Bitcoin Miners progress update – 26 March 2014
1.We progressed to The Minion’s 3rd substrate which has been approved and sent to manufacturing
2.The package house has received the
minion probe cart wafer.
3.Global Foundries has confirmed the wafer out date. The date is currently 5 days later than their prediction however they are seeking to catch up by optimising the rest of the process.
4.The final version of the X3 hashboard and X1 backplane has been sent to the PCB factory for prototyping
5.The final version of X1 hashboard will arrive this week on Friday.
6.The development team are still optimising the control board. The initial testing is positive: (booting sequence for Linux, network protocols and WiFi connections are ok). The team will focus now debugging the LCD. Testing for the touchscreen should start soon.
7.The modifications to the current setup is dictated by the testing and the quality controls reporting by our teams and suppliers. We concluded the last update to X3 backplane and the case design due to moving the X3 PSU on the left hand side for better heat dissipation.
8.We have received 2 types of PSUs for X3 from 2 vendors, we are testing them.
9.We have started mass
production of the heatsinks and X1 power supplies
10.We have received the mounting screw with springs for the heatsinks. After a thorough review the spring technical specifications are not satisfactory. We continue to upgrade the design accordingly and we expect the samples to be ready in 10 days.
11.We approved the design for X3 case and we are in process of negotiating the time frame with our short-listed suppliers.
12.We should complete the final specifications for the fans by the end of this week.
13.We had a demanding schedule in visiting all our suppliers for quality checks and for tracking the agreed aggressive deadlines
14.We are in the final negotiations with our manufacturing partner for power chips. We are seeking a reliable supply of the power chips.
15.We finalised the search for the new facility which will help increasing the power for Rent-A-Minion service. We’re planning to start setting it up as early as next week.
16.The team working on the Scrypt chip continue their busy schedule. They had some new addition to the team to help with the increasing workload.
17.We received a lot of enquiries regarding the LTC chip. The Management decided to focus on delivering the Bitcoin miners currently scheduled and postpone the LTC pre-orders until they have time available to deal with customer support issues that usually arise upon launch of a new complex product.
