Bitcoin Forum

Hi

I have in possession 2 defective boards. One that refused to boot up upon delivery and another with a ripped USB connector (and defective canbus)

The first board never hashed before but the second board was hashing up until the USB connector issue. And for some reason the canbus does not work on this unit.

I was thinking if it was possible to recycle the Bitfurry ASIC chips from these boards and somehow get them converted to USB miners? Any suggestions or ideas or should I just use them as paper weights?  :D

Thanks

I haven't done any digging around, so I can't offer any details, but...  it seems like there should be a bare board to support the bitfury chips around here on the forums somewhere.  Since they're QFNs, it would take a little dexterity to remove them, and put them on a new board, but it's not impractical like it would be for a BGA.

You could also look into getting the USb on the 2nd one repaired or replaced somehow; depends on how bad the damage is.

Worst comes to worst, if you can't find a replacement, and you're going to junk them, let me know.  I have an interest in poking at a couple of the chips, and wouldn't mind paying for your scrap. 

Get the pcb without asic from here swop chips  job done.
Worked for me :)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=293668.0

Thanks. That looks interesting. I am not sure how practical or doable would it be to manually desolder the chips using a heatgun (from the old board) and resolder them on the new board with solder paste+heatgun combo.

** taking into consideration that it has been a very long time since I have used a soldering iron  ;D

no solder paste needed just flux there is enough left on chips from old board  :)
And it is doable with a heat gun i have use that and my ir rework both work fine just need to be careful with heat gun not to blow surrounding caps away  ;D

This would make a neat DIY project. I plan to order the boards and give it a go. Any additional last minute advice. And like I said its been a very very long time I've done any kind of soldering.    :D

This does sound like the best option.  Let us know how it goes!

Keep some extra flux around, and be patient.  It can take a little time for this style of chip to loosen up, expicially if they were made RHoS compliant (the solder for that requires more heat, and releases a little less smoothly.)

I have one, possibly 2 boards, that I would like to pull the chips out because one board I got never hashed more than 14Gh/s, and the 2nd one was fine til the USB port broke and now only hashes a combined 35Gh/s with the 14Gh/s board. (It was fine and went up to ~50Gh/s before the USB broke, and just has continued to be a pain to get hashing since that happened)

You should check out the Wasp Project, they are working on prototypes for 4 different chips including BitFury.

I have ordered one board from hashbuster for testing. Will see how it goes. I doubt I will make back much from these but would be a fun project nonetheless to work with (assuming that I can get it to work)