone beside Bitmine. Here my approach is to wait and see other direct SPI based designs and modularize the driver in a generic part (basically what is already out + some cleanups and updates) and derivate code.

FYI my design is a direct USB-SPI design. I know there are some concerns about CPU load on the host when communicating this way, but to me direct USB-SPI is the fastest way to a working board since I don't have to develop µ-controller firmware.

-a[g