so can you explain it to me, how you set it up and what you needed?
I bought some Butterfly Labs "Single" 60GH/s mining units. I managed to buy them locally at a very good price on Craigslist. I purchased 16 of the 60GH units, plus some other smaller units. I sold most of them on eBay to get my money back, but retained 5 of the 60GH units for myself.
In any case, you can presently purchase these units on eBay for around $800 each. Once you have one, it is really pretty easy to run. It needs a power source. The official BFL power sources are crap. The guy who sold the miners to me included some really nice EVGA 1300W modular power supplies that could power up to 4 of the units from 1 power supply with no worries of explosions or fires like with the shoddy Butterfly Labs power supplies.
Anyway, once it's powered up, plug in the USB cable to your PC. It is no problem running many of these units from one PC, you just need as many USB ports/hubs as necessary. Depending on your OS, there may be drivers that need to be installed, they are linked on the BFL website. Once they are plugged in, start up bfgminer or cgminer, they should be detected automatically and they will run for weeks without intervention.
Other ASIC miners are somewhat different. Some of them have embedded micro-controllers or Raspberry Pi so that they can mine automatically, so you set them up kind of like you would a router, through a web interface.
I should warn: at current market prices, these units are vastly overpriced. A single 60GH/s unit is likely to ever produce maybe 0.5 BTC over its lifetime, starting today, given projected difficulty increases. By the end of the year for sure, but probably more towards the middle of the year, it will be un-profitable to run the machine due to power costs (fortunately, I have access to free power roughly half of the week, so I can keep using mine indefinitely). Of course, this depends on the price of BTC as well as the difficulty increases. If BTC goes to $5,000 by the end of the year then the units will probably still be profitable at that point. Anyway, take 0.5 BTC, that's roughly $350 today. That is the "break even cost" for these units at this point in time. If someone were to sell one to you for $350, you could probably break even on it. However, the market price for these is still in the $800 range on eBay, and even more on CraigsList. As recently as a few weeks ago, they were being sold directly from BFL for $1200 or so.
I should also warn: do not ever, ever, ever pre-order an mining rig from any company, period. All ASIC companies have been plagued by delays that mean months of not mining. They are all newbie chip-design companies relying on big fabs to fab their chips. Assuming that goes well, they still have to package, test, etc. before they can actually ship units to customers. They are not Intel or AMD or NVIDIA that have tons of experience and can give you exact delivery dates and always hit their performance goals (note, sometimes not even Intel/AMD/NVIDIA can come out on time and with projected performance). Butterfly Labs, Terrahash, Cointerra, even KnC have had problems meeting ship dates and/or performance goals. Butterfly Labs in particular has a horrible reputation for this. Although I have to say, their miners look very nice, and they have been running very stable for me.
The difficulty of BTC mining roughly doubles every month. That means that if you start mining today with a given rig, say it earns you 1BTC the first month. Then 0.5BTC the next month. Then 0.25BTC the next month. Then 0.125BTC the next month. But if you order it today and get it a month from now, you will start with 0.5BTC, 0.25BTC, 0.125BTC.... so you missed out on the 1BTC you could have made this month, and that means the difference between making money and losing money. And some of these companies have had months of delays. People that thought they would get their Butterfly Labs stuff in April ended up getting it in November.
These poor people got screwed. I happened to find one of them who was desperate to get his money back, so I forged a good deal and flipped most of the units on eBay to get me to break-even, along with the coins that I mined in the meantime. (Briefly, I had 1TH/s of BTC miners.) My units are now effectively "free" (although I could have sold them for roughly $4k, so opportunity cost of keeping them was $4k... I sold my last units last week. Prices have dropped, so the opportunity cost of still keeping them today is probably around $3k... I could probably net around $600 per unit after eBay fees) and any BTC that they mine is "profit".
I would recommend, before jumping into any of this: mine one of the scrypt coins with your GPU and see how it all works. Become familiar with cgminer in particular. Even if your GPU is crappy, it will still mine, and you can get a grasp of it before you spend big bucks on ASICs and spend days trying to figure out how to get them to work. If you already know how to GPU mine with cgminer then you will not have much of a problem with any ASICs that you might purchase.
And, if you really are desperate to buy an ASIC rig, keep an eye on this page:
https://www.bitmaintech.com/productDetail.htm?pid=00020140107162747992Ce5uBuxW06D6
Price was 1.45BTC before they sold out. It is anticipated that when they get more units in stock, price will drop to 1.1BTC or maybe even less. At that price, those units will probably do slightly better than break-even. Bitmain is a Chinese company, but they are actually pretty well-respected and always ship on time. If they say they have units in stock, they do, and they will ship them when they say. The units take about a week to ship from China to the US, according to most reports.