Quote from: Puppet on February 21, 2014, 10:34:12 AM

Biomech, I know you didnt ask to be a reviewer, so Im cutting you all the slack I can manage, dont take this personal, but really, you didnt review the AMT unit, you reviewed OpenWRT + cgminer. Just about nothing you tested is unique to AMT, somehow you managed a review without even looking at the box. No word on noise levels, build quality, size/weight, power consumption (!), no look under the hood whats actually in there, what PSU did they use, what boards, what router/host, etc, etc.

Keep picking at me. I don't take offense. I want to do this right.

I'll shoot some more stills and put them in this thread. To be perfectly honest, I think they picked the wrong guy. I'm a veteran of computers, not bitcoin miners. I'm also pretty much a political theorist. I do NOT understand why I was the one they chose.

To answer your specifics on this, the power consumption varies somewhat, as does the hashrate, but the range is 165 to 180 watts, usually tending to about 170. The router/firmware unit is a TP-Link TL-MR3020 . The two hashing boards are Technobit HEX16B bitfury based units.

I want to address the "nothing unique to AMT" part. You are correct in this. They assembled it and configured the firmware. They are essentially a reseller, as far as I can tell. I think they are trying to make their own boards for the Coincraft series, but this one is a technobit, preconfigured and put in a nice case. While I find their lack of communication and transparency as egregious as the rest of you, I don't find any problem with this part. The very mainstream laptop I'm typing this on is under the "acer" brand, yet when I took it's twin apart, almost nothing under the hood was made by or even branded by acer. Same with Dell, HP, etcetera. It's been the model in computers for a long time. Components are rebranded and repackaged. We knew they were working with Technobit before they shipped a single unit, so they weren't even opaque on that one.

I am upset with them. I really wanted them to come through. I'm sure you saw my post in the main thread, and it's the truth. But unless they drastically change what they're doing within the next few days, I'll be buying Ants. Which sucks, because I DO like this machine. It worked as advertised, aside from the power draw, and that's pretty significant in this brave new world. But doing it once or twice and doing it en masse are different things. I can't endorse this company as it stands. I am grateful for the machine, but they didn't follow through.

I took a few shots at you early on. It was mostly in humour. I think you are one of the more objective, if pessimistic, people on this forum. I'm an eternal optimist, and it has burned me on more than one occasion.

AMT gave me a start in bitcoin mining, and have personally done well by me. It was unexpected, kind of flattering, and a lot of fun. But I'm one guy, and by now there should be hundreds. I'll keep updating this as I play with the machine, but I will not endorse AMT based on this alone. So far, as near as I can ascertain, maybe a dozen people have received these machines, and I've not heard of any major problems with them. But they have not addressed the minor ones, such as lack of proper documentation, shipping queue, refund policy, all sorts of frankly trivial things that even a small company should have resolved in this timeframe. I've withheld my criticism of the company till now, but they have not lived up to that. I still have hope that they will pull it out as I do not believe they are operating out of bad intent. But they cannot continue in the lackadaisical manner they have been and be a real contender, even as a reseller. If I were enough of a gambler, I could do better. I have a lot of business experience as a manager in food service, which is WAY tougher than this.

And from my own side, I have dropped the ball on this. I can't say "it's not my fault", as it's a copout. I can say that I'm under an enormous amount of stress with things unrelated to this, and it wasn't as high a priority as I think a lot of you would have liked it to be. I didn't ask for it, but I did accept it.

Again, keep picking at me. I learn from it.

Edit: Noise level. It's pretty quiet. The camera/mic was two feet from the machine in the video. The fan runs constantly, but it's unobtrusive. I don't even notice it most of the time. I'd guess 5-6 db above ambient. That is a guess, I can't measure it.