Bitcoin Forum

This NOOB has a heavy duty problem with a ASICMINER V2 and hopes one of the resident Einsteins can assist.   I have a V2 that blew a surface mount fuse for unknown reasons.  It was installed in a backplane with 8 other cards using the prescribed HP 1000w power supply and the entire set of blades was cooled with two 166CFM fans (120mm) and  two 80mm fans at 33CFM.  The blades run nearly cool to the touch when under load.   
The V2 blade is stock with no overclocking.  Anyway the fuse is no big deal as I soldered on a auto-style fuse holder w/10AMP fuse.  Soldered with conventional grounded iron "off" when working on the board to prevent stray AC blasting into hash-o-tronics.

Here is the problem.  I reloaded board into backplane and flipped on the power, the board LED lit and about one second later I heard a loud POP and saw some molten lava eject across the room from a chip on the board.  Surprisingly the Ethernet and http server works.   I can http into board and board will connect to proxy server.  Chip status is all Xs not a single 0.  As expected the Board will not hash.

I shutdown and pulled board out for closer inspection.  The volcanic chip turned out to be an 8-pin chip labled IC82 stamped 4394 on top.

If I invest in hot-air station can I replace the blown chip and expect a good outcome or is this board irreversibly lobotomized?

 Best Regards,


Barf

It might be helpful to see a picture of the effected chip.  I don't have any blades on hand to get a good look at it.

The fact that it first blew a fuse, then did this, doesn't bode well for your blade.

Had you not soldered a new fuse on, you might have been able to inquire about a replacement.  I believe that friedcat does offer a limited warranty on the ASIC Miner products.

Post a picture if you can, so we can get a better look at the problem.

My dead V2, presently returned to Canary and awaiting word, had a splash of solder near the fuse on the side away from the connector.  There was no indication it had come from anywhere on the board so I just brushed it off assuming that it got there during production.  It wasn't in any kind of a shorting position.  I never heard any sound of anything going bad on the board and never found a way to get the ASICs showing O's instead of X's again.  Board did still have http but does not connect to proxys.  Mine still had 1.04v to the ASICs or at least to the empty copper pads.  Was never overclocked.  Ran well on 11.8v.  Had two 120mm fans a short distance blowing on the heatsink and a larger room fan blowing across the Blade from a distance.  There had been a cold spell with the room down to the low 60°'s and the Blade started to go bad with a subsequent warm day that put the room up to 76°F when its hashing dropped way down then failed after getting cleaned off.  The Blade was standing vertical in slots cut in PVC pipe kept stable with a small blob of RTV on each PVC slot with the two 120mm fans about an inch from the heatsink held in place with what we use to call radio straps holding one fan above the other with the bottom screwed to the PVC.  Tracking shows it was delivered to Canary's address on Monday.  It's Friday.  I've been of the opinion that static while cleaning may have changed the PIC programming.  I imagine using a PIC rather than a FPGA was a considerable cost savings.  I don't see any posts about reprogramming a Blade PIC.  Perhaps Friedcat has held that proprietary.  I've heard of chips that can burn out a connection if probed for data.

When connecting to the Blade do you have two proxy server addresses, user names and passwords entered, or a single address, user and password entered twice, or a single address, user and password entered once?  Can the Blade switch servers?  By 'will connect to proxy server' you mean that the Blade does ask for work but then hangs?