For my first year Bitcointalk anniversary, I wanted to prepare a little bit of a special post.
It could fit in the mining section, but since it’s kind of a work in progress and “Development and Technical Discussion” was mostly my home for this past year, I will present my latest project here.
As it’s rather easy to source BCM1387 chips from China for cheap, I set out to build an open-source low-power home miner that everyone can build themselves.
My first step was to create and order a breakout board to be able to reverse engineer the communication.
I also wanted to create a matching power supply; popular mining sticks like sidehack’s stuff utilize rather high power buck converter circuits that shift 5V input voltage down to whatever the core needs; in this case, 0.4V at high current.
So I’ve started to learn about buck converters and power electronics, but I’m not yet done with a circuit that I’m comfortable to get manufactured, so I designed the breakout board as a pure breakout, without any power supply circuitry and instead just a beefy 2-pin connector. My hope is that for pure protocol reversing, the chip won’t pull a lot of power and will only do so once it is instructed to start mining.
Anyhow, in the spirit of open source I’m releasing the Gerber files and will also upload design files shortly.
I will continue to work on this project, but if anyone wants to chime in and / or help in this project (for example for the power supply), don’t hesitate to comment or DM me!
I’d like to take a bit of space here to thank everyone for the great discussions, helpful information and acceptance in signature & avatar campaigns very early on. Thanks for taking your time to read through my topics and posts when my account was still in Newbie status.
This has really been the best forum I’ve been registered on!