Bitcoin Forum

Hello Bitcoin community,

This is the first post I do on the forum and I would like to contribute with a method(discovered by chance) I used to revival some of my Antminer S3+ controller boards which bricked after a power off/on cycle.

I am the owner of a small  (80kWh) and I started to mine Bitcoin since the GPU era. From October I'm running a farm of +100 Antminers S3 powered by my turbine. From all S3s I only have had problems with 3 of them which died after a power cycle. After this the Ants remained idle with the red LED blinking and the green led of the ethernet plug dimly litting. They did not start to mine anymore even It was not possible to access them by ssh or web.  I tried desperately to restart them hundreds of times without success, so I concluded their controller boards were dead.

Looking for a possible solution in the forums, I tried to reproduce the Taugeran's Antminer S1 / S3 revival guide(https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=775662.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=775662.0)) using the serial TX / RX pins of my Raspberry Pi. The fact is that when connecting the serial/debug controller board TX pins to my raspberry I accidentally made a bridge with the controller ground, and after powering on the miner tataxan!!! It resurrected!! Then I tried to reproduce the same with the other two S3s and they came alive as well!

So basically these are the steps you should try if you have faulty boards with the following symptoms (red LED blinking and green light of the ethernet plug dimly litting).

1-> Remove the top cover.

2-> with the Antminer powered off, make a bridge between GND and TX as indicated in the picture. You can do it with a paper clip. No need to solder.

https://i.imgur.com/OjLV00l.jpg

3-> Power on the miner. Now it should be alive!!

4-> Remove the bridge.

5-> Cover the miner again(if you want)

Hope this will be useful!

 Need a better picture.  How about turning all power off to one of the units.
Then put the paper clip in the correct position and take a photo.
Or use a metal bag tie since the bending it to the right spots easy


http://img1.etsystatic.com/011/0/6364764/il_570xN.415393301_e19a.jpg

Has this worked for anyone else?  Can anyone point me to any other resources for controller board issues?  Any other sources for replacement controllers other than Bitmain? 

Thanks

I've still got an s3+ with one hashing board that isn't recognised. Can't seem to find the fault. Would love to get it working again. Tried swapping ribbon cables and it still didn't work.

This reset my s3 and got it working again after I had bricked it