The daisy-chain topology used to cluster Mixtile Blade 3 boards is more economical, more user friendly, and faster than the alternatives. As many of you have noted, however, it can be challenging to find the breakout cables necessary to interconnect a PCIe daisy-chain topology. For that reason, we decided to make a custom breakout board and some custom cables. As you can see in the images below, our board breaks the U.2 pins out into three connectors: a 12 V DCIN connector, a pair of (SFF-8643) PCIe connectors, and a SATA socket.

You will need SFF-8643 cables to connect one board’s Port A to another board’s Port B. The picture below shows an example of a four-board cluster. Since this kind of short SFF-8643 cable is rare in the retail market, we include custom, 15-cm cables with the breakout board.

If you want to customize the cable by yourself, you can find the necessary pinout on our website.

New Stretch Goal!

If our campaign hits its newly announced $60,000 stretch goal, we will outfit every Mixtile Blade 3 with a breakout board and our custom cables for free!

Our Interactive Livestream

We’d like to thank everyone for the overwhelming response to the interactive livestream event we’ve been hosting this past week. Hundreds of users watched our stream and took Mixtile Blade 3 for a test drive using our online web console. This event will continue into next week, as we highlight some of the most interesting features explored through the web console. We invite you to have a look and then get in touch to let us know what you think!

Mixtile Blade 3 is solidly compatible with the hardware and software ecosystems that surround various use cases, from multimedia edge computing to machine-learning applications. If you have technical questions or would like to discuss a possible application scenario, please reach out using the link on our campaign page or via Facebook, YouTube, etc. We will get back to you right away.

Thank you for your attention and support. Your questions and suggestions have given us with a great deal of inspiration and passion!