Bitcoin Forum

Apparently, the cointerra people are starting to look more like BFL. First the stopped responding the support and phone calls. After issue from sever buys regarding their cointerra stopped working they now took the forums down as well...

Let's start a thread over here for miners who need support regarding ther 30lb Paperweight and if it can be of any use

They suck as a company, my Cointerra has been hacked and is only running at 50% hashing capacity.  The other 50% is hashing for some hacker and not matter what I do I can't seem to restrict access.  Cointerra gave me instructions on a recovery process that should kick this hacker out but that failed to do the trick.  Cointerras response was there is nothing else they can do and has ignored all my emails and no one picks up the phone when you call.  The employee who I was working is named Marshall and if he is reading this I have this message to you "GO FUCK YOURSELF".  If you want to message him and fuck with him his email is marshall@cointerra.com.

the hack is as far as im aware limited only to the beaglebone, thankfully (in a way) the goldstrike boards are stand alone, crack the lid off, disconnect the USBs and wire the boards directly into a linux PC with a cointerra enabled build of cgminer on, or just remake your own image if you really want to stick with the beagle, im getting rather clued up on repairing cointerras now (not bad for someone who doesnt actually own one!) maybe i should start some sort of blog on the potentail fixes etc, especially since the cointerra forums died

Thanks for creating this thread as I'm sure many owners (like me) have ongoing problems with these supposedly multifunctional paperweights.

It's been a few months since I've turned on this miner and in the beginning it worked fine hashing at 1.6TH with temps in the range of 75-85C (core).
My troubles started when CTA1 started to report inconsistent temperatures usually +15-20C above CTA0 while ambient temps have not been changed.

Shortly after this anomaly CTA1 started to throttle very often. I have cleaned the original thermal paste and reapplied a known quality brand.
This seemed to fix the issue for several weeks and CTA1 was within 5C range and I was a happy miner (my overall temps have gone down considerably too).

Next I encountered the "dead core" cointerra disease, as half of CTA1 disappeared. I was reflashing and restarting this diabolic device multiple times and disconnected/reconnected all the connectors inside to resolve this issue.
 
Couple of weeks after I'm again seeing CTA1 throttling very often meanwhile the reported hashrate is 1.3-1.5TH (temps in the 80-95C range).

I'm thinking about ordering quality thermal pads due to the unevenness of the chips surface and using a proper wc loop ("luckily" I have spare parts - will report back when it's done).

Do any of you found a permanent fix or tried something else with success?

nothing permanent, im looking at liquidmetal pads to replace the compound, ive also heard that there is the possibility the shims that protect the cores from the block being tightened too far may be a shade thick so i may try sanding them down a bit to try and get better results, i wish they hadnt hardcoded all the cutoffs and detection things (eg one of the units i look after cant read the waterpump hence the board wont start with that pump connected) were it not for all that we could easily swap out the cooling system in place for a stronger cooling system, not that its not possible still, its just a bit more of a pain

one thing that does seem to help is regular restarts, you can add a cron job to resart the system every few hours which seems to help a bit but not too much

Whatever you do, do not buy these thermal pads ( http://www.frozencpu.com/products/16878/thr-164/Fujipoly_Extreme_System_Builder_Thermal_Pad_-_14_Sheet_-_150_x_100_x_05_-_Thermal_Conductivity_110_WmK.html?tl=g8c487s1730&id=T4zpcMmV ) I bought these and my temps got worse. Temps went straight to 105°+. There was a guy on the Cointerra forum that used Collaboratory Liquid Pro and said it brought his temps down.

Hey guys thanks for starting this thread, seeing as Cointerra shutdown the forums this is the only place i can find help. I've been running an April batch for two months now and today one board did not come online. I opened it up to see why only one board was going online and noticed that LED D45 was red. Does anyone know what this means? and is there is a way to fix it?

Thanks. For the time being I have ordered some samples from http://www.tglobalthermal.com/

I would be interested if the Liquid Pro last long. I've used mx4 but it started overheating after 2-3 weeks.

I'm waiting for my wc block to arrive next week too, hopefully I'll be able to overcome this throttling issue once and for all. As CTA0 is fine I'll focus only on CTA1.

What is the intake/exhaust temp?

I used this http://www.frozencpu.com/products/7038/thr-41/Innovation_Cooling_Diamond_7_Carat_Thermal_Compound_-_15_Grams.html

I also used Arctic Clean to clean up the huge mess first. You want to put a small drip of compound on each chip. They say pea sized on the instructions but I used a little less for each chip since they are a lot smaller than a CPU.

I have had it running stable for 3 weeks now with no temp rises.

I had tried Arctic silver first but that didn't help at all, the Cooling Diamond was like night and day and has been working fantastic.

Thanks. I've ordered that as well.

I'll compare it to the thermal pads when everything arrives.
 

I want to buy some mining equipment and and checked many websites already I was interested in Cointerra's Terraminer but I am seeing that this company is not that good and their support is some kind of joke. And I will be buying now from http://www.gawminers.com/ (http://www.gawminers.com/) instead. They have a lot better client support and this is what I like the most.

I too have problem with CTA1. Do you guys know which board is the CTA1?
is it next to the 2 Power Supplies?
TIA

Marshall from Cointerra Tech Support told me board 0 was the board above the Beaglebone Black controller.

I just replaced the water cooling block on mine.  CTA0 for me was the board closest to the 2 power supplies(right hand side when facing the front).  CTA1 was the board furthest away from the power supplies(left hand side when facing the front). 

Good luck.

which part did you replace it with? the block is a custom one (i asked coolIT who made it but they dont sell them and said id need to contact cointerra support) and i couldnt find any alternative blocks with integrated 3 pin pumps that looked decent or have you just got an external pump?

Considering how bad they are, I wouldn't replace them with the same model.

EK blocks should fit but I'm yet to install it (it might require some modifications but nothing complex).

I thought I'd share my experience troubleshooting a very hot miner. Although temperamentally slowing down, this miner would perform at 100% after a reset, usually staying there for a day or so. I thought I'd replace the thermal paste with some arctic silver to see if it brought down the temperatures from ~90C. Long story short, it did not. Now one board isn't responding, and the other has overheating problems. Disregarding my extreme stupidity, it was a valuable education in the unit's operation. Here's a video I shot of it in operation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nqr9Dsli24

Note the orange and red status lights on each board. I'm assuming those are individual core hashing status. The "bad" board (on the left) would simply flash the orange lights as shown in the video, then reset itself (the fans go to maximum briefly then reduce in speed).

It would be really nice if they released the source code for the firmware used in the TI microcontroller they're using. I'm guessing they don't because yahoos like me would change some setting that would definitely fry the chips or electronics unintentionally. I don't blame them, but still want it. What the device does can be partly ascertained from the cgminer source code, but all that is pretty high level message passing which mainly involves reporting of values, and not setting of them.

I am in a similar situation as you. I applied arctic silver and now one board has the status lights on constantly. Is there a way of knowing what is causing the problems from the status lights?

I have applied thermal compound about 5 times so far with different results each time. If you don't get enough paste on them they will get hot and to much and they get hot. If the chips get to hot they are going to shut down. So the board you have that's down could be from the chips getting to hot. Reason I say that is one time after I reapplied the paste I had a chip shut down as soon as the stats came up from getting to hot. I redid the paste once again and it came back. Finding the right amount of paste is the trick since the four die's are not level. I'm yet to get it right.

Thanks for the info. Ill give that a try and hopefully that solves my problem.

My cointerra has been operating for two months. CTA1 Core Temp 1 has been steadily climbing in temp over the past few weeks. Its now at ~112c but is still hashing 809 Gh/s. Temp sometimes drop to 98c, 105c even hit 114c. CTA0 cores are at ~75c. The ambient room temp is about 75f with good ventilation. I just added 2 more terraminers to the room and their core temps are ~75c. Ive emailed and called cointerra multiple times with no response or help from them. Not sure what to do here. Let the miner keep hashing or what? I heard it shuts down at 120c.

I have been battling this issue also for quite some time. Well today I switched thermal compound. I applied this http://www.frozencpu.com/products/3784/thr-26/Coollaboratory_Liquid_PRO_Thermal_Interface_Material.html?tl=g8c127s451 and so far my temps are way down. Before I was using MX-4 and my temps were in the 90's-100's. Now the hottest chip is 58°. I also removed the screen in front of the fans. Just got to be careful with the Liquid Pro its highly conductive.

Edit: I am only on power step 7 so far which is where it was before I changed to Liquid Pro. Will try 9 after it runs a while.

I want to try this can you give any advise for applying this to the cointerra?

I just watched videos on youtube and went from there. But here's what I did. I just put some on the bottom of the water block with the bottom of the block turned up and flat so the Liquid Pro don't roll off. On the bottom of my water blocks I could see the outline of the chip and I just spread it were the dies would make contact ( a square about 26mm x 26mm). Then I applied it to the chips. After applying it to the chips I put a drop in the center of each one. I used a little bit more than 1 syringe (think I should have used a little more since I still have two chips at 57° while the rest are in the 40's). Anywho gonna let it run for a few hours then step it up to 9.

Edit: Just make damn sure to be careful and not get it anywhere but on the chips and block. This stuff is highly conductive.

I just ordered one syringe, how much of this works for a single core? How is your core doing? Mine has already begun to hit 120c and restart. This seems to be a endless loop its doing. The other core stays at 70c. In my two other brand new machines the cores are ~85c

Make sure you watch all the youtube videos on how to spread it and get an idea on how to do it. That's what I did. You have to spread it with the Q-tips it does not spread like regular thermal paste. When I put it on the water block I put just enough to cover it. After applied to the water block I held it vertical and made sure it didn't run (like paint will do if you put to much on a wall). On the chips I put about half the size of a BB or so. Just so you know I was just sharing what I did to mine that helped my temps and I'm no way responsible if you screw up your Terraminer doing this. APPLY AT YOUR OWN RISK. As for my temps so far so good. Think I might wait one more day before going to power step 9. I was getting high temps (90°+) on power step 7 which is what I'm on now and temps are 50's-60's. I just hope my temps don't start creeping up like they were doing. Will find out after a few days of running I guess.

I did watch some videos and comfortable with this. Ive been building my own computers since early 90s so this is right at home. Just never used thermal pro always high end grease. I wont blame you for anything that goes wrong, just a thank you if it works. Strangely Cointerra emailed me back this morn with this email below and I responded letting him know I have the latest firmware and attached the pdf for all 3 of my units because the brand new ones that just arrived yesterday are hitting ~90c. This is such B.S.

Hello ,

Firstly, have you updated to the most recent firmware? Oftentimes this solves minor issues: http://cointerra.com/firmware-downloads/

If so, can you please go to the ADVANCED tab on the Control Panel, expand the four sections (+ icon) and either save as a .pdf from your browser (preferred) and attach to your reply, or copy and paste all the stats into a reply to this email, and we will work with you to diagnose the issue ASAP.

Thank you and feel free to contact us with any other questions,
Richard
CoinTerra Support

I have got that same email and sent them my stats and was told they looked good. Then I took a screen shot of my temps when they hit 113° and they asked if I would like to RMA the machine and I told them I would try to get the temps down with fans. The reason I didn't RMA the machine is I seen on Cointerras forum where quite a few customers sent their units back for RMA and when they got them back the unit ended up doing whatever it was doing before they sent it in. I just kept them as cool as I could until my warrant expired and tried to fix it myself. One more thing I forgot to mention is after I removed the water blocks I took a brand new Stanley knife blade and scraped it across the tops of the chips to see how much of the thermal paste was left behind to get an idea of how much Liquid Pro to add. If you do that you will see the chips are not level.

I wouldnt RMA it either thats just downtime with difficult increasing. If these machines are not online its a loss. I just bought two cool laboratory syringes from the local store and will apply this to the cpu core. I understand that CTA1 is furthest from the power supply (when facing the front of unit its the left board) but which cpu is cpu core1, is it labeled on the board?

That's the thing I'm not sure about. I email Marshall from Cointerra Tech Support and he told me board 0 was the one right above the Beaglebone Black controller. But when I asked him which core was 1 and which was 2 he told me he couldn't comment on that. So your guess is as good as mine. If you figure it out let me know. Looks like my temps have came up a few degrees. Anywho, off to drink a few beers. Post your results please after its ran a few hours.

I solved my own problem and so far it looks incredible, better that factory shipped. Here are some details I will share. Facing the unit head on

CTA0 Left Board (furthest from power supply)
CTA0 CPU Core1 (front of the unit)
CTA0 CPU Core2 (rear of the unit)

CTA1 Right Board (closest to the power supplies)
CTA1 CPU Core1 (front of the unit)
CTA1 CPU Core2 (rear of the unit)

When I opened the unit I noticed corrosion in the corner near the radiator and then saw the tube had a pin size leak. This also happened to be the tube that cooled the overheating core (cta1 cpu core1) so I am assuming this hole caused a loss of pressure and could not properly cycle the coolant. I went to homie depot and got some tubing (1/4" ID 1/2" OD) and a couple house clamps. Local computer store had coolant, a big syringe to fill the radiator, and the liquid pro which has been recommended many times. Came home and removed the cooling blocks to discover a worthless shit job of applying thermal grease. I used isopropanol and lots of q-tips to clean up this worthless lazy crap job cointerra did. Also cleaned the bottom of the cooling block. Both surfaces cleaned to a shine perfectly. Emptied the old radiator fluid , hoses, and block. Put the new tube on clamped it down and filled it with the new red fluid the best I could trying to leave no air bubbles inside. (the air seen in the pic does not seem to be causing any problems so far). Applying the liquid pro with the provided q-tips was tricky at first but after a couple times it was easy, just had to go slow, steady and take my time. A very small amount about half the size or less of a bb. I used a very light smear and pat technique to make sure I covered the entire surface. The finished job should look like a mirror. I did not apply any to the cooling block. Below are photos of the process as I did this job. I hope this helps others because Cointerra is not doing jack shit for anyone and an RMA offer by them is not an option when time is of the essence here. My total down town was about 4 hours and now my units cores are all running at 50c-60c. A huge change from before and even better then out of the box. Even the two brand new units that I just got have started hitting ~85c and I will be doing this process to them as well.

https://i.imgur.com/lC2E914l.jpg
^^^^ High temps, 113c would hit 120c and shutdown ^^^^
https://i.imgur.com/CdgEXjVl.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/lkIOIC6l.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/4UPdLIfl.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/NWvmTgkl.jpg
^^^^ A small green dot can be seen from where the coolant was leaking ^^^^
https://i.imgur.com/QOe6HSWl.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/lbGhJ1zl.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/a7vw2wvl.jpg
^^^^ Cointerras crappy ass fucked up worthless job using cheap grease applied by a monkey ^^^^
https://i.imgur.com/chJPqJjl.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/kjV3zLMl.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/2AzWdx3l.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/bQCGtu3l.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/2ONVRUIl.jpg
^^^^ Clean GoldStrike chips ready for liquid pro ^^^^
https://i.imgur.com/qKcijrll.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/Va8fZfQl.jpg
^^^^ Liquid pro applied ^^^^
https://i.imgur.com/yQOVVz1l.jpg
^^^^ New hose with coolant ^^^^
https://i.imgur.com/33etg7Rl.jpg
^^^^ Low temps maintaining ^^^^

Your Welcome.

Well just went to power step 9. My temps are now at  55°. Whats a guy to do!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A huge THANK YOU to you my friend for your help in fixing this

You're Welcome. Glad it worked.

Well its been 4 days now and temps are still in the 50°C range. Still throttles for some reason though.

Temps so far after Liquid Pro applied.

https://i.imgur.com/iedA2A3.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/h76uWDy.jpg

I also vent it outside.

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

Ambient temps were around 76°F or so.

Temps prior to Liquid Pro were 80°-105°C on power step 7.

Edit: Ambient temps of 80°F+ my temps will reach around 62° or so. Also the temps I posted are from power step 9.

Yeah, I was truly impressed with the result of Liquid Pro.

what ever you do dont rush this and take your time. I noticed that one of units had so much thermal grease put on from Cointerra, I mean globs of it caked on that when I went to lift the cooling block strings of it hung down and one small string of it fell onto a part of the chips. I cleaned it up but after reassembling my unit CTA0 would not boot up. It had power via the volt meter and the fans where on but no mining. I had to take it apart again pull the board out and get tons of q-tip's and 99% alcohol and clean the heck out of the problem area and surrounding areas. This worked. The unit powered on both miners online. Def a lesson learned

Do you get a better hashrate now with the system running cooler?

I am running at step 9, but only getting 1.5 TH with one core running 20 deg hotter than the others.
Not sure if ist worth a try or wasting time

Just ordered the liquid pro, will give it a try. The videos on YouTube dont look too difficult.
Not sure if i only put it on the chip or on the cooler side also?

No I did not get a better hash rate. The terraminers are designed to run at 1.6Ths regardless of temp until a core hits 120c then it reboots. I also noticed my miners would have one or two cores that where significantly hotter then the rest. I opened my last 3rd machine to cool it and noticed that many of the screws that hold down the cooling block where not even screwed in or they where barley screwed in leaving the cooling block lifted up and not having good contact to the core. Another fail by cointerra. Only apply the LiquidPro to the cores, not the cooling block. Just like the photos I posted.

FYI, my third machine when put back and turned on failed to boot up CTA1. Ive cleaned the board twice but still no mining. It has power but does not boot up and coming online so currently only CTA0 is mining. I will most likely pull this board again and give it a full bath in a last desperate attempt. I was so critical in doing this last cooling job just because of my previous experiences and still I fucked up with no idea how.

If you decide to open clean and cool with LiquidPro its a huge risk but if you can pull it off its well worth it

After some hours or days of the miner running you should be at 1.6th. Its normal to have peaks and drops though. One of my cores that was overheating at 120c would still be hashing fully. I would suggest not opening your machine unless it is overheating. If you notice overtime the temps getting hotter and hotter and hotter then most likely its on its way to overheating. Let the miner run as long as possible until it nears or hits 120c and you have no other option but to open it.

Hey Scriber how would you go about giving a "full bath" to the board? do you wash it with alcohol or something else? I'm asking because i'm in the same boat as you, I reapplied the thermal compound and now one board does not want to work. CTA0 is working but CTA1 powers up but does not do anything. I've looked at the board all over and don't see anything wrong with the board so i'm willing to trying just about anything to get it working again.

I have a friend who knows electronics and from what he says yes 99% Isopropyl soaking maybe 10 or 20 min. I even suggested light brushing components with a soft tooth brush. Hes going to help me in a couple days and I will let you know how it turns out. Bummer to hear you have the same problem. I feel like something is up with these units once you open them. I wanted to buy 3 more which I know I will have to cool all of them with liquid pro but after these experiences I dont know what to do. If you bath it in 99% let me know how it works

 So glad I found you guys. Hopefully I can provide some help, and possibly get some. First off let me say I think it is great users are doing all they can to make stuff work that should work anyways. I did just hit my ROI on my feb batch unit except for the electric as I have not figured it yet but my rates are really low (.08). With that said, one of my units is only halfway working. I do not believe it has been hacked so that fix will likely end up useless. Reason I say that, with the case open the front d37-d45 leds strobe from right to left when working properly. One side is fine and hashing as expected. The other strobes the same but as soon as the light hits D43, I hear a tick, all lights come on, and it restarts the pattern faster than the one that is working. Has anyone figured out what the lights actually are? I assume that is the 8 chips on that side of the board. If this indeed the case I know the actual chip that is causing the issue. Mind you, this guy does that pattern the second it starts (powers on), so the damaged chip (I am assuming here) is not getting hot as it never even tried to start.

 With that said, please tell me if I am on the right track with my thinking, and is there anything I can do? I assume the chip is perma mounted to the board so I cannot simply unplug it and get the other working.

 Also, I noticed there is a jumper in the back and one has it on, and the other does not. Just guessing again, but the one with the jumper off is CTA0 and the one with it on is CTA1. What would happen if I put the jumper on the other board?

 Just looking for help and I really appreciate the help from this thread. I already ordered the Liquid Pro and will be doing this mod.

 Hey scriber.. I have a few ideas man. If your going to give it a dip might I suggest what I use for phones and ipads, etc.. My mother works for a jet manufacturer and she supplies me with 99.99% alcohol. I know it may seem like a minor difference, but it isn't. You can order it and I have never seen it local, but it makes a difference. I have soaked 2 different ipods in 99, and never worked, once she brought me the 99.99 to test, it actually made them work. Also, make sure soon as your done, let it hit the sun directely. It is almost like if you dry it that fast, it seals it. I cannot explain it, but I have seen it.

 Also. You may not even need to do a dip. It is possible a extremely small piece of Liquid Pro got away from you and alcohol will not help with that. I suggest taking a air compressor first and hitting the shit out of it as high pressure air will make it run off. Test that, then the bath if no go.

 I made a post after yours if you have any advice it would be appreciated. Sadly, I think I am going to have to tear it down and do more research.

 Good luck guys!

 Ok, So I just swapped the wires on the beaglebone from one board to another and the system started fine. The left board (looking from the front) still has the same issues and error When the led's run from right to left, instead of a continued running pattern it hits D43 makes a ticking sound, and then all led's come on and it restarts the pattern.

 Do you exhibit the same error codes on the led's as I do? I am asking so we can solve this. I don't believe half the unit is fried, I am starting to suspect a bad pump.

 Swapped power supplies and unit still worked so that is not the issue. Next problem though, there is a push button near the jumper pins in the back of the board. If you press it, the leds, and sounds will make different noises and error messages. Has anyone played with these? and what does it actually do? What is it changing on the bios of the strike boards?

 Folks I am trying to help solve issues, but for the past 4 hours I am merely talking to myself aloud. Lets go to work and solve this shittery piece of machinery. :)

Thanks for the suggestion to use the 99.99% I will try to get my hands on some of this. Before that I will try the air compressor idea also. Regarding your problem I have never experienced the LED issue. My dead board never lights up at all thats how I can tell its not functioning. I wish I could be of more help to you.

 Thats what makes me think you have an arrant run off from the Liquid Pro. Grounding out. May be wrong, and its possible you had one and fried it. May be possible you were shipped a POS like me.
 
 They actually responded very late today, and guess what I got... Answer 101, copy and paste. Here is the entire email...


 Richard.. you should have already sent this to an advanced tech if you care anything about the small customer, but yes I will do so. Why did I not get a call back, and the standard cut and paste response? I have read numerous posts on the bitcointalk forums. This is your traditional cut and paste response. Furthermore, I do not know why you would ask for this as the secondary board is obviously not working. These stats from the working one will tell you nothing. I spoke of the issue months ago, and you simply closed the case a few days ago. Please, I implore you to respond with sincere advice, or real technical help.


    -------- Original Message --------
    Subject: [CoinTerra] Re: Technical Support
    From: CoinTerra <support@cointerra.zendesk.com>
    Date: Wed, June 18, 2014 1:27 pm
    To: XXXX

    ##- Please type your reply above this line -##
    Your request XXXX has been updated. To add additional comments, reply to this email.
    Richard (CoinTerra)
    Jun 18 15:27
    Hello  XXX
    Can you please go to the ADVANCED tab on the Control Panel, expand the four sections (+ icon) and either save as a .pdf from your browser (preferred) and attach to your reply, or copy and paste all the stats into a reply to this email, and we will work with you to diagnose the issue ASAP.
    I will assign your case to our Technical Support staff. They will review your statistics and reply with the best course of action. This may take some time as there is a queue of issues for them to deal with.
    Thank you and feel free to contact us with any other questions,
    Richard
    CoinTerra Support
    XXXXXXXX
    Jun 18 08:13
    I have the latest firmware, I have reset the machine 20+ times. Did a hard reset and put all the config's back in and only CTA0 is working. Half the machine will not start. I have tried rolling back firmware as well to the other versions and nothing works. Both PSU's appear to be working. What else can I do?
    --
    This e-mail was sent from the info contact form on (https://cointerra.com)
    This email is a service from CoinTerra. Delivered by Zendesk.


 

Ive given up on tech support, they send the same canned response to everyone and never get back to them. The machines where all mining when they arrived so I know they worked. And the board is getting voltage so its not totally fucked. Im leaning towards the idea I may have got liquid pro somewhere but I really dont think I fried or shorted out anything. If I got one board working I surely can get this one. If there thermal grease got on the board before from my mistake and caused it to stop functioning then I cleaned it and got it working I should be able to do the same with this non-functioning board. I noticed Frys has 99.9% Isopropyl so if the air compressor doesnt work ill go get some of that. To bad I didnt live in Texas and I could walk into Cointerra with my board and plead my case in person. Unless the place is a fortress impossible to enter like a prison.

So you only applied it to the dies? Interesting. What temps you getting with it now? When I applied it I put it on both the die and the water block (just enough to cover where the chips make contact). Figured if it wasn't applied to the water block also it wouldn't flow right.

Wish I could help but I'm not sure what is causing your issue.

 I really am curious about the push button towards the back of the boards. My error sounds and lights change when I push it.

I just used the air compressor which did not solve the problem. I poured a little bit of 99.9% on the board and blew it off with the air compressor that did not solve the problem. The board is now in a tray soaking in the 99.9% for 10 minutes. I will let you know how this goes shortly. If that doesnt work I am going to ship the board back to Cointerra and plead my case. At this point a dead board serves no purpose

Board is still not working. It has voltage but no led's light on the board and no miner. Im now done with this and have no other options other then to ship it to Cointerra and hope for the best

 I was trying to think of what I was doing last time my board worked and so I decided to roll back the firware all the way to 6.32 and then 6.48 and viola.. the board worked again (kinda) It was slower than the other around 450 when the other was 600. I could power step it, but it would not speed up. I decided to go ahead and bring it up to 7.6 and bam! Board not working again. :( I tried repeating and I get nothing now. No idea what is going on with this damn thing.

Is anyone else's Terraminer throttling often? At first I figured it was caused by the high temps but now that I have the temps down it still throttles.

What temp does it reach before it throttles? what's the performance before/after?

I'm running on ICdiamond for about 2 weeks and I haven't had any throttling so far.

Previously the MX4 was good for 3 weeks, so I'm not sure how long the ICdiamond lasts. (the MX4 degraded into "dust" after 3 weeks).

When it disables/throttles the core(s) the temps go down obviously so it might not be evident that it's caused by the degradation of the thermal compound.

If a pump fails then it also disables the cores ( I had one pump fail on me - it produces weird noise before failure)

Having said that, I'm interested in buying problematic Terraminers. Pm me with the stats if any of you consider selling them.

My temps at the hottest part of the day (85°C) are around 62°C. So its not getting hot. You can see my temps on page 2 of the thread. Funny thing is it seems to throttle more the cooler it gets. What firmware are you running? I'm running 0.7.6.

eek, ive put MX4 on a few rigs here, id better check them soon after reading that, but the coollabratory stuff should be here tomorrow anyway (along with some hopefully less problematic KnC neptunes) but since its started getting warmer these things are dropping like flies, often i can get them back to life but not for long before they start having other issues

 I am down to thinking that I may have a bad pump. Anyone know how to test that? Obviously something is telling the board not to start.

Please explain more about your units dropping like flies? Are they overheating to 120c and restarting? How are you able to get them back to life and what other issues do they have? Please update us how it goes after applying liquid pro very curious

Bad pumps show as 0 RPM in the admin panel, iirc the boards will start with a pump failure.

Temps so far after two weeks+ with Liquid Pro applied.

https://i.imgur.com/uX7CvFU.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/1x7cW8u.jpg

looks great what are you hashing?

1.616 Th/s. If I felt like restarting it I could get it to 1.618 Th/s. Before upgrading to firmware 0.7.6 I was getting 1.622 Th/s. I will say this though. Ever since applying Liquid Pro not only are my temps down so is my power usage. Before it was using 2200 watts. Now it is using 1965 watts.

I am having the same issue as you guys. One cta goes to 120c right away and shuts down.  it was working for for the past 3 months.   the other CTA runs amazing over 800gh all the time
the "bad" one always ran hotter. i replaced the paste about 4 times now and like 4 cores go to the sky and it stops. at its different ones just seems like something is shorting out or i dont know what the hell is happing.  any input would be great.  i used ic diamond themal paste on all chips the "good booard temp are way down and it hashes amazing the "bad board is still HOT!

edit did some tinkering. found that letting the board cool down and then just start the one sounds like a fan in one of the pumps is ticking...   also found that the "out" side of both cores on the "bad board" are really hot and the "in"side is cold. On the "good" board both side are equally Warm cound it be a pump issue? both pumps show speed but not as fast as the other board.  if the fins inside the pump broke off the the pump would stiill spin just be clogged/not going anyhting????  im really tring to figure this out.    already had one of the power blocks that the soldered on the board break off that's why i opened it up in the first place. fixed that and now this heat/power/idk/short issue

 No offense, but that is obvious. If you have a board that will not start, and it is because of a dead pump, how would you know?

Does sound like a pump issue from what you described. Perhaps the impeller is damaged especially if its rpm is not up to speed like your good board. Contact the company who makes the coolers, they are located in canada I believe. Tell them how terrible Cointerra support is and you noticed they are using their product which might have failed on you. Btw I would not use thermal paste on these units, probably a good reason not to is that it continues to overheat and youve done the job 4 times. Use liquid pro its tried and proven here by numerous people including myself

I usually don' turn on the A/C till it gets 85° or so. Before Liquid Pro my temps were high, 105°+.

Now?

https://i.imgur.com/uX7CvFU.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/1x7cW8u.jpg

The bad board pumps are 300rpm higher then the good board.  why did the paste work so well with my other board?  i will have to give the liquid pro a try...  
i ended up taking one of the bad board coolers off and took the copper plate off the bottom and found a white rubber/cyclone piece inside. its suppose to work as a channel for the water to go on the copper plate fins i guess. thing is it was gunked up with this white residue and the water had no way to get to the fins... ended u p taking the whole white rubber piece out and now have one core up and hashing at 400gh.  still hot as helll but at least its hashing. we will see for how long... o and the hoses on that core are now the same temp.. 
i will do the second one tomorrow and take some pics for reference.

I have 0.7.6 too.

I got a reply from Cointerra and they have been emailing me trying to help. They first replied with I could not send the board or unit in for repair because I opened the unit and voided the warranty. They attached a pdf for trying to fix my problem with instructions that said to shutdown the unit, remove the cable from J11 on the offline board and then power the unit up. If the LEDs start the unit is all good. Leave the cable off and im done. I did this and the LEDs lit up then they immediately turned off in sequence and only D44 and D45(red) LED's stay lit. Cointerra asked me if the ground cable was connected. Yes it is. Cointerra says he has note seen many units with this d44,d45 led issue and is trying to figure out what is causing it. I have not heard anything else.

UPDATE: Just tried this process a few more times again and noticed only D45(red) stays lit solid

Is D44 (yellow) also lit next to D45(red)? Did you ever fix your problem? see my latest comment what Cointerra told me, it might fix your problem!

 Ok, now we are getting somewhere. Problem is I have no j11 plug on either board. Where does your j11 cord go? What does it connect to? I am solid red 45 as well now. But get this, an hour ago I reset the machine, and half the board was working! I power stepped it 5-10 times, all was well but only half the board. I then shut the power down in an attempt to get the other half working and bam. Back to dead board. I will say this though, it seems I can only get the board working with 6.48. I have not seen it at all in 6.32 or 7.6 in over a week.

 Please post more info or copy the pdf scriber.. we are getting there, I know we are!

 BTW, are you hearing the beep tones now scriber? or the throttling of the dead boards fans?

 One more thing, have you played with the push button towards the back of the boards. I can tell you this, even if you are led45 dead, push it once and it changes the error codes. I am starting to believe it has to do with the check sequence of the board.

J11 is on both boards. It is the 3pin black and white wire that plugs in directly behind the intake fans. This J11 wire runs into a small board next to the power supplies; a board located in the side compartment with the power supplies. One of my J11 plugs had the black rubber crap over it to hold the plug in so yours might be covered but its there. Here is the PDF they sent me. I have not tried pressing the reset button and I dont hear any clicking. I have been keeping this board powered off since its not working. Not need to have power running to it. I do have two other units running also below this one. I noticed there is a reset button on the outside front center top of the case and each internal board also has a button but I dont know what this one does. As far as one board having a jumper and one not I think this is just to signify and master and slave board
https://i.imgur.com/5rb2Jen.png

 There are no J11 cables in either of my units. It is simply a dead plug as far as I can tell. The beaglebone has it own wire that can be plugged into the top of any PSU module.. Is This what you refer to? The board itself a self check, or built in bios, if anything fails, you will see red 45 led. I actually had my secondary board up for an hour, power stepped it 10 times, and turned the power off to see if other core would hit, and lost it. I have since pulled the board and low and behold, I have oil under the board. A slow leak from the front pump. I am cleaning as we speak, and will not plug it back in till my liquid pro is here tmw. If I do not figure out the pump leak, I will dunk this bitch in mineral oil and fire it.

i havent seen anything connected to j11 on any of the rigs ive seen either, can anyone who has these cables tell us where theyre connected to?

I only have D45(red) on. I tried all the suggestions that have been given on this thread (used compressor to clean the board, submerged with 99.99 alcohol and lightly cleaned with toothbrush, disconnected the J11 cable) so far none have worked. The board powers up with D37 through D44 (yellow) and D45(red). When the miner starts working D37 through D44 turn off but D45 stays lit. I got a reply from cointerra asking to send them a pdf of my stat page which i sent and I'm waiting for a reply to see what they say.

Here is a pic I circled J11. If you dont have that maybe your version of the boards is different. These boards are printed with model numbers and revisions
I have GSA CARD ASSY: COIN-500-013 REV.B. I had a leak also, it was a small crack in the hose for me. You should be able to locate that leak and fix it just how I did
https://i.imgur.com/zHI53vg.jpg

finally got it!!  took out both white rubber things from the inside of each pump/waterblock.  Both were gunked up with white "butter"/paste type of sustance cleabed it all out and now the pumps are pumping. All hoses are same temp. I left both the rubber/silicon out. But the temps are very high still. But atleast its hashing. I think its time for liquid pro. thats my last hope to cool these down. that or building a custom watercooling system and seeing if that does it. It seems like these pumps dont move alot of water.

https://i.imgur.com/UL3mCx8.jpg

glad your making progress and fixing your problem. Now we just need to figure out our issue with the red LED light

 Ok, to summarize this. If you roll back the firmware to 6.32 and pay attention to the actual beep codes before it goes all red are they the same. Basically, When you first fire, all leds light up, and start a countdown from right to left. Pay attention to where it fails and the tone the boards makes. Different firmware will do it at different times and lengths. Please try and be specific as I am getting close to figuring them out as well as the push button series.

 Then try 6.48 and see what results are... 6.48 seems to be the most stable for unstable boards. Did that make sense? Actually it did. 7.6 is for a board that is fully functional, and will push it to the max straight out the box. Sadly, they have as of yet released new firmware. I am of the belief they could give a shit about anyone over 30 days or broken sticker.

 Cointerra really fucked this pooch in this aspect. They had a chance to be the American leader in this market and shipped shit and will not support it. BFL screwed folks by delivery date.. Cointerra shipped shit.

 Scriber.. when was this unit shipped as I have 2 of them, first of April, and I have no J11 wires...

 I am curious what this power is going to, and why it is needed on your boards. Following the leads on the board I have pulled now..

So; after doing a thermal paste job I'm stuck with the no LED issues (beagle boots just fine).  As I don't have that J11 wire on either board, any suggestions for troubleshooting?  I think I'll be doing a proper clean and inspect later of the boards.


I've applied thermal paste before, and thinking I may have made a mistake there I took the water block back off one of the board; I was impressed with my work.... so I'm not sure where the issue is.

One of the 16 cores is showing only 35 degrees, core freq of this one is 0, core Volts is also very low at 2, core Performance mode is 90.
100 ghs are missing, so it seems that 1 of the 16 cores is not active.
Any idea if this could be heat related so it is shut down immediately when powering the miner or any other idea what to look for?

 Check the leds after first starting the machine and see if all 8 are testing fine, and watch it over time to se if it drops one. I described the pattern they run in an earlier post.

I purchased one unit from an ebay user and two from cointerra
ebay purchased in April which was the one leaking and pictured earlier in the post, and Cointerra purchased in June
I dont want to rollback the firmware for a few reasons. I will have to take the miner offline which is lost revenue and I also dont want to risk the other miner going offline. It seems rolling it back does not fix anything either

My unit stopped mining and was not showing up on the LAN yesterday. Just the ctr1 showing red. I rebooted it and after running a few mins it did the same thing. Now, when I boot it up ctr1 shows orange-red for a few seconds then off. After about 5 minutes the light comes on and turns red. The unit never shows up on the LAN so I can't access it. I was able to access it a few times when it first started doing this, I tried re flashing the firmware. Didn't seem to make a difference. It's not really making a lot of sense to me that it's not showing up on the LAN. I would think reflashing the sd card would be a place to start but I don't see any image's for that.

this weather is not helping matters, im having boards crap out left and right, over the last few days ive seen three boards die to half power (clicking out when it tries to start the cooling resulting in having to disable the pump) i also have one board rig thats totally dead, one board clicks out on the cooling like the others but on both chips and the other just never powers, im starting to worry that none of these will make it to the end of summer

Beans:

you can do a quick fix by cracking the lid off and just connecting the boards to a pc by usb, just use cgminer with cointerra support compiled in, to restore the beagle fully you may need to get a cloned image from a good one, boot the beagle from the SD, ssh in and dd the working image over the onboard nand

 There is a user in this thread that has a unit on ebay for sale. Can you please pm me please?

I have a machine that has been hashing without issue (other than heat) for the last 3 months.....

Yesterday I rebooted it (via the configuration page) as the pool reported slowing accepted work...

Now it wont restart mining...I just have the "1 TerraMiner Offline: 127.0.0.1" screen.

I have tried:

1, Software rebooting, Via the Configuration page
2, Restating CGMiner, Via the Configuration page
3, Hard rebooting, leaving it unplugged for 15 minutes then plugging it back in
4, Reflashing the firmware


Anyone have any other ideas?

Thanks

 Are the leds all running the pattern I described in a earlier post?

 With that said, you kind of make it impossible to troubleshoot. I am willing to help, but you are unable to provide any info. :(

OK, so today was the day, i tried the Liquid Pro.
Up to today, temps were in the range of 90-110 deg Celsius, getting hotter every day.
First of all, i cleaned everything with cpmpressed air. Seeing how much dirt was in the radiators, i re-connected the Cointerra and checked.
2 cores still not working, but the other temps 20-30 degrees down.

Lesson 1: clean that shit frequently!

Then started with the liquid pro. Failed 3 times, it did not reboot anymore. Tried with less liquid pro, still not working.
Now i went the other route and took more: better. It booted, but the temps between cores were very different.
So i took it apart again, biut this time also applied a very thin layer of liquid pro to the metal plate from the cooling system.
Result: a dream!
Temps are all under 60 deg Celsius now and even the 2 inactive cores are back. Hashrate has gone from 13xx to exact 1600.

Lesson 2: dont use too much liquid pro is correct, but using not enough will not help either ;-)

Same deal with mine, just one core though

Has anyone tried just getting rid of all their cooling bullshit and just running this on air?

(I'm thinking cpu tower coolers for each core and a big blower fan blowing across the whole thing...

How big is the area you need to cover? Would normal cpu tower cover it?

The problem is not the coolers. It's the unevenness of the chips (and the ring around the dies) which causes the chips to not make good contact with the bottom of the cooling block. I have tried thermal pads and got lousy results. I have tried reapplying thermal paste several times with different results each time. Then I applied Liquid Pro to both the chips and the bottom of the water block and BINGO. Temps are great now, 59°C-65°C.

Ok, I will order some. But I think I'm still gonna try air cooling, this thing is ungodly loud.

I really hope you're not just some liquid pro rep  ;D

LOL, nope not some rep. Just a Terraminer overheating victim. You can see my screenshots of my temps a few pages back if you like. Whatever you do just be careful with the Liquid Pro.

Edit: Also if you're not comfortable applying thermal compound Liquid Pro might not be for you. You can possibly destroy your unit if you get any on your board.

 As far as I can tell he is no rep. But I can tell you this. The shit works. Just gotta make sure you apply it right. This could mean anything from heavy to extremely light on a chip. Hell the water cooler could be off too. If you apply it correctly, shit just simply works.

Thanks guys for all these suggestions.  I have ordered my Liquid Pro around 10 days ago, and now waiting for it to arrive.  To get my self prepared, may I ask how I should commence with my repair?:

Problems suffered:
1) 2 miners got their whole board not running.  Even the fan on the failed side did not run !!!, The 2 little lights at the back of the PSU got 1 turned "yellow".

2) 3 miners got 1 out of 4 cores not working.

3) some miners got extremely hot, and occasionally stop 1 core, but will return when rest for a while.


Potential solution that I've read from this forum:
1) remove the copper plate, take out the "white" rubber inside, then re-fix the copper plate on the water block.  (really? can someone confirm this works?);

2) remove the thermal paste and apply Liquid Pro.  (this has been proven here I suppose.  Can someone teach me how to apply? 1 little droplet in the middle of each chip, or spread them over the whole chip?  Need to apply on the copper side?)

3) remove the "black & white" chaser cable.  I have tried, no use.

4) switch the power supply large cables between the two boards.  i.e. the supply originally to left board now connect to right board, vice versa. (will try this out maybe)


Can someone confirm the above "potential solution summary", and summarize some key points that I should be aware of before I commence with my Liquid Pro application?

Thanks a million brothers.

There are some video's on youtube on how to apply. Watch them! I applied it to both the water block and the chips. On the water block you want just enough to cover where the chips make contact with the copper plate ( I could see the outline of the chip on the bottom of my water block). You want to make sure the Liquid Pro don't run like paint when you hold the water block vertical. As for the chips, I put just enough to cover then put about half the size of a BB right in the center of each chip. I used a little more than a syringe when I did mine. What ever you do be very careful with it and do not get it anywhere on the board. Liquid Pro is highly conductive. As for the rest of your questions I'm not sure.

Go back earlier in this thread and you will see step by step pics I posted of applying liquid pro. Use the q-tip they provide to spread it around and make sure to cover all areas to the edges just like the pics. Its tricky working with liquid pro but take your time and use a steady hand. I dont know why your power supply has a yellow light

has anyone here ever recover from Orange / yellow light on the power supply issue? Like half the fans only turn on?

 There is apparently a short on the board.  I got as far as pulling the entire board out and washing and scrubbing it with iso 99% and it still has a short. looked through a lighted magnifying glass at ever single component and can not see anything fried or physically damaged... any suggestions?

 Unplug one pump and see if it works, if not plug it back in and unplug the other pump and test again. I have seen 2 users that by merely pulling the pump power, half a board works.

Nothing plugged into the board and it still doesn't work. No leds and the orange led lights up on the power supply.

OK, so yesterday I finally got some Artic Silver 5 and did some repair (did not apply Liquid Pro, yet, because noticed that once applied hard to remove.  Will do Liquid Pro if everything is fine).

1 pump stopping issue:
I have faced this issue for a few of my miners.  Just, 1 pump got 0 pump speed reading.
- I replaced the thermal gel with Artic Silver 5.  No use;
- I remove the white plastic inside copper.  No use;
- I switch the power between front water block and rear water block !!! it runs !!! for 30 seconds ... then it gets EXTREMELY hot and shut.

Conclusion:
- since switching the power supplies between the two water blocks will trick the board in believing that the faulty core is receiving a functional water block (but indeed not), it will start runing, but due to heat, will shut down very soon.

Further Trial (please recommend water block replacement):
- this has greatly narrow down the problem to : If you have 1 out of 4 core not hashing, most probably, the water pump on that core is burnt / broken !!!  I think replacing the water block may fix the problem easily.  Can someone recommend a suitable common water block which could be bought from local computer store easily???  I will try replacing the water block, and provide you guys with the result once tested.

I was able to fix it after having it unplugged for 24 hours.  It appears that it was "heat related"  Now that the box had time to cool off....It is running "hot" but normal.   I will be replacing the paste.

Sad that CT took down their forums.  I had been reasonably active there like many others.

Anyhow, I've been nursing my two TMIV's along since April.  One continues to crank out a reasonably stable 1.6 th with decent core temps.  The other is hobbled down to 1.2 th as one core gets far too hot.  I've applied Noctua NT-H1 twice.  Worked well for a while, but then temps went back up.  Decided to give Liquid Pro a try.

Now I've got my LPro ready to go.  I'm hoping I'll see gains similar to what others have claimed here as well as a solution that keeps working (hopefully).

My question is, do I need to let the LPro cure before firing my machine back up at all?  Or should I just run it at "low" (PL 1-3) power while the stuff cures for 40hrs or so.  Or even better, can I just go right up to full throttle (PL 9)?

I know the material cures, I'm just not clear on what care needs to be taken during that process.  

The documentation provided by Cool Laboratory is both a bit short and sometimes torqued by the German translation.  They make no mention of curing, or oddly even needing to use the included "rough" pad which I'm guessing some may use to rough up the surface?  

I think I may skip that step on my Goldstrike chips though.  Maybe more something for CPU/GPUs where there is a larger smooth surface to deal with.

I went full throttle directly. Thats the only way you can see if you applied it correct or not. Running now a week without any issues since that.

When I applied LP to mine I started it at power step 8. I let it run about a day then went to power step 9. After a reset to power step 9 my temps dropped about 5°C. As for the Scotch Brite (rough pad) I didn't use it.

I did not use the scotch pad. I went full throttle after applying with no problems. I did use the provided q-tip for spreading. Put it all back together and fired up! Just be careful with the LP and take your time, DO NOT get that stuff anywhere other than on the chip surface. Good luck and report back!

Ive noticed all my machines are hashing lower then spec for the past week or two. They are 1.5Gh/s 1.5Gh/s and 750Gh/s (one miner died). Not sure why the constant drop for so long. Temps, fans, pumps all appear normal

UPDATE: Lost power for a couple hours and when it returned the machines appear to be hashing and normal speeds, I guess a reboot helped them

Having applied TIM to my goldstrike chips twice now, I've noticed a few things that make the application a bit more difficult than your normal CPU or GPU rig.  I'm hoping the following observations might save some folks time and/or help their application of Liquid Pro or any other TIM.

1.  The mount points, ie. the screws, for the water block aren't the easiest to deal with.  By that I mean specifically keeping the water block stationary as you put the four mounting screws back in can be prone to more movement than you might want.  The very first time (using Noctua paste) I noticed that the water block was moving around quite a bit as I screwed it back on.  The second time, I tried to be more careful about that but found it quite a challenge.  You might even consider it somewhat of a royal pain in the neck.

2.  The washers for each screw are aluminum.  So they don't get picked up by a magnetic screw driver.  Even worse, they have a tendency to fall into hard-to-reach places as you deal with the screws and are generally just an annoyance.  The net result is that they add a bit more unwanted chaos to an already delicate process.

3.  Even though both my machines seem to have some from the factory, I do not believe there should be any TIM on the outer square "ring" as such.  This is more of an observation than anything else.  I'm referring to the metal square that immediately encloses your 4 goldstrike chips under the cooling block.

My solution to #1 was to build a jig that helped tremendously.  Here's a pic.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5ki_Xeim-C2RVl3bUtNWWQ5bkE

NOTES ON THE JIG:  In the picture those are four chopsticks sharpened on each end.  Not expensive ones but not the super cheap have-to-break-them-apart ones either.  You basically just need some long round pieces of wood or metal.

To make your own, first a) pick your material to hold the chopsticks (foam, cardboard, styrofoam, wood, clay, a sponge, etc...) then b) measure the distance between the screw holes (I forget as I'm typing this) then c) draw a square on some graph paper with holes matching those distances then d) poke your sticks through and into your chopstick-holding material of choice.  Make sure you can slide each of the sticks UP and DOWN with some good friction so that they'll stay in place.  They should not slide on their own.

For #2 I just put the tiniest dab of crazy glue between the screw and the washer (NOT BETWEEN THE WASHER AND THE WATER BLOCK PLATE).  Do this with the SCREWS OUTSIDE THE MACHINE.  Cut a Qtip in half and use the stick side as an applicator if that helps.  I went out and did some shopping as I waited for them to dry.  I'm not 100% clear on the minimum time you want here.  Just make sure they're glued on and all the glue is dry.  It's not so much to bond the washer and screw.  It's more to just prevent the stupid washer from falling onto the board as you're trying to (very precisely) screw it back in place.  So you really only need the tiniest drop of glue.

For #3 I just left the outer square bare, no TIM or anything on it.  Like I said, just an observation here.

NOTE:  to remove the old TIM I found using a good solvent and purifier essential.  I use the 2 step Arcticlean and have been quite happy with it.

1.  First apply your Liquid Pro.  What an amazing material.  Behaves like solder but at room temperature and takes a LONG time to solidify.  The qtip they provide works great.  I had a small, flat, stiff, paintbrush handy just in case I had any spills over the edge of a chip.  BTW:  the brush turned out to be NOT AS GOOD as the qtip for actual application onto the chips.

2.  Then insert the long ends of the (chop)sticks into the water block's metal brackets where the screws normally go.  Your foam or whatever material you used should be on top with the water block underneath it and the motherboard below.  The sticks should be just touching the board (assuming you can't get four holes in one - see step 4 below).

3.  Have someone hold the water block up and safely away from the four goldstrike chips while you try step 4 next.  You don't want it falling down onto your nice new mirror-like application of Liquid Pro and messing it all up.  You also don't want anyone putting their fingerprints on the super clean and purified copper bottom of your block.  Care needs to be taken here.

4.  Insert each pointed stick end into the corresponding screw hole.

5.  Now you have four vertical "rails" upon which to slide down the water block and keep it in place.

6.  Slide the water block down gently into place, applying light pressure to the top as you insert the screws.

7.  Insert screws one at a time as follows.

8.  Slide ONE of your chopsticks up a few inches while keeping the other three firmly in place along with your cooling block.

9.  Insert ONE screw (carefully) into the now vacant hole.  Just finger tighten it.

10.  Slide ONE other chopstick upward, the one diagonally across from the one you just slid up and replaced with a screw.

11.  Repeat with the remaining chopsticks (and screws).

12.  Then go back around diagonally tightening the screws a little at a time until they're all snug.

I found this method kept the water block much more solidly in place as I screwed it back down.  I had my wife help me as some of the steps above are better with more than two hands.

I suspect the jig would help with general application of any TIM but I've been wanting to give Liquid Pro a try so I did.  Everything I've read suggests it is in fact better than even the best pastes.

I'm going to let it run at PL 7 for a day, then 8 then 9.  So far, at PL 7 my results are great.  

Prior to application, I wasn't even able to run at PL 7 any more.  I had to step down to 5, eeking out 1.1 th or so with my "hot" CTA spiking up to 90C at which point I'd throttle back to PL 4 for a while.  Ugh.

Now, at PL 7 my "hot" CTA1 is at 60.4 - 43.75 (used to cook up to 90 or so at PL 5).

And my former "cool" CTA0 is at 61.68 - 52.41.

I'm very happy with that improvement.  I hope it continues to hold as I creep back to PL 9, which this machine hasn't seen in about a month.  

I noticed when applying regular pastes that they only worked for a short while.

We'll see.

PS.  I did use the scotch pad ever so slightly on the copper bottoms of the cooling blocks.  I figured some tiny micro scratches might help the bonding/curing process.

When did mine I bought four M3 screws 1.5 inch long cut the heads off and wrapped masking tape around each one (about 4.25mm) leaving 3/16 or so of threads showing. Screwed them in each hole and installed the water block. Removed one at a time and installed the hold down screws corner to corner finger tight. Then tightened them the rest of the way corner to corner 1/4 turn at a time.

https://i.imgur.com/o9RbZfz.jpg

I like the screw based jig.  Maybe I'll head out to find some appropriate screws and shroud them with some tubing this afternoon.  I've only done 1 of my boards, so I have three more eventually to do.  Only one has temps above 80C at the moment but it would still be nice to have everyone in the 60s.  Better for the chips as well as hash/watt ratio.

The screws work great. Especially if you're doing it by yourself. I got mine at a local nut and bolt shop. Cost me a dollar for 8 of them. Just make sure you get M3 screws.

The results on the machine I did yesterday have been great.  It's running nice and cool in the 60s.  So I thought I should deal with my other machine with the slowly rising board temp (gets into the 80s and 90s depending on various).  I still had all the parts and tools out on my bench and liked the idea of all my machines running with temps in the 60s.

Unfortunately, my local Lowes didn't have any M3 screws longer than 1/4" so I decided to use my chopstick jig again and wrap up this little project.  Managing these Cointerra rigs is getting to be a pain.

The application of Liquid Pro went smoothly, even better than yesterday.  I turned on the machine and everything seemed great.  Nice low temps in the 60s just as one might expect.  So I began cleaning up my workbench very much in a good mood.  Shortly after I noticed that only ONE of the machine's green "miner" LEDs was on.  Perhaps I forgot to plug in that (or some other)  cable, I thought.

I shut the machine down and took a look.  Nope, all the cables were in order.

Then I started the machine back up.

Both lights came on and by looking at the machine alone, everything seemed fine.

Then I went to the web interface.  This is where the bad news began.  I was showing one chip with temps in the 180s even spiking past 200C!  WTF?!?!?!?!

I immediately shut down the machine.  I had read on the CT forums about this before they took them down.  Folks were blaming it on wonky temp sensors.  I don't recall if there was ever a solution.

I cannot understand how this problem just somehow started.  Perhaps no good deed really does go unpunished as they say.

I took the water blocks off again to see if anything was amiss with the Liquid Pro.  To be honest, some did appear to spill over the edges of one or two of goldstrike chips.  So I cleaned them all up and put the blocks back on.

Started the machine and had the same problem.  Now, it was even worse.  Aside from the oddball temperature rating, CTA0 is no longer hashing ... or only occasionally.  It seems to be throttling back due to the extremely high (and likely bogus) temp reading.  For a few seconds after it throttles and tries to reset it will get a few hashes in and register some gH.  Then it throttles completely and does nothing.

I took the water blocks off again and CLEANED OFF ALL THE LIQUID PRO.  It's not so hard to get off when it's still liquid.  

I wanted to test how things might be if I went back to regular thermal past (Noctua).  So I reapplied the Noctua and put everything back together.

Started the machine again and still had the problem.  CTA0 won't hash because it thinks (maybe it's not crazy either) that one of the chips is overheating beyond the point of reason ... hence keeps throttling itself to 0.

I have no idea what's gone wrong.  One guess is that some little drop of Liquid Pro must have landed in a very inconvenient spot on the board.  I swabbed the whole thing down with no luck.  Plus I was very careful so I doubt this one.

Another idea is that these boards are just plain fragile as hell and that something got messed up by simply moving the water blocks on and off.  This doesn't explain how things appeared to be running great until the LED stopped and I restarted the machine.

Regardless, my formerly "good" machine is now my 1/2 dead machine and it's a major bummer.  I wish I had left everything alone and not even bothered with Liquid Pro now.

It seems as though the temp sensors are built into the chips and there appears to be nothing I can do to correct the issue.  Did I mention that it's a huge bummer?

Maybe I'll put my dead board up for sale on eBay.  I saw a guy parting his out not long ago and I wish I had grabbed it.

I can say that I had mine drop a core from overheating twice after applying MX4. To much and it will overheat, to little and it will overheat. I just redid it till it came back. Also when you applied LP how much did you use? Did you apply it to both chips and block? When I did mine I used a little more than one syringe and put it on both.

Well, I did the LP twice and one round of Noctua today.  No luck.

I applied only to the chips, just as I did on my other machine's board.  That machine is now running better than new.

I used about half the LP just as I did on my other machine (remember I'm only doing one board per machine, not an entire machine).  If I were to use any more it would definitely flow into the gaps.  It already did this today so I used a bit less on my 2nd round of LP application.

I wonder if its not flowing right since you only applied it to the chip? I would try putting it on both. Also have you tried to power step it down to 1 to see if it will run a while before it overheats?

Well on the 2nd application I left the LP on the water block.  I was even able to get it all nice and smooth on there in precisely the right spots.  So on my 2nd attempt, I did in fact have LP on the blocks.  Plus as I observed, a bit of LP was already getting between the gaps on application #1.  So more LP will just make things worse.

Also, the thing is behaving the same way with LP and Noctua NT-H1.

Something has become a bit more permanently effed up now.  ;-(

Yes, I tried PL 1.  The temps are still way out of whack (200C).  Power stepping doesn't seem to affect that one chip's temp at all.  I don't think the chip is actually that hot.  I think the temp sensor on one of the chips is hopelessly effed up.  Either way, the machine is totally gimped whereas it had been my "good box" since day one.

Also, when it throttles and tries to reset, it registers NEGATIVE TEMPS for the other chips for a second or two  Methinks some math is getting messed up in their firmware.

My other chips, however, all appear in the 30s.  I'm guessing this is because they're not hashing (ie., throttled).  But can one chip throttle the other 7?  Even the 4 on the other board?

Well I can say when mine overheated it read low temps 40°C. I will say this, when they overheated they shut off before I got the GUI opened up. As for throttling, mine throttles ever since firmware upgrade 0.7.6. It still throttles with temps in the 50-60's.
 

I have faced many problems with my machines... half board not working, 1 core not runing, water pump showing 0 flow rate.

I did some experiments over the past week, and your +- 200C problem happened to me once and only once:---   Did you switch the 3-pin cable connections of your 2 water blocks on the board?  (i.e. the bottom water block takes power from the the top, and the top block taking power from the bottom) 

The water blocks HAVE to take power from the exact 3-pin supply that it was originally shipped, that's how the board communicate with the block and check the temperature.  If you mess with 3-pin cables, the board will get confused.

I'm 99% sure the cables coming from the water blocks are for reporting pump speed and nothing more.  You can verify this by unplugging them and starting up your machine.  It will run pretty much as normal but there will be no pump speed reported on the status page.

Just for fun, I tried your switch.  No difference.  Same problems.

Regardless, I did have all the cables connected exactly as they were. 

It seems like some kind of sensor mapping / byte issue in the firmware.  IE., the high temp will shoot up to +300C (or some other unrealistic number) then the next second the lowest temp is -300C.  It flip flops and if you're unlucky landing on the + side you stay throttled until it flips to a minus reading.  If the chip really did get to 300C it would likely burn out.  So ...

The negative temp reading was discussed on the CT forums.  I'm not sure if anyone discovered a workaround. 

It might be, in my case, that I had the extreme misfortune of a tiny bit of LP shorting out or otherwise messing up one of the temp sensors on one of the goldstrike chips.  Now it's borked and can't be reset to behave normally.  And as of right now, that spells GAME OVER for the entire board ... along with the other seven chips.

I'm back to hating CT again.  The machines are way too fragile for the $$$ we paid for them.

Let me share my experience with you see if helpful.

I got quite a few machines with 1 core (i.e. 4 chips) dead, temperature at 50C, pump speed at 0, not hashing.  So the machines are hashing at 1200 TH/s max at step 9.

I am so upsat about this, and have tested so many times and have identified which core was the faulty core on one of my machines.  I found one very special hint, that when I swap the top water block 3-pin cable with the bottom water block, the machine fires back to 1600 TH/s, very very briefly for like 3 seconds ... but the temperature reading reads +200C or something like that.  Also, the row of orange chaser lights suddenly showed a "special" red light.  Guess nothing is good about red light usually haha, so I shut off the machine and swap back the 3-pin cables to it's original connection ... everything back to normal.

Now, it hinted me that the chips were not dead, the board was not dead, and if i tricked the board to believe that the water block was runing, it will run.  So, I suspect it must be something wrong with the water block !!!

So, I went off the the computer and bought myself the cheapest water blcok available, and spend the whole weekend learning how to install a water block.  I remove the faulty water block with the new block.  Guess what ..... it did start for a while back on with 2 chips in the faulty core !!!!! big improvement already.... now I see that pump speed was only 1000 RPM, I was guessing that because it is too hot so only 2 chips ran.  I step down to power step 6 .... now guess what, the machine hashes with all 16 chips !!! which it had not done so for over 2 weeks !!!  The pump IS the problem.  So I went off and bought myself some higher grade water blocks!!! Since it was out of stock ... now I'm waiting for the new block to arrive and will further test, but it is looking good, as I have successfully revitalized the dead chips albit could only run at step 6 (the whole board, even the good core, shuts as soon as i step up to step 7).


Now I see your problem, I hesitate to apply the Liquid Pro, which I have just received today.

But anyway, if your problem is only with 1 chip, you can remove the 3-pin power to that specific faulty water block, it powers it off, trust me, I have done this.  If it's stopped, that core will not start (there will be reading, but it is not hashing without the cooling system going online), then the good core can still run happily without being affected by the bad core, at least you get 4 chips back.

For you guys that are thinking of trying Liquid Pro stop and think about this for a minute. When you go to spread Liquid Pro to the chips you will see it takes a little work to get it to cover the chip. Once you have a thin layer on the chips and you apply a little to the center you will see it flow across the chip. So what's going to happen if you don't apply it to the water block also? Its going to push the Liquid Pro off the sides of the chip instead of flowing between them like it should. You need to break the surface tension on both the chips and the water block by spreading just enough to cover each then putting a drop in the center of the chip before assembling it. Measure out where it needs to be if you can't see the outline of the chips on the bottom of the water block. Last thing you want is for the water block to push it somewhere its not supposed to be. Not sure where this applying it just to the chip came from. Liquid Pro is NOT like regular thermal paste it HAS to be spread!

Yeah, these machines were barely out of beta testing IMHO and they shipped them to us anyway.  I can only imagine how many little hacks and tricks have gone on both in hardware AND software just to get them running in the first place (from the factory).

Now we all have this very delicate machines that can go haywire for the most nonsensical reason.

I doubt it's the pump.  This machine has run perfectly for more than three months.  It was "elective" surgery I performed on it yesterday as one of the cores would sometimes get up to 90C.  Inspired by my initial success with Liquid Pro I thought I'd give it a go.  As I said in my post about it, I had all the tools and everything laid out on my bench so why not, right?

All I did was apply Liquid Pro.  It actually ran perfectly for about 30 min.  Only after I noticed one of the green LEDs wasn't on did this most recent nonsense happen.  Yes, I too have the red light.  I'm pretty sure that's just the board telling me I have a bad chip.  Since the temp sensors are somehow integrated into those chips ... the problem is compounded.

If you have an ASIC chip go out and the temp sensor remain in tact, you're ok.  You'll just hash with one less ASIC.

If you have an ASIC chip go out and the temp sensor gets messed up to, then you're in for a world of pain.  

It is truly annoying.  I hope the class action suit drives CT into bankruptcy.  I bought mine just after November 1 so I'm SOL for that myself.

If they had just made it so you can remove individual ASIC chips all our lives would be better.  Shit, there'd be a market for buying and selling just the damn chips.

I'm sure I'll waste more time on it today and the rest of this week.  It's so aggravating words can't express.

That's a good point.  But ...

1.  The first machine I did this with is working flawlessly.  Maybe I just got lucky.

2.  The second machine was running fine, until whatever episode happened that led to my current situation.  But when I re-applied LP to the 2nd machine I did have it on the water block too.  

It could be that the damage was done once the LP oozed out past the chip die edge and shorted or caused whatever havoc.

I'd generally agree with you though.  If anyone goes down the risky LP road they should apply it to the cooling block too.  It doesn't need much.  Just "paint" enough on there to break the surface tension so that, as you observe, it will bond with the LP on your goldstrike chips.

However, a little bit of LP oozing over the edge of your chip should not wreak such havoc with the motherboard.

An update ...

Spent all day trying to get the board back to normal.  No dice.  One of the ASIC chips is fried (only reports 7 dies on the advanced stats page) and the temp sensor is mangled along with it.  I still get swings from +300C do -300C.  But after many reboots and other attempts, it's mostly reading negative low temps right now.  So it gets some hashing in.  Currently:

Core Temp 1 (°C)   65.22   48.64   54.80
Core Temp 2 (°C)   46.94   -216.28   -22.62

I have a hunch that -216.28 actually means 21C (the temp on the dead chip) and that 310C means 31C.  At someplace below 28C it reports a negative value (times -10) and somewhere above 30C it reports as a positive value (times 10) ... that's my guess based on what I've been seeing.  Those scalar multiples may not be exact of course.

So I'm trying to keep the board as cool as possible for now in the hopes I can use SOME of CTA0.

you scared the hell out of me ... just received my liquid pro yesterday, and some thermal pads too from coollab

i hasitate to apply now ...

btw, how many chips can one syringe of liquid pro cover?? I only got 1 syringe and doubt it would be enough even for one machine ...

I don't think you need to be scared.  But I will say that I've basically had this happen with the last two boards I've applied TIM to.  The first was over a month ago using Noctua HT-N1.  It seemed fine, then a die went bad (remember there are 8 dies per board).  There was no rhyme or reason to it either.  I inspected afterward an my application was fine.  No overflow, short circuit, or anything.

Most recently, using LP, the same thing happened but worse.  The temp sensor went along with the goldstrike die causing more problems.  A dead die isn't so bad.  You just lose 1/8 of your boards hashing power.   I can't say I blame LP for this either.

Particularly if you have no choice and your machine is running way too hot, then I'd say to go ahead with the LP.  I honestly believe it's better than other TIM.

Some notes:

1.  I modified my jig since I can't find long M3 screws near where I live (Lowe's doesn't have them).  Simply put, I cut the chopsticks down to about 2" long and just used them as temporary screws.  Turns out I really didn't need the foam and the top part of the jig.  The sticks / wooden pins worked just as well as my more complicated jig.  Regardless, you really do need something to keep the water block in place when applying any TIM to these machines.

2.  Use a good solvent to get rid of the old TIM.  I used Arcticlean.  But who knows, maybe that's the culprit here for all I know.  It is a common element.

3.  Make sure you apply LP to both the cores AND the bottom of the water block.  I feel like one syringe of LP can do an entire machine, or pretty close to it.  You really DO NOT NEED MUCH material when applying.  When you "paint" it on to the bottom of the block you'll see.  It's like you're spreading it only a few molecules thick.

4.  After you restart your machine and especially if it seems ok, try to just leave it that way for at least 24 hrs.  I feel like in both instances where I've had a board drop a die, it happened after a restart that occured shortly after application.  I'm speculating here.

Here is something else to consider.  In both my cases, it's been the last core on the board that's gone bad:  core7.  So I'm not convinced this is necessarily the fault of any TIM or application method.  That last core seems to be the weak link in the chain and was also likely the problem core running hot in each case.  So there might be more going on to these failures than we'll never know until some ex employee of CT writes a book or something.

LP goes on more like silver paint than thermal paste.  It also won't stick to a surface until you spread it a bit.  Try to resist the urge to put on too much.

Be careful and you stand a good chance.  But then again, that's what I thought when I started applying Noctua last month (before I went to LP) and I still had a chip go bad.  Any time you work on one of these very fragile boxes you're taking a bit of a chance.

Shortly after writing the above, I see my core temps have flopped back to the + side of nonsense.

Core Temp 1 (°C)   34.7   31.24   32.71
Core Temp 2 (°C)   326.59   28.09   105.18

It will occasionally flip back to a very large negative temp, but now seems to be stuck on the positive side, so the CTA is not hashing at all since the system thinks it is running too hot and is throttling it off.

What a pain.

have you tried my idea, or pulling the 3-pin power supply off the bad block?  It should shut that core down, and thus revitalizing the good core remaining on that board.

FYI, I have now one machine with only 3 water blocks connected (one core with no water block, waiting for the new block to arrive tonight).  And it is hashing nicely with 12 chips, 4 at rest because of the lack of any water cooling system connected to it, not even the power connected.

Try this

I did try it.  No luck.  The core does not shut down.  I'm pretty sure that cable only reports pump speed.

What firmware version are you running?  I've tried them all, from 0.6.x through 0.8.8.  Makes no difference.

Ok, here's some bizarre observational data.

When I run with PL7 or below the bad temp sensor tends to flip on the plus side more often (eg., +300C) and the other core on the board runs in the 70s - 80s.

When I run with PL8 or PL9 the sensor seems to stay in the negative more often ( -299C currently) and the other core runs in the 60s.

Go figure.  More power = lower temp.

Things go kooky when chips and senors get wonky.

EDIT:  not so sure about this anymore.  It seems to flip back to + without rhyme or reason now.  I may have to just disable the board entirely.  First I'll have to check how much power it's drawing.  I suspect it's now a very inefficient miner electricity wise.

EDIT:  yup, it's been showing +300C or so all day, hence no mining from CTA0 as it's throttling itself.  I wish there was a way to force it NOT to throttle.

Has anyone here replace the Beaglebone in their Terraminer? Mine is dead and I just purchased a new one, but not completely sure how to load the Cointerra firmware onto it.  I was told I need to point the boot loader at the firmware files and have been doing some research but thought any experience or suggestions would be helpful.

Thanks.

If you want to completely duplicate the setup Cointerra put on there, you'd need to image the beaglebone exactly as they did. If you really, really want to have it back as-is, you might be able to get an image dump from someone. Otherwise I'd just load on some default embedded linux version for the beaglebone, compile a version of cgminer, and just run that.



Where are you getting version 0.8.8?

I got it from their tech. support a while back.  I think it's similar to 0.7.6 with added support for extensive debug printout put nicely into a tarball so you can (could) email it to CT.  I don't think CT cares so much anymore.  

Someone had a set of links to all the firmware versions on the CT forums, before they took them down.

They were all up on GitHub too but I'm not sure if they still are.  The devs may have wised up and put them into a private repo.

I suspect if you email support@cointerra.com they might still send it to you.  Who knows.

Seriously.. wtf is this 0.8.8 shit? sounds like you got infected. :)

Mine is ver. 0.7.6, should it be ok?

There's a USB trick you need to perform to have cgminer recognize the CT devices, it's described in the cgminer README. Other than that, no fancy stuff, it just works.

https://github.com/ckolivas/cgminer/blob/master/README#L355

The build instructions are also there:

https://github.com/ckolivas/cgminer/blob/master/README#L100

Keep in mind that Angstrom linux (the *normal* version, not the wonky scheme Cointerra boots into) uses a package manager called opkg. So far as I know you can get all the necessary packages to build cgminer from it, but I haven't actually tried it myself, I'm just recalling an almost identical process with KNC.

OK so I have got myself a Silverstone Tundra TD3 water pump and replaced my faulty pump.

Unfortunately it is not much better than the cheap Cooler Master Seidon 120 that I've tried a few days ago...


Both could solve my problem, partially.  With the replacement pump I can now mine with all 16 cores, but only if set to Power Step 6.  many chips shuts as soon as I step up to Power Step 7.  Probably the pump is not strong enough to remove the heat???

The pump speed only reads 1200 RPM for TD3, while it's ~1000 RPM for Seidon 120.  Noticed that the original cointerra pumps are 3000 RPM ...


Any idea on how I could boost the replacement pumps so that I could fully utilize my miner to Step 9 again?  Maybe Liquid Pro could help?  I am using Artic Silver 5 for thermal paste now.

Lol ... no.  This was all discussed at great length on the CT forums before they put them down.  Believe it or not.  I'm not sure what advantages 0.8.8 has.  But the LED lights seem to respond a bit more.  IE., pwr LED stays green and/or turns red if the machine hangs.  It also has an option for more extensive debug output.

I have no reason to make this up ... and no my machines are not infected.  ;-)

LP will likely drop your temps a few more degrees.  But be very careful when applying the stuff.  Unlike AS5 it's electrically conductive.  So it can short out your board if it gets in the wrong place.  

Stuff is like (and likely contains quite a bit of) liquid mercury.  This thread has lots of good info on how to go about applying.

Also, your chips shouldn't shut down at PL7 unless they're getting above 120C.

Lastly, when you applied AS5 did you also apply it to the square "ring" that surrounds the chips.  I'm pretty sure you do not need to apply there.  My hunch is that doing so "lifts" the cooling block ever so slightly off the chips.

Several have speculated that the chips suffer from some misalignment in the horizontal plane ... which makes for tricky cooling issues and thermal paste application that lots have been experiencing.

But it sounds more like you need better pumps.  Also, what's your intake air temp?  IE., the temp in the room.  I've found if it's above 80F everything starts to overheat.  Below that and things are fine.

room temp at 34C, pretty marginal, notice CT is only designed to operate below 35C

ill give LP a try tonight

6.4.8 best version I have found unless you have the machine in a very cool environment. 6.4.8 actually shuts down 1, not all 4 per chip. Try it. Rollit back to 636, then set stepping to 7, and let it run a bit, then upgrade to 6.4.8 and step it slowly.

Is Liquid Pro "removable"???

I have heard people saying that applying these kind of liquid metal paste will join the block and chips so hard that it will become very difficult to remove later.

So, if need to do maintenance later, how to?

It's actually mostly gallium, another element that is liquid close to room temperature:

http://www.coollaboratory.com/pdf/safetydatasheet_liquid_pro_englisch.pdf

Given that spec sheet, Liquid Pro it is most certainly Galinstan, or a slight modification of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galinstan

That is a potential issue I think as well.  I have noticed, however, that you can still remove LP after a day or two.  So if you don't see the gains you like, you can always fall back to a regular paste.

Ironically, my board is now running fine (minus a die) using some CoolerMaster paste that came with a CPU cooler I had.  I think that some of the issues people may be having are application related?  Go get some chopsticks, cut them down to about 3" and sharpen one end.  Stick them in the holding screw holes (they will screw slightly in) and use them as guides.  Or ... go get some longish m3 screws.  Make sure not to apply too much TIM.  I also have a hunch that the screws do not necessarily need to get torqued all the way down.  Tightish, yes, but perhaps not fully in.  I wonder if full torque might damage the very delicate goldstrikes, esp. if they don't sit properly flush with the surrounding metal square.

That's actually quite cool.  Good find.

Great. My Terraminer IV is falling apart. 1 core already died and am not sure how to fix it. I want to get some thermal paste and see if that fixes anything but I dare not touch it. The remaining 3 temps are getting higher slowly each day. I hope someone starts a class lawsuit action against them.

The core you have that's down was probably shut down do to it overheating. I have had two cores go down do to overheating. As for the other three slowly getting hotter, well, they are going to continue getting hotter. Replacing the thermal compound is the only way to fix this issue. It will most likely bring back the dead core if it was shut down do to overheating. The question is which one to use? The best thing to do is read through this thread to see what others have done and make your decision then which way to go.

My beaglebone shorted out on me so I am trying a method to get my Terraminer back up.

Making some progress with the Terraminer. I hooked up both boards directly to my PC, installed WinUSB, and then started up version 4.3.5 using the --ps-load 80 parameter since I used to run it at power step 8.

Cgminer recognizes the boards and they get an initial hash rate of about 200g for a second on each board and the over about a minute it goes down to 0.

I get a constant output of checksum bad for each board.

The miner registers on my pool for about 2 minutes and then nothing

The fans spin up like they do when the miner gets ready to hash and then spin right back down.

Is there a parameter I am missing?

Any suggestions?

Think I got it.  Needed version 4.3.4.

Will let it run for a bit and see what I get.

I have a few "1 dead core" miners, and have found the problem and solution.  I have tried redoing the paste, no help.  I am pretty sure it's the pump problem, probably pump dead.  My solution is to replace the water block with a new one: (something like this: http://www.coolermaster.com/cooling/seidon/seidon-120v/ (http://www.coolermaster.com/cooling/seidon/seidon-120v/))

They way how you can see which pump is dead is, to remove the 3-pin of each pump one by one, and run the machines with only 3 pumps hooked up.  You will see which one is good and which one is not actually responding.


However, although the dead core was brought back to life once I have replaced the water block, they can't run as fast as the original ones.  I have tested with both Cooler Master Sedion 120 and Silverstone TD03, and they only provide 1000 ~ 1200 RPM for the pump speed. 

As a result, I can only run the machine to Power Step 6 with the replacement pump.  As soon as I step up to Step 7 or higher, the core with the replacement pump register errors and do not function properly. --- I am still using only normal thermal paste (i.e. Artic Silver 5) though.  I will try liquid pro on my Silverstone replacement pump sometime tomorrow, and see if I can put it beyond Power Step 6.

I have a bad beagleboner lol. I would like to hook the miner to usb and control from a pc. Has anyone successfully done this? Thanks for the help.

Yes, it's quite straightforward. There's a printer-style USB plug on each board. Just plug that in to a PC and run cgminer (I'm simplifying a little).

Yes, I did this last week.  Make sure you get version 4.3.4 or earlier of cgminer.  Later versions have a checksum error. 

Also, you need to install the WinUSB driver for the goldstrike boards.  See a prior post in this thread about it. 

Thank you guys! I appreciate the help. I have one more question. Should I pull out the beaglebone completely and then do the USB connection? Wow this is going to be great if it works. This controller card has never worked right since day one. Thanks again for the help.

I did everything you guys said and it worked perfectly. I will provide the steps for this surprisingly simple process. This way when the beaglebones start dying people can breath life back into their terraminers.

Downloaded cgminer get version 4.3.4 into my laptop.
Configured the batch file to point to my pool. No special cointerra commands needed.
Opened the top lid of the miner and disconnected the two usb cables from the cointerra boards.
Connected my two usb printer type cables from my laptop into the miner.
Cut two slots into the lid so I could feed cables out to the pc.
Loaded zadig usb driver loader software into my laptop so that I could change the usb driver to WinUSB
With the laptop already on I then powered up the Terraminer.
The PC recognized the Goldstrike boards.
After they were properly recognized I ran Zadig and changed the USB drivers to WinUSB.
I started cgminer and amazingly the miner began to mine almost instantly.

Since I left the beaglebone with power connection I will plug in ethernet tommorrow and see if I can still see the cointerra interface so that I can hopefully change settings as cgminer does not offer any cointerra setting commands.

Thanks again for your help. I hope this procedure helps other people with Beaglebone problems.

Actually it does, just use command line arguments:

--cta-load
"Set load for CTA devices, 0-255 range"),
--ps-load
"Set power supply load for CTA devices, 0-100 range"

Thanks JoseSan I will give those a try tomorrow. Do you have a complete list of all the Cointerra commands by any chance? 

This is starting to get interesting and fun !!! i was wondering, can i chain all Terraminer into one controller board, and kinda like combining 10 Cointerra machines into one single interface!!!

Yes, though this reduces redundancy/resiliency. If your control computer stops working, all your Cointerra machines will be starved for work. I wouldn't recommend it.

Those are the only Cointerra-specific command-line arguments in cgminer.

Funny story - I got those from the source code without looking at the ASIC-README: https://github.com/ckolivas/cgminer/blob/master/ASIC-README


That's sort of a lie, but it might indirectly be telling the truth, as the CTA devices might be ignoring the bits about the power setting, set via these two lines:

   buf[CTA_RESET_LOAD] = opt_cta_load ? opt_cta_load : 255;
   buf[CTA_RESET_PSLOAD] = opt_ps_load;

You can send those commands to cgminer, as the version in your Beaglebone is doing (I had a look).  You're basically saying "please use this much power" but it can happily ignore you. This might also require cooperation from the Beaglebone, but I doubt it since there's no direct signal connection to the PSUs from the Beaglebone (there is a power connection).

Josesan  I tried the commands and it did not seem to change anything,

Can you please give example of how to do these commands into cgminer

I would like to set up a batch command with power setings

./cgminer -c cgminer.conf --cta-load 128 --ps-load 50

That's an example of an (in-theory) 50% power setup. Cointerra never documented what the hell these things do, not even to Con Kolivas. I'm not sure what they do, really.

Okay thanks JoseSan... I'll give it a try. It appears though my woes with Cointerra are more serious than beaglebone. Both of the hashing boards are over heating badly. I saw a reference to some videos on how to repair the cointerra boards by reapplying thermal paste. I looked for the videos but could not find them on Youtube. Can someone please post the link for the videos. It looks like I am going to have to perform a full repair on this piece of crap hardware. Ugh!

Hey mmfiore,

I've done the thermal paste reapplication. its pretty easy.

1. completely remove the processor block/radiator assemblies from the system. You will need to disconnect the power wires from the boards as well since they weave between the hoses.
2. Completely remove all the old thermal paste and clean the the blocks and processors using 90%+ isotrophyl alcohol and q-tips.
3. Apply thermal compound only to each processor, not the pump blocks. About the size of a BB on each core. I prefer "Innovative Cooling Diamond 24 Carat". It will get you results similar to the "Liquid Pro" many others are using but doesn't have the shorting risks of conductive paste.
4. line up the block above the processor and get the mounting screws started. Do not apply downward pressure on the block until all 4 screws are started.
5. Apply firm pressure straight down on the block and tighten all the mounting screws.

Done.

Thanks derel1cte for the reply. I guess I will give it a try. What do I have to lose. Right now I can hash faster with a pencil and paper than the damned Cointerra at full power.

You don't need to completely remove the entire cooling assembly.  The block hoses should have just enough play in them so they can be set out of the way.  It may depend on how your power cables are set up.  On mine, they weren't an issue.

Perhaps most important, use some guides to keep the block in place when screwing it back in.  I used 3" wood dowels (chopsticks) sharpened on both ends.  You don't want the block moving around and smearing your paste all over as you screw it back in place.

Thanks for the extra tips MarvinMartian I will perform the operation next week and let everyone know how it goes. My heat syncing compound should arrive next week.

Hello Patrick, how nice to see you around on Bitcointalk again. How's the dog?

My seven year old daughter, Anna, is wondering when you are going to return our 51 bitcoins trapped in Intersango, which you promised to return to us last October, so that her dog, Buddy, can get his long overdue heart operation.

Damn 51 coins is a good chunk of money, hopefully you get those back but highly unlikely. Every coin I see go missing never gets returned. That goes for USD too-

I decided to send another request to support through the cointerra website asking specifically what the D45 RED LED means and how can I fix it. This is the reply I got. What a fucking bitch and Fuck CoinTerra  >:(

Hi ,

We are not currently releasing that information.

Best regards,

Laura
CoinTerra Support Team

I got pretty much the same response from Marshall when I was having overheating issues. I sent him an email asking which core was which so I could narrow down the ones that were getting hot and he told me he could not comment on that. Cointerra will not help their customers in any way.

Folks,  seems like this is probably a non-starter given all the complaints I am seeing about Cointerra support.  But...  barring building my own controller to bypass the beaglebone, (perhaps Raspberry Pi?) is there any way to recompile or otherwise change the cgminer version in the stock 0.7.6 firmware? I'm running into an issue on NiceHash pool where I am getting 80%+ rejects that has been identified as the following:

This error means that your miner modified ntime too many seconds ahead which means that the target pool may refuse such shares. Some pools may permit some seconds ahead and some may not, but we don't know which do and which don't so we do not allow ntime to be rolled more than current time (we don't permit rolling into the future). I would suggest you to contact ASIC developer and request a fix on mining software/firmware. Miner should always exhaust extranonce range first, before doing ntime rolling.

So basically, I need to use a different cgminer....

Is anyone in fact using a Raspberry Pi to control their terraminer? I am using one for my Scrypt Zeusminers....  love it! Would be nice to have a bit more freedom...

Are you sure the date isn't wrong on the Beaglebone?

This is like a slap to the face. Look what Cointerra is selling now.

http://cointerra.com/product/non-warranty-repair/

This is not linked on the cointerra homepage, is it some kind of "private link" only issued by cointerra to enquiring customers via customer services, i suppose?

Wow.  That is one very large pile of bull****.

If you have a Cointerra machine and you feel they haven't lived up to their promised service or performance, here's another link you can try to get some resolution.  You won't have to pay for it either:

http://www.bbb.org/central-texas/Business-Reviews/virtual-currency/cointerra-inc-in-austin-tx-1000104440/

So, I have basically fixed my "1 core dead" issue by pump replacement + Liquid Pro.

These pumps are like shit, burn too easily.

Now I am left with the only problem, of "half board not receiving power" and the PSU is showing an orange little light.

I tried to pull off everything from the faulty board, even the power supply black / red cable.  PSU turns back to double green light.  Problem should therefore on the board.

Any successful story out there for fixing this orange light issue?  :-\

Hi there. I am running a early Jan (hm, I mean late Feb) batch Terraminer. It ran fine the last months, but yesterday one board stopped hashing. The pump is listed as 0 pump speed.
Which alternative pump do you suggest? Are they easy to replace? I just saw single alternative pumps and not a double system like Cointerrra build.

Thanks for helping.

I would like to thank all you good people for the good advice and technical support. I received my Innovative Cooling Diamond 24 Carat thermal paste yesterday and today I took my cointerra apart removing the cooling blocks and cleaning off all the shitty cointerra paste. I reapplied the Diamond 24 smearing a thin coat over the chips and then a bb sized drop in the middle. I reattached the heat sync blocks and fired the machine up. It is now running better than when cointerra shipped it to me. Temperatures have dropped from 120 plus to 50s and 60s. The crashing has completely gone away. I tell you it is bringing tears to my eyes. This thing has never run this good. Gentlemen my hat is off to you guys. Hip Hip hurray!  :D

 Hi All,


I live in a country where it was hard to find Coollaboratory Liquid Pro

will Coollaboratory Liquid Ultra be okay ?? i found and bought 2 packs but just need a heads up on that

thanks in advance

I didnt see some of this posted elsewhere so I thought I would add to this thread.  Some may be mentioned elsewhere I did not search for everything I am putting in this post because of the size and scope of what I am contributing.  This post also turned out to be much larger than I had originally intended, sorry bout that for anyone who dislikes reading or pays per kb downloaded :/


I would have more info but have to spend more time on things that pay the bills.  I have no funding for this research so its kinda on an as available basis and currently I have only had about 30 minutes to look into it.  Should that change I can probably do a whole lot more.  As I get the time I am going to disassemble the board firmware and try to write compatible C code that would replace the closed proprietary cointerrible CTA firmware that is known to be buggy.  This is by no means a trivial task, disassembly has its own problems and is often a little more involved  than running IDA to get something that can be recompiled into a working software package.

If this info is helpful I do accept tips, should anyone want to fund my research I can make more time available.  1AhuDugRidP9HksF8s5WrDUziucmctXBNc


The PSU is a power-one PFE-1100-054RA ($350 or so at a few retailers).  This breaks down to 1100w max output, reverse airflow psu.  It seems to me that the psus are maxed out (and less efficient as a result).  The PET-1300-054NA would actually fit and according to power-one anything in the PFE or PET series is swappable.  This would give you a bit more available power which might solve some issues with the systems.  The 1300w one is a bit more at about $450 though.  It is my understanding that the DC/DC circuitry on the board as well as the psu is the reason the 1.6 TH/s units cant do 2TH/s so you may get a slight bump from swapping the psu.  It would be an expensive experiment for someone to try though.  I also like the NA rather than the RA models as they exhaust the heat rearward instead of to the front.  I am unsure exactly why cointerrible got reverse models, but the heat shield could be removed (you must remove it to swap the PSU) and for data center apps the hot/cold sides could be better maintained.

The mcu on the boards themselves is an arm.  specifically a TM4C1233H6PGEI.  The firmware loaded onto the board along with the tools to load the firmware is located in /opt/GSA_{VERSION}.dfu and at least some debugging symbols appear to be intact.  I have a few versions of board firmware that are not yet released specifically  from 0.7.53 CTA version 0.5.29 (2014-06-12) and from 0.7.46 CTA version 0.5.29 (2014-06-12).  See the end of this post for instructions on extracting the firmware so you dont have to ssh into your box to get it.

The waterblocks/coldplates are basically corsair H60s (which coolIT also was part of developing).  Any intel LGA 1150 (and others) compatible block should fit providing you have an X type mounting bracket with slots allowing for about 72mm spacing on the screws.  I would avoid any round screw hole and stick with slots like the cointerrible unit ships with to ensure that you can get the screws in exactly the right place.  This means people can experiment with alternate blocks, radiators and pumps to see what works best for them.  My quick measurements on a running unit (so I couldnt get the calipers in as good as I wanted) showed the exterior dimensions of the block is 2.5 inches or about 64mm and the screws center to center are 2.88 inches or about 72mm.  I know for a fact that I did not take good or exact measurements mostly because I was afraid of accidentally touching something with metal calipers and partly because I wanted approximate dimensions to see what would fit.  If you do replace the coldplate I strongly suggest that the part that touches the chips be made of copper and that the water channel be cut into that copper plate.  Copper allows for better heat transfer into the fluid than aluminum (while aluminum works better in the radiators to get the heat out).  The pump appears to use the standard 3 pin connector with the pins in the standard positions.


PSU datasheet http://www.power-one.com/sites/power-one.com/files/documents/power/datasheet/bcd.00012_ai_pfe1100-12-054xa.pdf
MCU datasheet http://www.ti.com/product/tm4c1233h6pge


The salvage price for various components in the cointerrible miner puts it at $1k or maybe a bit more if you have a good salvage guy.  Soon they will be selling well below this price point and just parting them out could be more profitable than mining with them :)


insturctions to extract firmware

First let me say that if you need these you probably shouldnt be modifying firmware for your device.  However sometimes all someone needs is a nudge in the right direction to notice and/or fix something that should have already been fixed.  There are plenty of things that can be fixed on these boxes.  The beaglebone is a ARM AM335x cpu so anything you build/add/replace must adhere to that platform.

The web stuff is php and one thing that would be easy to extend is the power stepping (and possibly adding the ps_load capability).  Cointerrible gives you 0-9 to step through, however the cgminer driver takes 0-255.  You appear to be able to do 25MHz steps if you can get finer grained control over this than the crude stepping they give you.  ps_load is 0-100 with a hardcoded default of 0.  I am unsure exactly what ps_load does exactly.  I was unable to observe any real device changes in the brief time I looked at things.

This at least opens the door for more people to fix many of the problems with the non-CTA firmware, and opens the door for a few who can work on the CTA firmware.  One is obviously harder than the other.  You will need mkimage from uboot to rebuild rdImage back so it can be flashed using the web interface.


In /opt you will see a few files.  Of interest is:
dfu-util and cointool which has symbolic links made for cointool-info and cointool-upgrade

dfu-util can reset the board (0 or 1)
cointool-info can query the board for its info - serial numbers, CTA version, hardware version, etc
cointool-upgrade can load the firmware of your choice, or even downgrade (default script loads anything that is not equal to the version on the board)
GSA_0.4.5.dfu is the firmware itself for the board.  

I have not yet looked for a recovery method in case you brick the board.  There should be jtag or something to allow you to load a minimal firmware that then lets you load a working one (jtag is slow++ and the MCU natively does usb and other faster stuff).  My guess is reviewing the data sheet on the MCU would yield that answer fairly quickly, but alas I have no time.  I have not even looked at the board for headers or contacts or silkscreening that would indicate where you can do this.  I am guessing there are contacts somewhere that directly connect to pins on the MCU that would enable a reflash for recovery but until this is resolved I personally would not reflash it with anything not from cointerrible.

If you try to be clever and use binwalk on the GSA firmware you will be disappointed.  It claims it contains a LZMA compressed data section and the uncompressed size is 9000 yottabytes.  This is obviously incorrect, which leads me to think that it is a direct image for the ARM MCU.  I have yet to further analyze the file to see if this is true, but occams razor and all that.  While its compiled size is only 55k, and it is ARM which generally have 4 byte opcodes usually with the same prefix that does not mean it will be fast, easy or trivial to reverse the firmware, then again maybe it will be.  I do know already that they use a PLL to set the asic chip frequency, so there is a potential however weak that one could play with that for overclocking.  The PLL is probably controlled via one of the 106 GPIO lines the MCU has.  There may also be some speedups that can happen during an audit of the code to see if they do anything in a silly way that is inefficient.

im not recommending anyone modifies their terraminer - and you will definitely void your warranty if you had any left - but for those whose warranty has already expired, and if you dont mind risking damage to your system (with no possibility of comeback to cointerra) and if you do choose to modify or repair your box, here's some extra hints.

If youre going to replace the pumps theyre probably closer to the Corsair H80i pumps than they are the H60 pumps.   Getting a dead old pump off without losing coolant from the radiator may be a challenge but probably not impossible if you hold the radiator the right way and let the liquid drain out of the pumps into the rad before removing them.  and be sure to clamp new ones on again properly so there are no leaks.  this is a bad place to have liquid leaks with so much power on the board.    Since the pumps contain moving parts and are highly mechanical they are definitely a source of potential failure/unreliability in the system, and are definitely worth considering their replacement if performance isnt good and pump failure is suspected.   However, i remind that cointerra has an out-of-warranty repair service which id recommend instead of doing it yourself.

Power Supplies.

The standard one is an 1100 watt power-one unit.  there is a 1200 watt Murata one that fits in the same size housing (but may need wiring changes to utilise) if thats of interest.   Failing that, perhaps someone should try an outboard power supply (like most miners these days are shipping without psus) and use bigger power supplies and direct connect their outputs to the terraminer's power input?

Board power... as has been mentioned, the dc/dc converters get hot and that explains why the fans are running at full speed all the time - probably giving significantly more cooling to the asics than they need... thus if you want to try and over-clock the asics, you will need to reverse engineer the firmware, and increase not only the clockspeed but also the volts... which will require significant experimentation and risk of burning out the chips and boards.  The chips themselves are capable of 500 GH each (and the liquid cooling system is overspecced so thats no problem) thus a 2 TH box is possible, however, the dc/dc converters on the first board werent efficient enough and run too hot to make this a possibility, which is why cointerra designed a mk 2 board that does run the four asics at 2 TH using different dc/dc converters that are more efficient.

If someone finds a better way of cooling the dc/dc converters (perhaps putting heatsinks on them... or using immersion cooling for the entire board) then there's no reason why the asics cant be clocked higher and volted accordingly.  With the right power and cooling, they definitely run at 500 GH per chip (or more)

note, you have been warned that any modifications of your terraminer are dangerous (due to the high power currents involved) and that you will definitely void your warranty and lose any support possibility you ever had from cointerra.  if you dont care about that and still want to go ahead, on your own head be it.  (if youve opened your box and done anything to the innards, there's no way cointerra would be able to repair it, so if there's any doubt, dont touch it!)

I will add that cointerra charges about $350 just to look at the unit.  Once inspected they will tell you what they want to repair it.  The $350 is non-refundable but I believe does include shipping back to you.  

The warranty is only for 30 days on new sales 3 months on sales from long enough ago its out of warranty anyway.  You must use the original shipping container in order to send something back to them or you void the warranty.  They have so many ways that the warranty gets voided its almost as if they expect the units to fail.



I suggested the PFE drop in replacement because the power supply in the unit has an i2c bus and the boards might talk to the psu.  If you replace it with something totally different like an external you are likely going to have to do a lot more work to make that function properly.  I believe that the ps_load argument to cgminer is involved in talking to the psu over that bus but I have not researched that aspect enough.  I do know that cgminer just passes that argument to the CTA board and does not do anything internally with it, which hints that a firmware change would be required to change to a non-compatible psu.  The fact that power-one says
is helpful in assessing risk.  Specifically I do not think there is any as long as you stay in their PFE/PET series.

http://www.power-one.com/power-solutions/products/embedded-power/ac-dc-hot-swap-front-ends/platinum-efficiency/pfe-series/series


There might be some light shed on this if someone has a 2TH/s unit and can get the model number of the psu so that I can compare what all was changed.  If its also a power-one PFE/PET series then its likely that one firmware can deal with all of them trivially, if however its something totally different then that may mean the psu has less communication since the same firmware works on both and with only 55k of code at an average of 4 bytes per opcode excluding the symbols and other text you are looking at fewer than 10k instructions which makes it less likely that the firmware has 2 totally different psu control sections.  A totally different PSU would hint that the firmware does not do much with the psu.


Power-one does do cases of the power supplies, they are 10 packs.  There is a price discount at digikey, mouser, etc for 10 packs and some you can only buy in a case.  At 2 per unit a group buy would not take a large group before you start to see a price drop, but until someone swaps one and sees if it does anything I do not suspect that anyone will want to pony up the money just because.

The power efficiency graph on power-one says its most efficient at about 50% max capability.  Inefficiency is commonly presented as heat as well as slightly higher power bills.  Granted its only a few percent difference but a larger one might help keep things slightly cooler while providing enough of a surplus that the boards run better.  Just need a guinea pig to try it, preferably someone who can spare the $450 without compromising their ability to put food on the table for their family.

You could just swap 1 psu and see if that board performs better before ordering a 2nd.

It's clearly not compressed, there are printf strings all over the binary (e.g. "A%dC%d Pump bad %d"). That doesn't mean that the code itself doesn't do some decompression, but as you so perfectly put it, occams razor and all that. There's even a string "Set asic %d core %d to speed %d pll 0x%X". I stuck the firmware into this online disassembler; who knows if it's any good:

http://www.onlinedisassembler.com/odaweb/wzJdcS/0

I took a great interest in this firmware a few weeks back, but gave up. I think my non-working board is borked for some other reason, but the MCU _does_ communicate from time to time, so I held out hope. I really appreciate your writing that little essay, it's rekindled my interest. I just wish they would release the damn firmware code instead of us poking around like criminals.

my point was that it is clearly not LZMA compressed because its not 9000 yottabytes :)  There are also no other known signatures in the file indicating if it is anything it is not standard or well known.  It is more likely that it is completely uncompressed as there is little need.  And yes there are symbols and strings all over in there that indicate a lot of it is not compressed.

I have IDA pro and plan on using that although I have not yet reinstalled after I wiped  this system as part of an upgrade a while back.  That one generally does a better job than most at this type of thing.

onlinedisassembler does not appear to do armv7 which would explain some of the undefined instructions.  I would not rely on its output as it apparently lacks the proper support for this MCU.  It also appears to ignore the symbol information which can be quite helpful in knowing generally what a section of code does without having to parse every line and figure that out yourself.


BTW: email cointerra support and explain your woes, some of the newer firmwares deal better with usb resets than what is in 0.7.6.

touching on the PSUs a bit, one thing that may help is to reverse the fan.  There are two otherwise identical model PSUs made by power-one.  The PFE-1100-054RA and the PFE-1100-054NA, the R/N stands for reverse or normal airflow.  For some reason cointerrible got the reverse ones so cold is rear and hot is front even though the rest of the system is completely opposite.  Because these are otherwise identical and it does not make sense from a manufacturing standpoint to have two completely different layouts internally I suspect but have zero proof that the only difference is the direction of the fan.

The fan can either be flipped or possibly, maybe depending on stuff I couldnt see, the power wire reversed to reverse the flow of the fan.

I suspect that reversing the fan may actually be helpful, especially for boxes in a data center with a cold and hot side.  If people have exhaust strategies in a home environment this would probably be even more helpful since they are unlikely to have surplus airco capacity.

To remove the psu:

remove power to the machine
remove the 4 phillips screws holding the heatshield on and set aside
depress the grey tab and pull the psu, the connector may stick a bit but a firm yet gentle tug should dislodge it.
using a small screwdriver, tack or other item pry the 3-4 tabs on each side of the psu out just enough to let the  top cover slip off
using a small torx bit, smaller than T10 (which is the smallest I had so I never went this far) remove the screw
The top cover should be easily removed at this point and you can locate the fan.  Flip it around.

I got as far as being able to open the cover a bit to blow some air in and remove the dust that was in there but could not get to the fan so I could not  reverse it.  Any information on what size torx screw it is and especially if reversing the fan helps would be appreciated.

There very well may be a reason they got the reverse air psus, I just cant see it.   There is plenty of space for air to get in and it makes a whole lot more sense to suck the coldest air in rather than the hottest.  The heat shield would not even be required if the fans were not reversed.

The psu will shut down at about 115C on its own per power-one so if this turns out to be a bad idea you may have to wait for it to cool and undo whatever you did.  In  theory a cooler psu will output more stable voltages which in turn should result in better hashing.

sorry to ask again :

 Coollaboratory Liquid Ultra v Coollaboratory Liquid Pro ?

'' After the overwhelming success of the Liquid Pro, the new Coollaboratory Liquid Ultra was developed. Of course the Liquid Ultra is also made of 100% metal, but it has an absolute new usability and offers an outstanding performance. Due to the paste-like texture the application is now very easy. ''

 - which sounds good because ive never done this kind of thing before, and i am unable to find the liquid pro in the country where i am.

just one thing scared me :

'' Please notice that the Liquid Ultra is not suitable with the usage of aluminum surfaces. ''

-- umm . so my fear is that the chip or cooling block has aluminum or something? - sorry if that makes some people laugh - i really have no idea about chip metals

thanks ~

The block is copper, the chip is a semiconductor with epoxy around it (see http://www.empf.org/empfasis/2007/June07/flip.html). You're good.

All good waterblocks/coldplates will be copper, at least the part that touches the chip and what the water channels are cut into.  Copper transfers heat to the fluid better than aluminum, however radiators and mere heatsinks are aluminum because that helps to draw the heat out better. 

If you have an aluminum waterblock you have a really cheap one not to mention aftermarket because stock is copper.  Aluminum heatsinks are popular though which is probably why they mentioned aluminum.

Aight that's nice, thanks guys i learned something. Fingers crossed i get the job done okay !

thanks again .

For anyone who needs new PSU's for their cointerra rig.
I have two brand new powerone 80 plus platnium PSU's received directly from Cointerra.
Im selling them for 180 each or 320 for both.
I accept bitcoins or paypal
message me or reply if interested

I have also filed a complaint with the Texas Attorney General https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/consumer/complain.shtml (https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/consumer/complain.shtml)

Even-though the Attorney General can not seek restitution for you, I still felt that their unfair business practices needs to be brought to there attention!

I have purchased 3 units from CoinTerra and all 3 had to go through their lengthy RMA process. CoinTerra would only repair one at a time and the repairs have only lasted a month. Now all my miners are out of warranty and are running too hot again. I contacted CoinTerra and once they found the units to be out of warranty I receive no reply to my requests. Only confirms my suspicions that you would only get one repair out of them if you where lucky.

Even though there maybe some compensation from the Class Action Law Suit coming out of California it will only be related to the companies inability to hit the 2Th's mark and the excessive power consumption in conjunction with not being able too deliver the units in a timely fashion.

Their is nothing filed in the Courts to address the major losses of revenue due to CoinTerra's  lengthy RMA process. Which I found to be on a average of having a 6 weeks turn around until the unit is back in service and functioning normally. Nor for the time frame of the units operating even below the 1.6 Th's level till the RMA was recognized and CoinTerra took action to receive the units back.

As we all know time vs hashing power vs difficulty = major losses in revenue.

So, will CoinTerras consumers ever get what they are entitled to???
Posted from Bitcointa.lk - #7L0w4Gk6YGLaF4m6

Hi all, been spending some time reading through this thread trying to see if anyone has a similar issue, and whilst I think people do, there doesn't seem to be a fix.

It all started with the top PSU showing an orange light on the right and green on the left, unit not mining at all.  When you turned on just the top one the fans weren't starting on the unit. 

The customer service at Cointerra is shocking (and rude), the issue was reported mere days after the 3 month warranty period, I'm in the UK so I'm sure it will cost more than the $350 non refundable fee to get it there (they won't even allow me to ship and return - they make a FORTUNE on their shipping rates I can tell you shipping myself on a corporate UPS account).  The breaking point was even if you do that, a 7 day warranty period on the repair; really?!  So I'm voting with my feet, I won't be buying anything else from them again and being an advisor to many BTC onboarders I'll ensure they don't get anymore new custom, in my mind they're not far off Butterfly labs now.  All that said, decided to self diagnose and try to fix.

The problem...

1) When opened main board had no lights (the night rider orange ones on the board).  Not even at startup and no fans.
2) Switched PSU's and ruled out that problem as the good PSU then became the bad.
3) Checked all connectors
4) Tried removing the black and white cables from the faulty board - nothing.
5) Swapped out the 2 boards checking all connections along the way.  No leaks found, no bad connections.
6) After swapping boards around we've worked out a board is at fault and as it was the primary board there was no mining.  Now the machine is mining on one board so that is an improvement.  Interestingly both PSU's need to be on or the unit won't stay online.  If you don't power up or power down the 2nd it goes offline (can't access over LAN etc)
7) Now the original problem of the orange light on the PSU is on the bottom one.
8) No lights on the faulty board at all, not even on startup.
9) Looking at the nightrider lights on the working board D42 and D45 don't light in sequence (on startup D42 does but not D45) so I assume this is why it's hashing at around 700. 
10) Only CTA0 displays on the admin screens (before we started I couldn't get to this menu as the faulty board was the main one).  On the front of the machine it blinks on Miner 2 as mining.
11) We've not amended or touched the coolant system yet, there appear to be no leaks.
12) We've tried resetting the boards, we've tried resetting the system etc.  Firmware is 0.7.6, I tried to install 0.6.32 but it loads but doesn't downgrade.

So.. a board seemingly without power, PSU's seemingly fine, cooling seemingly fine, everything follows the board.  Have meticulously checked the board and can't see anything obvious.  Any ideas?

Would really appreciate any advice, thanks all.

David

I had a similar issue with my TerraMiner. One of the boards shorted out, resulting in an orange light on the PSU. I could not find a fix for the failed board, so i removed it, its cooling, psu and psu breakout board. To point 6, You CAN run the system with just 1 psu in, you just need to make sure that the small beaglebone power connector is attached to the single remaining power supply. In one of my previous posts in this thread i outline the reapplication of diamond thermal paste, this is a good step to take on your remaining board to get your miner running stable at 1/2 speed. Sorry about your dead board :(

There is not yet a class formed.  For one thing the purchase agreement includes wording that it must first go to binding arbitration, and they are in that process.  I am in the queue with the same law firm should that result in something positive.  If however arbitration totally breaks down then they can go to the courts and request the court for a class to be formed.  It will probably be a year or more before anything comes out of that, if it actually happens.

If they are successful in arbitration with the first client then they can cookie cutter deals based on that for the rest that they represent.  However I am still waiting for a refund from my Jan order and was told on July 8 that it would be processed on July 30.  On August 8 I was told that it was not yet processed.  Today I was told that there is no ETA but they assured me they are working as fast as they can citing how overwhelmed they are with refund requests.  And to think I still have multiple units that didnt hit the 2TH/s mark :/

The only thing I can think of is they used refund money from customers to build their cloud mining operation, so the store on broad street manhattan could have the miners in stock, etc.  They expected sales to explode and they didnt.  They expected profits to soar and it was more costly to have the units made and delivered.  They now do not have the cash to refund people and are struggling on that front hoping to mine their way out with gear they cant sell.  I could be wrong, but that is the feeling I get.  That insolvency is just around the corner. 

Their warranty  suggests that they know their devices will fail.

One LED is "AC ok" the other is "DC ok" and they both have fault signalling.  Perhaps the data sheet will help http://www.power-one.com/sites/power-one.com/files/documents/power/datasheet/bcd.00012_ai_pfe1100-12-054xa.pdf


There is a fuse internal to the PSU (per power-one data sheets) that is listed as non-user serviceable (because it is not externally exposed and they do not like mere mortals opening power supplies).  That may have blown.  To get at it pull the faulty PSU and take it to your workbench.  Using a tiny flat bladed screwdriver (I used a thumbtack) gently pry the 3 tabs on each side so the top cover will come off.  There is a single torx (smaller than a T10 I dont know its size and never removed it) screw you must also remove.  You should then be able to identify and access the fuse (take pics if you do this!!  identification of this fuse and its type and all would be great info for this thread).

I do not know if the fuse is soldered in or in some type of socket so you can easily replace it.  I do not know what type of fuse it is either only that it exists.


The problem could be the connector board but I would think that less likely.  These are sold separately and are a standard part.  I do not know if maplin carries it but they might be able to get it, I also do not know of any other stores like that over there because that is the only one I went to while living in that part of the world.  In the US Mouser and Digikey carry it and they do international shipping.  I believe cointerrible uses part number SNP-OP-BOARD-01.

Hope this helps ... :/


EDIT:

I missed this the first time.  When you swapped the PSUs the problem remained in the top or bottom slot?  It did not follow the PSU? 

That would indicate that it might be the connector board and that everything I said above is probably wrong.  Unfortunately its a $170 USD part to just try and see if it is the problem.  :(

If possible I would try and see if you see anything on the board that looks damaged.  This is the board that the PSUs plug into that is inside the power "nook" on the right side of the miner as you face the front.  If you see fried parts and cannot replace them yourself (most people cant do SMD work) you will likely have to get a new connector board.

If you dont see such a part then perhaps you need to hunt down the CD to talk to the board and get a USB cable.  The software from power-one is windows based and lets you monitor the board and get some stats off it and other stuff.  That may help you figure out what is wrong, whether its a dead CTA board or dead psu board.



But then you said this

That leads me to believe that its not power related at all although the LED on the PSU indicates a AC or DC fault somewhere ...


miner 1 and miner 2 leds at the front are hardwired to the CTA board.  If you look at the front edge of the board there is a connector on each  that are literally just wired to that LED.



It seems that way,  the system loads the firmware, starts up and then installs the firmware while its mining.  You gotta give it a minute or two more and it will restart again and run the downgraded version.  I have gone both up and down on mine playing with which is best and it took me a while to figure out that is what it was doing. 

Both of my CTA's are running extremely hot, 85 - 115 C and I am experiencing terrible hash rate.  Low of 200G to a high of 1.2T.

So, it seems like some thermal paste may help address the issue.

The question I have is which type is better.....

- Liquid Pro

OR

- IC Diamond

Seems like some folks have had issues with Liquid Pro due to the conductive nature of it - but there seems to be several documented positive results.

What about IC Diamond?

Should I try IC Diamond first to be safe?

Suggestions.....

Having applied various types of thermal interface material to my chips, I have to say that it really boils more down to technique.  By that I mean that if you "do it right" you should be fine with ICD or even AS5.

Make sure you clean off the old TIM very well.  Also make yourself some guide pins to keep the cooling block in place as you screw it back on.  I suggest 2" sharpened wood dowels (or chopsticks).  Don't use too much TIM either.  Definitely don't use any on the outer square metal "ring" that surrounds the 4 chips.

Last but not least, be gentle when re-torquing your hold down screws.  I'm not 100% sure they even need to be screwed back in all the way.  Just get them good and snug and tighten opposite screws at a time.

Yup, that's my take on it too.  Not sure about insolvency though.  I think they were able to keep many, many machines to use in their mining op.  In fact, I can't help but feel the recent spike in hash rate might be their latest round of machines at the new data center they teamed up with.

I contacted Cline's attorney and maybe I miss understood the reply, but it is as follows:


Sorry to hear that as of to date, you still did not receive your refund!
I agree that CoinTerra probably miss appropriated funds that should have went directly back to their customers.


My thoughts are that there cloud mining operation is what the June Batch went for. The units that actually hit the 2Th's mark with a reduction in power consumption. I believe that those units and the Spondooliestech's, Yukon SP-30's that has been released is what produced the spike in the network. 

With only more units to follow.

I was considering on buying some of the Spondooliestech's Yukon SP-30's, but now they have changed the specs. from Hashing 6Th's to 4.5 Th's and raised the power consumption rate. After more investigation into this product I have found that running them on two 120-V circuits will produce a Hash Rate of less than 4Th's.

Just another CoinTerra and BFL operation with only one exception. They are not a US based company, with possibly no recourse.

These companies are just as bad as the Day Traders driving the price of the coin down with their FUD!
Posted from Bitcointa.lk - #nvFIGkW2HHMYy2c7

Thanks for the extra info, certainly points to the board having an issue.

Due to having other equipment and a lack of space and time, I'm considering selling now.

If anyone is interested in purchasing my Cointerra, hashing on 1 board very happily and I guess potentially fixable, please drop me a PM.  I'm open to offers.  Maybe if you have the same issue you can make 1 good machine and have a lot of spares, or have a much cooler 1/2 power box...

Apparently I got sidelined :(  I had contacted them before they were in mediation, had a phone call, etc.  I did not get such an update and at the time they told me there was no class formed which implicitly means there can be no class action.  Apparently they are trying to expand it a bit because mediation at that time was with their 1 singular client.

Its good for the law firm as class action settlements negotiate the lawyers fee totally separate from anything else and usually that means the lawyers get a windfall.  I just hope that it does not mean I am stuck with cointerrible vouchers when its all said and done because I really do not want to deal with them in the future (or the terribleminer hardware).


And now that there are futures and other non-direct investment things out there en masse the volatility will be worse, although if you catch it at the right time there can be considerable profit to be had albeit at great risk.  For people like myself who for 2+ years have relied solely on bitcoins as my source of income that complicates things.

I have apparently confirmed that the DFU firmware file is infact just an ARM binary.  It is basically a memory dump so its not packaged as an a.out or elf or anything that way.  

I am still trying to work on this when I get some time.  I am planning on getting a loan from BTCjam (references greatly needed :) ) to expand my hardware holdings which in turn will allow me to free up one miner for experimentation with the firmware.  I have a few ideas that might be able to increase the speed of the cointerrible miners should certain things pan out (I dont know enough about the ASIC to know yet).  If I can increase my hardware holdings then I should have less time spent chasing the carrot to pay bills that I can dedicate some serious time to delving into the firmware and seeing if it is possible to improve performance and maybe fix some bugs.  

The first steps will be to map out the firmware.  There appears to be 108 functions that I would have to go through one at a time and figure out exactly what each one does and how it does it.  They may not all be functions, sometimes compilers make what look like functions out of blocks of code during the optimization process.  Once mapped I plan on rewriting functions one at a time in C and publishing on github under a OSI approved FOSS license (unless cointerrible is going to sue me since that might violate some copyright law somewhere given the fact  that I am doing the disassembly and spec writing and coding of the new firmware - see Compaq in reversing the IBM PC BIOS).  The DMCA clearly does not apply as there are no "locks" to be broken and reverse engineering under limited circumstances is allowed.  Technically this would help cointerrible anyway as they could use any of my published code as they see fit, but sometimes companies dislike users doing things they did not approve of (see Apple).  

It may be required that someone else code from the spec who has never seen the firmware but we can cross that bridge if cointerrible decides to issue a takedown notice.

EDIT I was wrong!!  Say it aint so.  Upon further reading the DFU file is wrapped using Ti's dfuwrap tool as part of Tivaware.  This means that to properly analyze it one must unwrap it.  I am not able to find a utility to do that so I have to read up on how its done and write a tool to undo it.  Fortunately its well documented so I should be able to figure it out.

I was able to unwrap the DFU header.  It flashes to address 0x00000000 so a complete rewrite.  I also noticed that the payload grew by 10kB between 0.4.5 (0.7.6) and 0.5.29 (0.7.46? something not yet published I have 3 versions).   I may not yet have it perfect, I had a problem validating the DFU suffix meaning its either not there or is in a format other than I expected it to be in.

This means that I can start looking at the code.  Hopefully the rest is more straightforward.

EDIT:
I started on this and have most of it "done".  There is the Ti library that I have to weed out, and because the padding bits are known standards for the arm (well unknown to me as this is my first arm reverse engineering project) I discovered it is thumb so if anyone else starts set IDA T=1 or whatever tools you use set it to use thumb. 

By done I mean that I have marked data sections, code, disassembled the code, know what some of the functions are, but that is the easier part.  Disassembly is rarely perfect, and converting it to equivalent C code is troublesome in most instances.  So the real work will be the next step which is extremely time consuming.  I honestly do not think I will have any time for the next week maybe more.  If anyone else feels they are qualified to actually do something meaningful with what I have done I can provide the work I have done so far and maybe get something going.  PM me if you are interested, have time and can help :)

You know all their firmware was on Github not long ago.  It's quite possible you may be able to find it in a net archive someplace.  If you did, it would save you a ton of trouble.

I feel silly for not grabbing it myself.

I did not know that, thanks.

So far all I have found is a monitor for it, and web pages.  Not the firmware that gets loaded onto the mining boards.  I have tried various different search terms, do you know what the project was called?

I even searched for some strings in the CTA firmware to see if google can find anything, it couldnt.  I tried several strings, just the string and nothing else.  Are you certain it was the CTA (miner board) firmware and not something else that was published?  I cant believe anything got deleted from the internet and I cant believe that google cant find it if its there and available publicly.

I'm pretty sure it was the code for the CTAs, yes.  It may have even been linked on a thread on BTC forum.  I can't recall but perhaps someone here can find the link.  May have been another forum.  I'll keep looking too.

My piece of shit cointerra died today. I am going to take a sledgehammer and smash it. Then I am going to douse it with gasoline and burn it.

A friends half died yesterday.  It seems they had the 30 day warranty (originally 3 months) because they knew there were problems that gave them a short life.  Is it a total death or is one CTA board still good?  I may be interested in the working board.

I suspect it can be fixed, even if partially.  If not, you can sell it on eBay either as one unit or part it out.  EG., the power supplies sell for almost $300 ea.

Try disconnecting the "black and white" cable that goes to the PSU.  Google around (and on this site) for pics and other info.  It's the most common cure for the "one dead board" syndrome.

Well, the day has come where it costs more money to run my Terraminer than it makes. Time to shut her down.  :(
Its been fun. GL all.

I think you need to check you math.
1.6Ths @ Diff of 23B is still 0.034BTC per day, about $16.50
2200W costs $9.00 per dat at 0.17 $/kwh.

You're still making $7.50 a day.

How can you come on here and tell me to check my math? Do you know where I'm located and how much I pay for electricity? I didn't think so.

Ok... so what are you paying for electricity?

Mining is barely profitable for me here in the states paying $0.17 per kwh. If you are paying more than that for power IDK why you'd even attempt to mine. Unless you are paying more than $0.32 you are still breaking even. Factor in speculation that the $/BTC increases, the TerraMiner is still profitable for now.

Do you really need to know the whole story? Ok well listen. When I started out mining my electric rates were $0.19 per kw. After I added the Terraminers in March my electric usage went up considerably and every month my electric company threatened to raise my rates. Well they finally did it last month. They raised it to $0.34 kw. Happy now?

Yeah, actually. I wasn't trying to attack you. It just seemed strange to declare a piece of hardware unprofitable when it is really only a unique (and very shitty) situation that caused it to no longer be viable. Sorry to hear about your power company. Hopefully you can find some co-location or sell it to someone in an area where power is more affordable.

It's all good. And yes it is a shitty situation.

I've tried to re-thermal past one of my units, just where one of the groups of four are bad on both boards. The result was no change in temperatures, which leads me  to believe my coolant must be low or the cooling blocks are clogged. How do you add more coolant to the system? Is their a plug to top off the system or do I have to cut and patch a hose to do it?

Thanks!
Posted from Bitcointa.lk - #ZS4Ze8HI51nhwAMK

According to cointerrible you never ever need to because magic.

Its a sealed system so you are going to have to yank off one of the hoses and hope that you can seal it back up when you reattach it.  I have never done this as I have not appeared to require it.  Others have reported leaks so hopefully they can chime in.

My „Early January Batch“ Terraminer IV stopped hashing on one board after 5 months constant hashing. About every 4 weeks I cleaned the grid at the front side of the miner. These cleanings have been the only shutdowns of the miner. I kept the fingers crossed at the reboot, but it did not help. After the last cleaning only one board started hashing again. You could see both boards on the status page, but just one was hashing. At the faulty board pump speed was zero. I thought about just leaving it as it is, but now I have a new hosting possibility at much cheaper power costs... so I decided to try to change the pumps!

First of all... It worked! Both boards are hashing at full speed again (about 1.6 Th/s):

You can not buy the Terraminer water cooling system at a electronic store. They put two pumps on one giant radiator. So I bought two Corsair H60 instead (about 60 Euro each). Each H60 has a pump, a fan and a radiator.

To place these two radiators inside the miner, I removed one of the fans in the back. After removing this fan, there is enough space for two new radiators + fans. The next step is removing the old cooling system. Then I removed the old paste from the 2x 4 ASICs. The new pump came with heat transfer paste on the lower side of the pump. I thought that this is fine and installed the two H60s. This was a bad idea, because there is a frame around the 4 ASIC chips. This frame is slightly higher than the ASICs. Result: The ASICs had no contact to the pump and shutdown immediately because of heat. At least they did not get damaged.

The second try: I removed the H60s again. Then I removed the heat transfer paste from the pumps. Now I put Coollaboratory Liquid Ultra on the ASICs. One package lasts for 8 ASICs. After installing the new water cooling system I looked out for a place for the old fan from the back. It is not a perfect installation, but now it is mounted at the front side.


Beautiful silver ASICs:

http://i60.tinypic.com/33ccj2b.jpg

http://i61.tinypic.com/2epjyw1.jpg


Back side with one of the new radiators:

http://i61.tinypic.com/210d5rr.jpg


The new cooling system installed:

http://i60.tinypic.com/2cpq1jq.jpg

http://i62.tinypic.com/zn4ubq.jpg

http://i58.tinypic.com/1620byp.jpg

http://i61.tinypic.com/wbp8gk.jpg

http://i61.tinypic.com/2a8orq0.jpg


... and finally - the old fan at the front and the miner hashing again:

http://i58.tinypic.com/f5696x.jpg

keeek: thanks for the pics. 

More  generically for other problems ... To aid in diagnosing these problems like pump failures there is a cgminer log file you can access with ssh which will contain error messages, for an example of the previous post error it will be
"Pump bad" (which will contain numbers letting you know which board and pump).

There are many errors that get reported that can help a bit, or perhaps just muddy the waters.

the cgminer log is in /var/log/cgminer.log (symlink to /Angstrom/Cointerra/logs/cgminer.log).  This might help you diagnose what exactly is going on with the unit so you know what corrective action to take.

The web interface may give pointers (such as was pointed out by the prior post) however the log file can give you more information when the web interface fails to provide anything meaningful.

Can you check the cgminer.log file I mentioned in the post above yours?  If you do not understand its output, and feel safe providing it to me I can look at it.  While it should not contain any information relating to passwords it might.  It will likely contain pool information such as username and stratum server.  You may not want to trust some random person on the internet with this information.  It is up to you whether you do or not.

It may be the pump, I know if the pump is bad the unit wont mine.  If it cannot initialize the temperature sensors it will not mine.  There are a few other things that if it cant get good data from it will freak out and refuse to do anything.



Here is what you need to do to get the file:

1. enable SSH access via the web interface (I believe default is enabled, many users disable it when they dont need it)
* goto the miner web page -> configuration -> enable remote SSH password

If you have never changed the root password you should log in immediately and change it.  The default is 'cointerra' and is a well known and thus highly insecure password.  If an attacker is able to log in they can make your miner mine for them instead of you.  If however your miner is not internet connected, is firewalled such that port 22 can only be accessed local/vpn or the CTA boards do not work its not as big of an issue but it still should be changed.


From linux:
scp root@MINER.IP:/var/log/cgminer.log ./cgminer.log


From Windows:
This assumes that you download psscp.exe into the default download directory.  If you know enough to alter where you download to you probably know enough to change the 1 line below that needs to be changed.

Install scp.  I personally like the putty.org line of products, nothing to install just executables to run.  go to putty.org -> downloads -> pscp.exe
open a cmd window (windows-R -> cmd.exe  alternatively start->run->cmd.exe)
cd \users\%username%\Downloads
pscp.exe root@MINER.IP:/var/log/cgminer.log .\cgminer.log


From OSX:
I dunno how to scp using only a mouse but there is probably a utility that will do it, where it is how to make sure its installed, whether it comes with OSX, etc is beyond my knowledge.


Now that you have the log file you can view it.  Any text editor will work, however for windows wordpad is better than notepad as notepad requires a CRLF end of line terminator and wordpad will work with the format of the file being just a LF line terminator.  

Note that there is a logrotate function on the cointerra box that makes some compressed logs of backups.  Check /Angstrom/Cointerra/logs for them if the log file you copied does not have what you need.


In particular you want to look for errors or other messages that will point to what is going on.

As soon as winter hits, there will be a rush to plug these machines back in.....

In the states, with the summer heat it is almost not worth mining.

I am running my on stepping 7..  rock solid at :


Hash Rate

Accepted

Rejected

Errors

Totals 1,425 Gh/s 25,466,475 8,192 5
CTA0 713 Gh/s 12,750,604 7,168 0
CTA1 713 Gh/s 12,715,871 1,024 5


I am using a large box fan blowing air in the front that is allowing extra air to run through keeping it cool.

I tried that with mine using a $40 utilitech 6800 CFM fan from lowes.  That fan was quieter than my box fans and and moves more air.

As for the stepping, you can get finer grained control if you ssh into the box.

echo -n [0-255] > /Angstrom/Cointerra/cta_load

the 9 steps they give you is based on a simple math equation which is linked to the chip clock frequency.  I have also split what I set on some units because I had one board that could do 255 (stepping 9) and one that couldnt.  This required trickery because the way cointerra implemented support for their CTA boards you can only specify 1 number which gets applied to both boards.  I had wanted to tweak cgminer to accept a string of numbers to be applied similar to how you can set video cards separately.  Cointerra did a weak implementation in cgminer for their boards.  Their web interface would also need to be tweaked because you cant set each independently.

If you manually run cgminer as a test via the ssh session you can see the clock speed the asics are running at.  I have observed that some of my units will use different frequencies on the same numbers and I think that is why they did such coarse granularity.  Basically you might be able to get another 25MHz (the stepping the chips seem to support) by doing it by hand vs using the web interface alone.

You also cant override via the cgminer config file because cli arguments override the config file and this is always presented on the cli when cgminer is started.  This means that there will have to be a couple of tweaks to the firmware (php files and maybe 1 init.d file) so that its not a total kluge hack to split the stepping per board.

Hopefully my btcjam loan (https://btcjam.com/listings/19193) funds and I will be able to get some time to deal with some of this instead of chasing the carrot.

Can anyone here tell me what I need to get a serial connection to the usb port on the back of the unit?  Have tried multiple different pcs and cables and not getting anything to recognize it.

Nevermind,  I figured it out.

Since it seems to have been problematic to do could you explain here what it took to get it working?  That way others can benefit from your experience :D

actually, it was not hard to figure out at all it just took a little bit of patience. I was not giving it enough time for the proper drivers to download. Once the drivers were downloaded and installed I got a connection right away.

is it just standard usb serial (FTDI) or is it something custom?  I have never used that port so I dunno anything about it.  

Additionally does that port just let you talk to the raspberry pi or does it pass through to a CTA or what?  I guess I am asking why would I want to use that port? :)  more for the sake of adding to this thread than for personal curiosity since I am not physically local to any of my cointerrible boxes.

It is to communicate with the Beaglebone Black (these units do not have pi's in them,  they use the BBB's) and you should not need to use it except in cases of serious recovery,  which in my case was to unhack the units that had been left exposed to a public IP.

I knew they had blacks, guess I am just talking about my gridseeds a bit too much lately :P 

ok so because i believe in sharing info with others especially with mining hardware makers that take little to no time to help users out after they fork out thousands and thousands of dollars i have decided to post some info here for the community and hope it helps some people out.

brief back story:

i purchased a terraminer from a seller on ebay that ran at only 700gh/s for about $500 and paid in btc. the seller was an awesome dude and got that beast sent out and packed very well. he showed pics of the miner both inside and out and there were no char marks on the boards. the psus were green so no board shorts in this miners case but i m working on boards that have those issues and will post that info as well if i get some extra free time when im finished fixing them.

problem #1 - the first thing to check when only one board is detected is the little black usb dual port hub they used in these machines. Now i have never ever seen this issue in all the years i have been doing pc/laptop component repairs so this kinda shocked me but when i was swapping the usb cables from one board to the next i noticed only one cable was able to talk to the beaglebone at a time. i assumed it was a cable defect even though there were no signs of cable damage. since these miners r hard to move around in even with all the extra room (weird....i know but if you have to hook and unhook the power cables to the boards as many times as i have your fingers get very very sore) i didnt remove the hub which i should have because it would have saved me troubleshooting time. one of the pins on the bottom usb slot was completely burned away. im not sure y this happened since i thought these got power from the psu and not from the usb hub but after taking it out and removing the housing cover from the actual usb board i saw the white electronic smoke marks on the corner of the case in the same place the burned up pin is located. now when i say burned up pin i mean gone....not charred or singed i mean there was a pin there but now there is no pin there at all so swapping the usb hub out was a pain because i had to unhook everything again but once i changed it both boards were detected. on to problem #2!

Problem #2 - the miner was detecting both boards and hashed away at much lower speeds then i had hoped on the second board so i pulled it out and saw the tell tail raised dots on a few mosfets. I immediately said awwwwww shitttttttt cause the codes printed on the top of chips doesnt always lead you to the component you need and cointerra wasnt gonna tell me shizz as usual so i gave the code a quick search and sure enough the one printed wasnt the full product number but luckily there was only one item with this number so the extra part of the code that was left off of the chip doesnt matter because that product family only has one version in it so no worries about getting one that is too low a spec or even too high. luckily digikey (awesome company) has these bad boys in stock and ready to go so i picked up some of them. here is the link:

http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/CSD16342Q5A/296-30314-2-ND/3074512

i had to pull out the bad ass ir station to replace them because these boards just suck the heat out of one spot so the smaller machine wouldnt get to the melting point of the solder no matter how long i waited but after swapping those out the board was running at 700gh/s just like the other one. now ik some are saying "but they should run at 800gh/s" but i paid $500 and resolved the issue and now get over 80% of the power out of both boards so beggers cant be choosers and risking damage from heating and cooling the boards to replace other chips wasnt worth another 100gh/s or risking losing more gh/s by mistakes on my part....im only human and like eveyone else i make mistakes so it wasnt worth it to me. 1.4th/s vs 1.6th/s was more then fine given the price i paid.


Problem #3 - the psu's ran pretty hot. this annoyed me even though they run fine. to resolve this i did a couple of things. first i opened the psu's up to see which was the fan was facing. i found out my psu's sucked air in from the back instead of blowing air out of the back which i would have expected it to do. so to get to step 2 i had to swap the airflow 180 degrees. to do this i remove the fan and pushed the 4 rubber holders through the mounting holes so it could be taken off of the plastic mounting plate (sounds confusing but if you look at it you will see what im talking about). once removed i flipped the fan around making sure to keep the fan cable facing the same way and pulled the rubber mounting legs through the fan holes to lock it back to the plastic mounting plate. the fan sticker has to face the back of the PSU (back being the area the power plug connects to). Once i test to make sure it works i put it back together and made sure they could power the mining boards and that nothing bad happened lol. **NOTE** im not responsible for ignorance. If you cant do this or havent opened things like psu's or computers before then proceed at your own risk and you risk being hurt big time from the caps in PSU's so please be smart.....pay attention to what you touch and dont rush things. On to #4!

Problem #4 - now that the psu fans are in the right direction i thought maybe i want huge airflow blowing into them to keep them ice cold soooooo thats what i did. I have some old delta fans that were installed in podiums to keep air flowing into the area where PC's were installed at a campus. these plug into the wall and run on 110v power so no special wiring needed and they move alot of air through their blades and dont sound like delta computer fans that resemble the noises plains make when taking off. they arent silent but they dont compare to the fans in the front and back of the miner already so ya it wont add any noise to your setup. i put the fan on the side after drilling a few holes because the fan is a little smaller so the original holes dont line up....they come close but if i had another inch i could have used them but i didnt so i just drilled some fresh ones no problem. the fan blows air into the hole which is why the psu fans needed to be set to blow air out of them and now into the same place the delta fan is blowing air because the delta fan will win killing the internal psu fan because of the pressure created. some may not care about psu temp but when i took the psus out after running an hour long test they were hot to the touch for a long time after they were in use which will slowly kill the machine. a cold machine is a happy machine. even though i paid little for the miner i didnt want to run it until it died.....i work on olectronics for a living....ik if you treat things right and take care of your stuff they will pay you back in the long run. and its always better to prevent issues then it is to scramble around waiting for stuff to come to resolve the problems your having.

problem #5 - the power cables. this goes without saying im sure but what the fuck was cointerra thinking when they decided to use utility power cables to power these miners?? they put extreme amounts of preasure on the terminal ports on bother the psu and the miner boards. i had one board that had the connector ripped off. sure they may be sturdy when mounted on the boards but the power cables have no give in them what so ever and will not sit perfectly and after tearing my fingers up trying to get them on and off the boards to test i finally said "fuck it" and went back to my car audio installation days and grabbed some 0 guage amp wire. this shit can handle 250a or 3500w per cable and thats for the entire length of a car which isnt whats needed here so if it can provide stable power to 2x jl audio 1000.1 amps which are powering 2x jl audio w7 13.5 subs then this can surely handle some wimpy miners and sure nuff (ik its enough) i was right lol. not only can it handle more then the entire miner puts out but its extremely soft and flexible unlike the cointerra psu cables. they will need to be zippe tied to keep them out of the way of the fan or laid down along the bottom of the case or whatever you choose to do but no matter the choice one thing is clear....im glad i "voided" my warranty by making these changes. I no longer have to wonder if my psus are gonna die from running hot or if i will rip off a post from the board. if they die i know it wasnt from heat or non flex power cables!


sorry guys for makin u read my essay. i try being as detailed as i can when explaining things like this and i hope it all makes sense but most of all i hope it helps someone out with a miner they are having issues with. just know if both of your hashing bards have the lights cycling through the bottom of the board it could be something as simple as a burned up usb hub port and most wouldnt think to look there....i know i sure as hell didnt but im glad i did even though i feel silly for not doin it before lol.

p.s. DO NOT FLIP THE POWER CABLES ON YOUR MINER UNLESS YOU FLIP THEM ON THE PSU TO MATCH WHAT YOU DID ON THE BOARDS. POS SHOULD NEVER BE HOOKED TO NEG. THATS JUST COMMON SENSE. EVEN IF YOUR DESPERATE DONT DO IT GUYS! I CANT BELIEVE SOME HAVE TRIED BUT I HOPE THIS STOPS OTHERS FROM ATTEMPTING IT. NOT EVERY MINER USES THE RED CABLE FOR POS AND BLACK FOR NEG BUT IF YOU PAY ATTENTION YOU WILL SEE EVEN THOUGH THE CABLE COLORS ARE NOT THE SAME THE WAY THEY ARE HOOKED UP IS. FOR EXAMPLE IF YOU HAVE A MINER THAT HAS THE RED CABLE ON THE NEG TERMINAL LOOK AT THE PSU....YOU WILL SEE THE RED CABLE IS ON THE NEG TERMINAL OF THE PSU TOO. THE COLOR DOESNT MEAN IS POS OR NEG....ITS HOW ITS HOOKED UP TO THE SYSTEM. I COULD HAVE USED YELLOW FOR NEG IS I WANTED TO. IT WOULD CONFUSE OTHERS AND I AGREE THEY SHOULD HAVE FOLLOWED THE TYPICAL COLOR USAGE PATTERNS THAT ARE A STANDARD THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE WORLD PRETTY MUCH BUT THEY DIDNT. MAYBE THEY DID IT TO CATCH MINERS OFF GUARD SO THEY FRY THEIR BOARDS CAUSING MANY TO PAY $350 JUST TO HAVE THEIR BOARDS LOOKED AT....I DONT KNOW....WHAT I DO KNOW IS IF YOU SWITCH THE POLARITY YOUR GONNA SCREW YOUR SHIT UP AND PEOPLE TELLING YOU OTHERWISE SHOULD BE IGNORED.....EVEN IF THEY ARE RIGHT IGNORE THEM.....IK I WOULD NEVER TEST THEIR THEORIES OUT EVEN IF IT WAS PROVEN TO BE TRUE BECAUSE IT GOES AGAINST EVERYTHING I HAVE LEARNED OVER THE YEARS ABOUT THIS SHIZZ. ITS OK TO BE A JEW AND NOT SPEND MONEY TO HAVE SOMETHING LOOKED AT BUT THERES NO EXCUSE FOR STUPIDITY SO YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Check this one... pretty obvious now why I have a CTA not showing up.  Bad thing is that even if I have replace the card with another ( and a card I can confirmed that it was working) , CTA still doesn't show up.  There is no voltage what so ever that pass thru.  If I swap card and PSU , same thing.

At least I didn't have a fire started...!

http://s12.postimg.org/xdfu26119/photo.jpg

First let me say thank you for the information you provided.  Now all we need is someone who wants to be helpful and go through this thread and condense it all into a wiki or pdf thing or whatever so that you dont have to search the entire thread :D


Yes it is stupid that they got the "RA" model instead of the "NA" model.  I believe it is entirely the only reason for that heat shield on the back as well.  The part number the R/N means reverse or normal airflow.  This is kinda important for  those replacing to know, I have seen a lot on ebay claiming to be cointerra compatible and "N".  If you run 1 "N" and one "R" the heat will circulate through the two PSUs and they will get much hotter than normal. 


I was curious in a previous post if this would actually help and if that was the only thing that needed to be done.  Was the screw a T5?  I didnt have anything small enough so I never fully took the cover off and could not get to the fan without doing that. 

holy cow!  Thanks for the more detailed pic.  I had thought it was power-one part number SNP-OP-BOARD-01 but this confirms that it is not.  They are more similar to YTM.U0M00.0 which is for the 3kw slightly larger psu.  I cant find one for these although it looks from the silkscreening that what is actually in the unit is custom for some reason.  The pinout of the PSU is public so it should not be hard to reverse the board and clone them if you cant buy them.

The real question is why did the capacitor pop.  Was it a spike on the AC side or something else.  It also appears that there is damage by the black/white wire (I2C??) like something got too hot there as well.

I have put a better picture with the two version of the board that I have (not from the same unit).  Also note that the J2 power was still working on the burned card.  There are no damage by the black/white cables.

Now I have to take a closer look at the CTA board since I get nothing from there... pretty sure its dead.

http://s1.postimg.org/sr4vdhw67/photo.jpg

well do the lights on the card come on and cycle through the green leds before starting all over again?? if so check the usb hub cointerra used in the machine and read my post above yours. its ballz long but it can help prevent the melting with the psu boards.

as for the psu screw size….its the same size as the ones on the cover they put on the side of the miners case. you just have to remove the screws and pop the tabs on the sides to lift the cover off. when they are facing the right way and have the fan mounted to that hole on the side of the case then the back cover that goes over the psu's can be removed because they will be blowing air instead of sucking in air so the air coming from the radiators wont effect the cooling performance which i assume is y they put that cover over them to begin with.

No light what so ever on the main card. Its all in piece but Ill take picture next week and post it.  I have remove the faulty board to inspect it but I see nothing special.  I have check all the connectors including the USB and everything seems to work correctly.  More testing to do...

I have a couple of units like that.

damn…..ne burned up components or char marks?? when hooked to a psu does the light turn amber and when unhooked from a psu the light stays green?? i keep popping into this thread so i will keep an eye out for replies. i just got one board workin this morning with an ultrasonic cleaner and a tank of CLR (yes the calcium lime rust cleaner) and distilled water cause the dummy thought alchohol was the best way to clean the beard which it isnt lol. so many do that and im not sure why but their loss is my gain i suppose.

PSU got 1 green and 1 orange.  I swap PSU and same thing.

The board itself is like new, no dust whatsoever.

After the inspection of the main board, no sign of anything that have burned. 

Like I said before, the board itself doesn't light up.  Neither the FAN that are on that board.

Has anyone successfully got a RasPi to work with the TerraMiner IV boards?  If not has anyone tried?

If you look at the data sheet for the psu page 10 http://www.datasheetlib.com/datasheet/784801/pfe1100-12-054ra_power-one.html?page=10#datasheet (http://www.datasheetlib.com/datasheet/784801/pfe1100-12-054ra_power-one.html?page=10#datasheet)

The 2 LEDs are a single color green indicating AC on/off and a 2nd LED that is bi-color for the DC side.  There are 2 colors "green" and "yellow" (which presumably is the orangy color people report since its just a bi-color LED and not something more).  A solid yellow is the result of any of these conditions:

Over temperature shutdown
Output over voltage shutdown (V₁ or V_SB)
Output over current shutdown (V₁ or V_SB)
Fan error (>15%)

Since swapping the PSUs causes the same error that would generally rule out over temp or fan error (psu fan not chassis fans).  This means that it is trying to output too much voltage or current (implying a short somewhere).  This would have to be on the DC side as its the only LED that is bi-color.  Which means its either on that power adapter that the psu connects to or its on the board itself.  Given that the board has physical damage that indicates that is the only problem. 

Power-one just got bought out, I have no idea if these PSUs are going to be harder to get support on in the future or not.

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i have returned to offer some help to peeps or at the very least provide some more interesting info i found out.

1. like the post above states there are 3 colors used. red, green, and an amberish color. The red usually shows up on the far far end of the string of lights and the others are greed and or amber. I got a coupleof boards in the other day that i paid $53 each plus shipping and one had green lights with a red led at the far end and the other had all amber lights with a red one at the very end. Im assuming this was one from a batch that substitued the green lights for amber ones since it makes no difference what the color is and it doesnt seem to indicate any issues. Now some may notice lights are off in the row of diodes and that means thats a core that isnt being contacted or is shut off to protect the core from damaging voltages. i have no clue which belongs to which and dont care to be honest.

2. these dont need the waterblocks on them to test the power. sounds stupid i know but if you connect the power to them with nothing else connected the lights will come on but the dies on each core will stay ice cold. some may be wondering whats up but after i played around  and pulled a dummy move of not connecting the pump cables up i realized the lights dont cycle when the 3 pin fan connector has nothing attached and or the fan runs slower then a certain rpm. If you look in the status page of a terra miner it says the fan speed of the fans and the fan speed of the pumps which the pumps dont have fans but they do communicate like they do so if a pump is no longer able to hit lets say 2000 rpm but the miner is set (cant change this normally unless modding cointerras firmware) to only kick in the core when the 3 pin fan connector detects 2000+rpm then the board shuts off that core and will not start it even if the second pump is running fine and circulating the liquid over both cores. soooooo with that being said this also means something else can be used to cool the cores instead of expensive water cooling kits and that something is air :). if you get a higher end heatsink sure it will be louder but you will no longer have to worry about leaks and or a pump dying. if a fan dies the core shuts off and you replace that fan with an equal or better cfm fan that is controlled using 3 wires and your all set. itried out a coolermaster heatsink with 3 moddel dell delta fans  with 2 pwm controllers specifically made for 4 pin fans and it was able to cool the cores down when using diamond thermal paste. i got the temps to drop to about 70 degrees in a room that was pretty warm because i closed the door to work on everything in peace.

3. if your psu is going orange on you get a standard pc psu and remove the board from the miner. cut the wires or in my case make a new pci-e connector with just bare wires on the other end and hook them to the terminals. it would be best to get 3 wires of pos and 3 of ground hooked to ring terminals but if you dont have a home depot or whatever near you you can wing it but ring terminals are the best way to go and they will securely lock the wires down. anyway after having 3 of each hooked to the correct power posts and having the board sitting on a piece of cardhoard or in my case supported on some m3 spacer posts power on the psu. Once you do one of the mosfets will probably burn up. i have had at least one burn up on every board i connected to external power. its never the same one and i believe its because thats the weak mosfet causing the spu to sense a problem and shut off to pretect the board. I repeat one mosfet has burned up on every single board i have repaired. once the mosfet is replaced doing the same thing again doesnt cause it to burn up. this tells me the psu sensed a problem and shut off before the mosfet blew which in this case you want it to blow so it puts a mark on the top of it allowing you to find the damaged mosfet. with the psu turning off before it blows it allows it to stay in tact making it hard to find the damn thing. also once blown it wont allow the psu of the miner to communicate with that die so it wont sense a power problem and usually allows the miner to start up without however many mosfets that blew. it sounds bad but really its fine. just provide power and wait a couple of seconds and check the top and bottom for the blown fet. cant get anymore simple then that really. so a standard pc psu has 2 roles here….one the power pushed into the board lets you find the bad mosfet and 2 the psu provides the unmetered power to the board and wont shut down like the main miners psus would to prevent what your trying to have happen. idk about u but i rather have 1 dead die and 7 working dies to mine with then 8 dead dies and a board that shuts off to protect the fet that is gonna blow anyway. that and u can replace the fet allowing the board to potentially hash at full tilt again :).


i will keep posting more info when i run into those issues. u can take it or leave it but i will still post it lol. Also i will offer my help replacing stuff on the boards if people want. I will only need the board nothing else and if i replace the mosfets its $100 flat for the first one and $10 per additional fet because it takes a long time to heat these boards up to temps that allow the solder under it to melt so the $100 covers the first fet and the $10 each covers each additional one. if i cant make any progress with the board then u only pay shipping to and from me. so $100 plus shipping to and from me or shipping to and from me. Or you can run it the way it is if you want lol idc just throwin that option out there. Or you can sell me ur miners or parts for them too like psus and psu boards and water cooling kits and so on.

finally since everyone i see on this forum posts donation addied i thought y the hell not?? if my info helped you in ne way and ur feeling greatful lmk by sending some btc my way :) its wayyyy cheaper then cointerras help thats for sure!!!

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I am considering selling my Terraminer.  I bought it 6 months ago and while it worked OK for 4 months, I had a lighting strike in July that took out the Beagleboard.  I have it hooked up to a PC with the USB cables, but my hashing rate ranges from 300G - 1,100G.  Mainly it hovers around 500G - 600G.  I am going to slowly phase out of mining and want to know if anyone here has interest in purchasing my Terraminer.  Feel free to send me a private message if you are with a reasonable offer.

I can post pictures for anyone interested.

Thanks,

John

Anyone load the new firmware? https://cointerra.com/firmware-downloads/ (https://cointerra.com/firmware-downloads/)
Posted from Bitcointa.lk - #4FzAEPuis6i4w19q

If you get a lot of usb disconnects (CTAx rises over time, CTA2, CTA3, ...) then this is a worse firmware than 0.6.48.  On a stable box this one is slightly better than 0.7.22, 0.7.46 or 0.7.53 in terms of stability and hashrate.  I find it better than 0.7.6 but only marginally on a stable box. 

I will be retargeting my patches that might get slightly more performance out of a box by allowing you to split CTAs in terms of power stepping (cta_load) and power supply loading (ps_load).  I will do it for this version of cgminer and the associated tweaks to the firmware to not override the changes.

I would be curious if anyone has gotten a RasPi B+ to work as a replacement for the BBB?

Also. 

I haven't read all of this so maybe my question is answered above.

1. Can you just plug into the USB connectors on the two boards and plug those into a computer (RasPi) running CGMiner (of some flavor), and have it work?  Or maybe a PC?

2. I have blinky lights on the BBB. Does the BBB actually work, but need to be reflashed?

3. I have blinky lights on the two boards, one board has one light that doesn't light as it cycles through them.  Is that due to a bad chip? 

4. I have NO CTA light at all.  Nothing lights up on the front panel.  Yet I have lights on the board?

Thanks in advance, I ordered a BBB off eBay that is flashed already with the latest know version from Cointerra, was taken out of a working unit, so they say.  But I don't understand why I don't get a CTA light up front?

I will check the USB hub that is inside the unit as well. 

Thanks

yes providing its cgminer with the CTA support.


dunno, the boards  have a chaser led pattern that should be on.  Red only is not good.  orange in series from one side to the other is good.  The CTA light on the front board is from a header on the board.  The board directly controls it and afaik it will only light up when its actually mining - meaning work is fetched and sent to it.  If there is a problem with the beaglebone then that would prevent it from working.

I would start at the first item, the beaglebone.  make sure that is working.  If you can get to the webpage you can ssh in and look for logs in /var/log and see what is going on.  Once you have ruled that out then check all the wires and make sure they are securely connected. 

One board has all lights in chase.  The other board has all but one light in chase.

I am about to pull all the heat sinks and put new thermal paste on them...  Hopefully that will help as well.

One miner has half it's cores running.  The other has more but is hashing slower.  I think it's rebooting due to heat, so it never gets up to speed.  More later.

The only issue I am worried about at the moment is that one chaser light isn't lighting so it's either a bad light or a problem... :-)


PS Got a new flashed BBB off eBay and can now connect no problem.  Hashes up to 1.6Th at times... :-)  Still need to solve the top.

Been nursing my TMIV's since April.  Thankfully, they're still going strong more or less.

My cooling system went bad on one board a couple of weeks back.  So I ordered two of the Corsair H60s as per a previous post in this thread.  Now I'm back in business.  It was a bit tricky getting the radiators in the box, but the method of sandwiching the fan between the two radiators seems to work just fine.

Thought I'd post as such.

Turned off my February bach back in July.
Anyone want to buy two units PM me with a serious offer.

Can someone explain to me how to use the cointool commands?  I am obviously doing something wrong.

I will ssh into the box cd to opt directory and I try to use cointool the following different ways and responses:

#
# cd opt
# ls
GSA_0.4.5.dfu       cointool            dfu-util            upgrade_GSA.sh
cgminer             cointool-info       do_upgrade.sh       usb_reset
cgminer.conf        crontab.root        restart_cgminer.sh  watch_powerbutton
#

# ./cointool
usb_claim_interface: Device or resource busy
 

Thanks for the help!

Need a replacement pump - anyone parting out a Terraminer?  Will pay in Bitcoin if you like.
Will consider buying an entire machine for parts if the price is right...and of course it has at least one good pump :)

got my hands on a terraminer iv with one bad board. 

is there a way to rewire the miner so that the good board will run with only one power supply? 

it seems it wont fully boot unless both plugs are connected.

Open it up and disconnect the USB cable going to the bad board.

i figured it was that was easy.  but wanted to ask before fiddling.  also the controller power was plugged into ps 2.   

much appreciated, can't believe you read so many posts :-)

thanks for your support!

A little help please. Like a genuine dunce, I removed the power cables when building a miner from spare parts and forgot the positioning of the cable leads on both the mining boards and the PSU breakout boards. Now I don't remember where either power cable end goes relative to the other end.

How does one determine which screw is pos and which neg on the mining board and the PSU breakout board.

Many thanks in advance.

try this,
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=641998.20

Do you mean the pics of the Terraminer interior? The problem is, I have seen different TMs with the pos lead (black wire) in BOTH positions, so a picture alone without data as to where it goes and why is a possible accident, unless you can hook the leads up to either post. Thanks for the input though.

I just bought several of these Terraminer units, What kind of software do you use to get a good overview of 10+ units?

Switching between each ip address is a pain.

Thanks!

p.s. DO NOT FLIP THE POWER CABLES ON YOUR MINER UNLESS YOU FLIP THEM ON THE PSU TO MATCH WHAT YOU DID ON THE BOARDS. POS SHOULD NEVER BE HOOKED TO NEG. THATS JUST COMMON SENSE. EVEN IF YOUR ...[/quote]

How does one determine which lead is pos and which neg on the mining board and the PSU breakout board.
Do you mean the pics of the Terraminer interior? The problem is, I have seen different TMs with the pos lead (black wire) in BOTH positions, so a picture alone without data as to where it goes and why is a possible accident, unless you can hook the leads up to either post. Thanks for the input though.
[/quote]


On mine, top-off and viewed down into the case, the blacks are the top-most of each pair on the power supply mounts. I checked the lower set to be sure, they are set up the same, so Black-Red / Black-Red from top to bottom. Which is not a definitive answer, of course, but that is what I see.  So, on mine, Blacks ( topmost of each pair on PS ) are attached to the posts closest to the centers of each board, Reds are attached to the posts closest to the board-edges.

I've just been keeping ssh sessions open on each system.
At first I was going to go further into it, but ended up just relying on this as it works fine and gives the same info
you get from the web page.
Do something like this ( your mileage may vary, work it through) to get a 15 sec snapshot:

while :;do php-cgi /var/www/status_frame.php|sed -e 's/<tr>/\n/g;s/<t[h,d]>/  /g;s/<[^>]*>//g;s/^.*pted //;s/y\t*/y\n/'|grep .|tail -n 16;sleep 15;echo;rm /tmp/sess_*;done


So at a glance you can see what's up with each one. Be sure to 'rm' the session file which shows up in /tmp.
I also set up a cron job to see if the things get stuck, reboot them.

Depending on your number of screens, ten might be a lot, maybe you'd want to curl/wget and collate like that instead.
Also, seems like there was a guy who made some sort of software for these, but I haven't looked into it. I saw it on one of these
forums long ago.

Thanks, I just have a couple windows of browsers open with multiple tabs.  It would be nice to have an overview to see a quick snapshot.

If anyone remembers the software, please let me know.

So, I tore apart one of my pumps today since it apparently wasn't working and here is what I saw:

https://i.imgur.com/nWyvomq.png

https://i.imgur.com/dyuP4IS.png

I have the dreaded D45 red light and I cannot seem to solve the issue.  I know its not the the thermal paste - successfully changed that on other TMs with no issue.  I used a mechanics stethoscope to listen to the pump and it seems normal, shows a normal RPM on the STATS page but for whatever reason (according to the diags) the cores overheat and immediately shuts down one board.  Tried swapping the connectors, pulling the J11 and a few other things but no luck.  

For what its worth, I haven't taken apart the other side of the pump since I didn't have fluid to replace what I would have lost had I done so.  Does anyone know what type of fluid it uses?  Perhaps I'll try that and take some pictures next.

I see others have had this issue but nothing I seen discussed thus far seems to solve my issue.

I reached out to this forum to purchase a used pump/radiator setup - waiting to hear back.  If not then maybe I'll try to the other suggested setup with the dual radiators.

Any new advice out there?

Hi,

I have had 3 radiator  hoses spring leaks over the past few months so this is what I did- and I think it keeps things even cooler than the stock coolers.

To replace a leaky hose, remove the entire radiator / cooling block apparatus. Place it on it's back with hoses facing upward and cut off the leaky hose (you will loose no more than 10 ml of coolant, the precise amount is not important). Go to your local hardware store or Home Depot and buy a length of polyethylene tubing. Its the same hose that is used on your refrigerator ice makers or if you can find what Cointerra used that's ok too but the polyethylene is much, much stronger so it's never going to leak again. Cut the correct length and replace the hose but...

Connect the 1st end to the radiator and before you connect the other end to the block, fill the radiator up with as much "automotive anti-freeze". If you want to dilute the antifreeze with a little distilled water you can but its not necessary as most all antifreeze comes already diluted. After the radiator is filled up with as much antifreeze as will fit, attach the other end of the hose and replace the radiator back in the miner. A few air bubbles are unavoidable and does not affect the miner operation that I can see. My refitted automotive antifreeze miners all run on power level 9 with temps running in the mid to high 50s deg C.

Hope that helps.

Can anyone help me here?
Need an cointerra beagle bone image!
So it was lost after the update 09/04/14 Firmware 0.7.56 MD5: 2ACCF7DE2603490128A2A3A8266CEECD by standard method in the interface of device through software updates.   :-\
Has anyone encountered a similar problem?
Help please!

Curious if anyone is good at fixing these Terraminer IV boards?

I have several that have a short, I do not have the bench power to test.

several that have usb connection problems.  I can connect direct from pc to usb with cgminer and have usb errors.  It will mine for a few seconds say usb error, disconnect, reconnect, hash for a minute or two, usb error - repeat

3 or 4 boards that look like the lights are working correctly but will not show up in the usb connection with beagle or direct PC with cgminer.

any ideas?  there is probably 6-7 TH if I can get it working.  I would pay some btc for detail instructions.

Thanks

Same problem... my Cointerra stop to works just today! When it get powered it light on RED CTRL1 led for 2 seconds and nothing more...

Cointerra sell the BBB unit with preloaded firmware for 70$, but they should provid a SD card image to restore the BBB like KnC!!!

Can anyone extract data from BBB and post it?

Tks you all for any help!

Hello all, has anyone tried to lease their rig on west hash or miningrigrentals?  I will normally get around 1600 Gh/s mining on my own but I can't seem to lease it to a miner for more than 1 Th/s consistently on these sites.  Any idea why?

hey guys i picked up a terraminer 4 that i didnt know was damaged. it has a red light on one of the boards. and it seems that 3 of the cores are underperforming or not working at all

Asic0Core0           120:fffefffefffefffefffefffefffefffe
Asic0Core1           74:fffeff7efffebffe00002000ad046d1e
Asic0Core2           120:fffefffefffefffefffefffefffefffe
Asic0Core3           120:fffefffefffefffefffefffefffefffe
Asic1Core0        104:fffefffefffe00007ffefffefffefffe
Asic1Core1           0:00000000000000000000000000000000
Asic1Core2    120:fffefffefffefffefffefffefffefffe
Asic1Core3    120:fffefffefffefffefffefffefffefffe

just wondering if there is anything i can do to fix this?

infernoman -

You'll probably need to be more specific - although I'm no expert.

On your status page:
are your core temps < 100 on average ?
are all the pumps running roughly 3000 rpm?
are all the fans running 3500-4500 rpm?

looking through the front grill do you see the 'knight rider" lights - sequenced yellow lights?
are any red?

if its not under warranty - pop the top - which light is red?

any sign of leaks in the cooling system?

any lights looking through the side power supply screens - should be none

next onto the advanced page then the diagnostic report.....

Most probably you get a long latency connection from your rig to MRR's server... sometimes happen! Try to set failover strategy in TerraMiner and set first pool priority as MRR's and a second pool of your choice that it works well for you. If you get some share on the second pool means that MRR's server it's not fast enough to provide work to your rig.

For who want to help us, here is an useful briefing of how to extract the eMMC image for BeagleBone Black controller of TerraMiner IV unit.

http://elinux.org/BeagleBone_Black_Extracting_eMMC_contents


Thanks to all for any help! ;-)

here is the full report after re thermal pasting. one of the boards has one light that doesnt light up at all. and one that is red. in that series of led's d42 does not light and d45 is red on the board beside the power supplies.
http://pastebin.com/PnuYUhLz

currently the power stepping is at 7. any higher and both the board throttles back down to this freq. same as before. when i took the cooler off. they were so coated in thermal paste it was ridiculous. the moats for the asic dies were filled in even. all i did was replace with a dab on the top of each die. like a normal CPU. so if im wrong here and the moats need to be filled to let me know. the only thing i didnt do was take off the copper block from the pump. since i noticed a few people have done that with better results.

Also i noticed on the boards there are 2, 2 pin connectors. labeled jp1 and jp2. the board furthest away from the power supply has a connector on jp1 connecting the 2 pins together. but the rest of the boards do not

EDIT: ive tried every firmware possible. now the board with the previous red light. lights all of the leds up clicks and shuts down. the board that is working. has a red light on all firmwares below 0.76. so now i've got half a miner. that i cant fully power step

miningrigrentals may have the same issue as nicehash.  I have the same issue.  Nicehash says to setup a stratum proxy server with exranounce subscription.  I am working on setting one up so I can help on that.

inferno:  regarding heat issues, even after adding new thermal paste, the glycol will drop out when they are hot and deposit on those copper plates.  You will have to take it apart and clean it.  and refill it making sure no air is in there.  There is barely any fluid volume in there so even a small air bubble may cause a problem.

yepp its pretty much going to end up in the trash lol. that was a big waste of money. only one board is currently working. the other one wont even boot up. if you have to go through this much bullshit ? its not even worth it. if anyone has any ideas why one of the boards wont boot let me know. otherwise it'll be stripped and sold.


the board was working.after the thermal paste but still had the red light and the miner shut down unexpectadly. when i tried to reboot the board would not start again. and i had to unplug the usb from it

EDIT: the board that works. works amazing at low temperatures. i wonder how long it will last outside.

Hey Folks,

Just "upgraded" to a broken terraminer. One board not working (PSU side). Price was good, wanted to be running some "network support" hash, BFLs are past it. Speed read the entire thread, seeing a bunch of different possible problems. Previous owner tried swapping PSUs over, bad side PSU ran good board, but that's all he tried. He thought it might be a dead pump. No crispy critters turned up by eyeball so far.

So, is there a good order to test/try things in?

Also not 100% sure at the moment about whether I have the power in one location to run both sides at once. Anyone decased a board completely, run independent? Saw the post about running on a laptop, that's half of it I guess.

Another thing is that I was wondering if anyone had posted up approx hash/power/efficiency for each of the power steps available. Thinking I may have an easier time with power hookup if I can run one side at 900W ish, the other full bore.

Haven't tried powering it up yet, need to get organised, just wondering if I should have it apart for inspection first or, try powering both to see what happens.

Thanks for the hints, PS total Cointerra n00b, didn't really follow developments in past.

well from what i've learned over the past few days if you open up the case of the miner you will see a knight rider type of light on the board. if not then there could be a problem. if you only want to run one side at a time make sure everything is plugged into that same power supply. i had to move my power for the beagle bone to the opposite power supply and unplug the dead boards usb cable to get mine hashing

Wrote them in support.
Support this pathetic parody of specialists. But sent the link.
The first time it was a link to the damaged file with the image file.
The second time the file is normal, but apparently the image itself is damaged.  https://yadi.sk/d/y-Q05244dcTeP
I tried to install the firmware image, but I did not succeed. http://youtu.be/P9czTTtjHB0    http://youtu.be/g3V-LgOqTmo
At the same time updates from the BeagleBoneBlack installed without any problems at all.

Look. Maybe someone can.
Describe the process then.

USB Errors.

Does anyone have any guesses to try to fix?  screenshot is with a direct connect to the board USB.

it happens with beaglebone or usb direct.

it continually connects then disconnects.  Any ideas to try?  I have 4 or 5 boards like this so it would be nice to find a fix.  Thanks

https://i.imgur.com/bKvqOQb.png?1

Here's what I know about the D45 light:

Obviously if it is on and red that's bad!

I had a red D45 on one board that was fixed by simply re-applying the thermal paste - this can be verified by downloading the diagnostic file and following the logic - i.e. everything boots, then slowly overheats and shuts down - as opposed to not starting at all.  So, that was my first instance with the red D45

Furthermore, I know if a pump is not working or not connected it will go straight to the red D45 without even trying to start beyond the first flicker of all the lights D37-D44.

What I did (I'm not smart with programming) is download NotePad++ and used it to search and highlight words like "overtemp", "fail", and "error" in the diagnostic file to see where things are going wrong.  Although there is a lot I do not understand - I simply compared it to one of my normal machines.

By the way, SW1 (push button) on the back of the board is apparently the reset switch - used it to diagnose things while it was running - simply restarts the respective board.

My assumption is: D37-D44 are lights representing each of the 8 cores and by sequencing yellow it means everything is normal.  If it is skipped in the sequence it must be bad or not responding.  D45 is some sort of error indicator whereas OFF is normal and Red is bad but does not necessarily always mean the same thing????

Would be nice if between all of us here we could put together a guide of known issues/fixes and a decoding key for the diagnostic report in a public document that doesn't require reading this entire thread - anyone know how to do this?

More to follow as I troubleshoot...

Thanks.  maybe someone just starts a troubleshooting guide in excel & save it to google docs.  If no one else starts it I will give it a try.

Regarding my USB errors all the lights are good (no red or out) and do the night rider sequence.

Hello all,

First running
Terraminer IV
CGMINER 4.3.5
FIRMWARE 0.7.56
Some cores are off. Trying to troubleshoot, board issue, power issue, end of the world as we know it issue, etc....

Is there anyplace that has the definitions for the fields in the STATS output in CGMINER 4.3.5?
ADVANCED-->STATS

Example fields;
 CorePerfMode0
 CoreFmatch0

I've looked and I can't find any manual or instruction. I'm looking for field definitions and system relations. I can guess on the obvious. But how they relate or specific conditions I may be unaware of.


Thanks

In some linux systems when you ssh in, you can type "screen" to start a process running, then Ctrl A then D to keep the process running and end your ssh connection.  (if you end your ssh connection you will end the process)

The screen command does not work with the beagle bone linux software.  does anyone know how to do this type command for the linux on the beagle bone?

In standard linux, if you put an ampersand after the command it unties it from the console you ran it from, don't know it if unties it from the user though, i.e. log out and process dies.

Yes, it when I log out it kills the process. 

The problem I am having is some of my beaglebones will not start cgminer (not from reboot or web gui confi interface).  the crond is running and it tries to restart.  so I ssh in, go to opt directory and manually start ./cgminer.  I have to kill crond or it will kill my instance of cgminer.  when I close the connection it stops cgminer.

So, is there an unresponsive cgminer process running? If so, you could try getting that process to restart with something like

sudo kill -HUP processIDofCgminer

edit: might be -SIGHUP or just -1 on some versions.

no, there is no unresponsive cgminer, when I check with the top command, there is no cgminer running. 

I will even click on the restart cgminer in the web gui and it still does not show up.  So I manually start the ./cgminer.  If I do not kill the crond listed in top, the manual ./cgminer instance I start will get killed.

On a fresh reboot, what is in /tmp/cgminer.log ?

Thank You, there was a problem with my pool setup.  strange as exactly same thing in other terraminers but they work.  I am using stratum proxy server and had everything pointed to stratum+tcp://x.x.x.x:yyyy and changed to http://x.x.x.x:yyyy.

now they work.  Thank you.

Hello,

Don't see this in any of my beaglebones, when I do the top command in one I find the below, does anyone know what this is?

180     1 root     S     1136   0%   0% udhcpc -R -b -x hostname TerraMiner -t 20 -p /var/run/udhcpc.eth0.pid -i eth0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udhcpc

thanks.  i guess i shoyld give google a try.

does anyone know of another way to connect cgminer to the terraminer boards?  serial?

several boards of mine have usb connection issues.

I know this is a little old but I wanted to put my 2 cents in for future help. I also had a red D45 and a core not working. I was able to remove the pump and smack it with a screwdriver a few times and get the pump working again. If that pump does not work, the core will be shut off and that light will be red. Not very scientific, or high tech, but a pump is a pump. When they dont move, smack em!

Hi
Now I have the same problem. I Bought 2 TMIV. Once is good always
Another worked for one week then it started with troubles, Cointerra support said me tO upgrade 8.15 firmware, that killed machine for one month then I minned through PC with USB, but Cointerra Support help me and after one month BBB worked again, but boards are with troubles, the CTA0 is working without D40 light 630 gh, another CTA1 is only mining 280 GH and D37 to D41 are working (4 Yellow Lights turned on), now I have 8.15 FIRMWARE WORKING but machine still with the same troubles. I touch Pumps; in CTA 0 are working 2 pumps but I felt only 3 hoses are working when I touched they. CTA1 is working only One hose from the one pump which is working. Of course Like you said D45 show that troubles. But when I turn on machine, I can see all lights are turning on for once time.
- I would like to know which is the problem. Pumps, Power sources, boards, cables?

can you post 8.15 firmware.  Obviously can not download it from their website.

I am guessing you have one bad pump.  Just unplug one at a time and boot.  If everything looks the same with the pump unplugged then that is your guy.  If nothing comes on then you have the good pump unplugged.

Just curious how many out there are still running terraminers or all they all shut off?

Mine are all powered down since the price went below $300. Looking for $400 before I power up again.

I can't post but I could send you, send me a PM
I believe it is not a pump, because a lot of troubles in 2 cta's, i don't know what can i do with that

Good morning all,

Long time reader but I garnered some benefit from reading this thread so I'm going to share my experiences and fixes with you. I have suffered nearly every failure/issue mentioned in this thread over the last 2 weeks and managed to repair about 90% of the issues so far.

The story beigins with me purchasing a used terraminer IV on ebay. I paid 250 plus shipping and was promised the unit was in good working order. It was not. I requested a replacement/refund and he sent me another even more broken terraminer. Now I have 2 that I am in the midst of bringing back to life.

I plugged the first miner in and set it up. First thing I notice is the temps are outrageously high on ALL chips. Even when just idling they would overheat and "shut down". Upon reading here I learn that the heat transfer paste is an issue so I pull the water blocks off to reapply. Turns out the previous owner had already applied LiquidPro but it looked like a pretty trashy application as there were gobs of the original thermal paste left all over the place. I thoroughly cleaned the chips and applied a quality thermal paste that I use when building PC's. I may use liquid pro in the future but bear with me on this. These units shipped with thermal paste similar to what I used and at least some operate properly with just that. I should at least be able to idle the machine without overheating my chips right? Right! So I reapply and put everything back together. This greatly improved the issue on one of the boards but not the other. This basically tells me that my theory was correct about the paste. Properly applied thermal paste is adequate as long as there is not some other issue affecting the cooling system.

Now it was time to dig a little deeper. I confirmed both my pumps were running but they were making some noise. Water pumps should make a quiet hum like the sound of a motor running or virtually no sound at all. You may be able to hear water moving through it you listen carefully. Mine were making a sort of groaning/creaking sound. Pump RPM was OK so that wasn't the issue. I decided to disassemble the water blocks.

Many water blocks use jet plates and rubber/silicone inserts to direct/even the flow of water through the block. That's all well and good (even effective sometimes) but the inserts on these machines appear to be a problem or at the very least they develop one over time.

Upon inspection the silicone insert was pretty warped but not too dirty or anything like that. I decided to remove it per some posts I read here. I also noticed that there wasn't much coolant in the block which seemed strange. I got some quality coolant and filled the block. Put it back together, ran the pump, shook the pump, repeated until the block wasn't empty after a run. Now it runs silently and as of this posting I can idle the chips without them getting hot.

In summary of heating issue 1:

1. Check your pumps. You can get the RPM from the UI if your unit is online but you should still check the sounds they make. Otherwise wait for your machine to completely cool, unplug the delta fans on the board you want to check, unplug 1 of the water blocks so only one will start and plug in the power to that board. You can also bench test the pump if you like. It's a little safer but then you don't get to learn if the pump plug on the board is working properly. They should make a quiet hum. Anything else is a problem and you need to investigate. Mine were low on water and the insert was warped so I believe it was restricting flow. Basically if you have good paste and the chips are still getting hot you probably have an issue here. Also make sure you don't have any leaks in the lines or radiators.

2. Check your paste. LiquidPro is the best but it's also difficult to apply. I will post pics later of my temps running on non-conductive paste. It's fine if everything else is working properly.

Now for issue 2. The first miner also was getting the D45 red light on the board furthest from the power supplies. I can't take all the credit for this one. Thanks here goes to numnutz2009 for his excellent post about shorted boards and mosfets. In my case the D45 red light was caused by a blown mosfet on whatever code the D44 light corresponds to. It's the second from the front on the right side when looking at the miner from the rear. There are 4 mosfets for each chip (2 on top, 2 on bottom) and one of them was blown. This one was easy to spot. It was burnt out on the top. This doesn't always happen though. Sometimes they blow out the bottom and you need to look for a gob of solder sticking out from under the side. More on that later. I ordered replacement mosfets from Texas Instruments and will replace as soon as my rework station comes in. You can order them directly from TI or you can look them up on DigiKey. The part number is CSD16342. If you are half way decent with soldering you should be able to use a rework station to replace them. Otherwise numnutz2009 has an open offer to repair them for you.

Issue 3. Another minor issue I had was the front status LED board. Upon opening the case I found a chip laying on the bottom of the case and one hanging by copper filaments from the status board. This was pretty simple, just solder them back on. You need a pinpoint tip but they go back on pretty easy. If your filaments are ripped up like mine were you may need to use some thin copper wire to remake the filaments. It took about 30 minutes for me to reapply both chips. I will confirm orientation later but I believe the little circle on the chips needs to be toward the bottom.

Now for miner #2 that was supposed to be a good replacement for the crap one I was sent.

I plug the miner in and one boards lights up just great. All 8 chaser lights, good temps, good fan speed, the works. This board is cherry. It will hash at a solid 800+ in the 50-60C range. Great! Plug the other one in. Orange light of death. The board won't even start.

There are 2 lights on the power supplies. Left is AC OK, Right is DC OK. I had the right one going orange. which meant a fault on the output side. Obviously something was shorted. Again thanks to numnutz2009 for pointing me in the right direction here. First thing I pulled out the power supply and plugged it in. Both lights green. Then I removed the terminals from the CTA board and placed them in a safe location so they would not short against the case and plugged in the power supply again. Still no fault which told me the little collector board in front of the power supply was also OK. Definitely a fault on the CTA board.

Now per the numnutz2009 post I attempt to hook up a bench power supply to blow out whatever component is shorted by providing unmetered power to the board. Short was still too great and it shut down my bench power supply. Now it was time to go mid-evil. I took the board out and hooked it to a car battery. One big flash and a pop later and my board was alive on 7 chips. D45 red light because of the mosfet I just blew out. Incidentally it was the same chip as above. Second from front on right when looking at the board from the back. This one however, did not show any signs of burning out from the top. This one actually blew out the bottom. It took me a while to find it but eventually I noticed the gob of solder sticking out the bottom of the mosfet. That's the culprit there and that mosfet will be replaced with the other when my rework station arrives. The board is working well on 7 chips though.

Couple notes about intentionally shorting your board.

1. Wear safety glasses. You are about to make an electronic component overheat and explode. Molten solder could be blown in your face. Wear safety glasses.

2. If using a bench power supply be sure it has overload protection or you could blow that out instead of your board. I'm amazed how much current that little mosfet was able to pull before blowing.

3. If using a car battery like I did, make sure the car is not on! Cars charge the battery at 13 volts or more and that MAY be enough voltage to damage something on your CTA board. I checked the power supplies on the miners I have and they put out a consistent 11.99. The battery I used was at 12.2 which I figured (very scientifically by assuming) was close enough to be safe.

4. Make sure you have the polarity correct. All of my boards have positive closest to the edge of the board and negative further in. This is likely the case on ALL of the boards. Reversing polarity is a BAD idea and will not under any circumstances fix your board. In fact it will probably destroy it. Electrical connections are polarized for a reason.

I ended up taking the one totally good CTA from each miner and putting them into one. The frankenstein miner is hashing at over 1500 on power level 8 and has run stable for 3 days straight. Tonight I will complete my initial repairs on the other 2 and I expect to see speeds around 13-1400 until I get the mosfets replaced.

That's all I have for now. If you have questions please let me know. I will post pictures later this week of everything and how it's all working. I will monitor this thread occasionally as well for others that need help.

If this post helped you and you want to send me some BTC love my address is: 1Q6JZq2gaVmAUyVWNuWgyWtNn3YTaTrygt

Little more info on the LED lights and what they mean.

Front status LEDs: First is just machine status (CTR1). Basically this just lets you know the beaglebone is up and running and that it got an IP. If it's orange/red you either didn't get an IP or there is some other issue with the unit. If it's off the beaglebone is being a butthead and you need to restart your miner.

The second light (CTR2) is not used. Ignore.

Then there's miner 1 and 2 which show activity on the miners kind of like the HDD activity light on a PC.

If your CTR1 doesn't light up, open the case and look at the beaglebone controller. There should be a series of 4 blue lights on the left side (when looking at it from the back of the machine) and they should be flickering. That's how you know you are connected to the network. If not, hit the reset button on the beaglebone until it works. If it doesn't ever work then you probably need to reflash or replace the unit.

I have never managed to get the main reset button to work on the terraminer. Maybe it's just me but the reset instruction never seems to make it to the board. Not really an issue because the firmware seems to work OK.

Now for the status on the CTA boards:

There are a series of 9 LEDs on the boards numbered D37-D45. These are the chip status lights and board status light. D45 is indicative of a board fault and if everything is peachy it won't be lit. The others are status on the individual chips. If d37-44 are cascading on and off then everything is good. If some are being skipped then that core is offline. The most common cause for this is overheating on that core. You will need to check your temps in the UI.

Now for D45. If D45 is lit red it means a board fault. Most commonly this is caused by the board being unable to communicate with one of the chips. Most commonly this means you have a fried component on the board. D37-40 are for the back chip. D41-44 are for the front chip. I don't have any more detail than that at the moment. You will need to inspect the board (especially the mosfets) for a visibly damaged component. It may be very subtle and difficult to see. I suggest using a magnifying glass.

Status lights on the power supplies are AC OK and DC OK. AC is on the left, DC is on the right. If DC is orange you need to troubleshoot your fault per the method I mentioned in my last post. If AC is orange you probably have a power cord issue or a blown power supply.

If you have any additional questions or need more detail on any of this please let me know. I know a lot of people got screwed by cointerra. I want to help if possible.

Alright. I got the pumps and inserts sorted on one of the boards. Temps went from fluctuating between 95 and 105C to sitting pretty at 77. Basically all I did was remove the inserts and top off the coolant. Seems to work well. Now I have another problem. One of the pumps just died. It was working great this morning, I unplugged the unit to switch with the one I had just repaired and when I plugged it in it died. These stinking things are going to be the death of me. I'm trying to find a water cooling kit that will work but the brackets are all wrong. Looks like I will have to purchase a block and pump separate. That should do the trick. Updates to follow...

I see one of these advertised on eBay. Wondering if its worth buying or are they all badly built. Power isn't an issue. Just need it to be quiet and reliable.

They are not by any means quiet or reliable. Buy an antminer.

Couple new developments in the quest to make a bad miner good.

I was working on the water blocks last night and I discovered something interesting with the inserts. See pictures below.

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

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

Note the difference in size and the distortion on the larger one. If your inserts look like the large one you will need to remove and discard them. If they look like the smaller one you can leave them in place and they will improve the performance of the water block vs having them out.

I managed to get the board that was rapidly overheating to run at about 75c last night by removing the inserts but considering the cold air it's pulling it should be operating around 50. Tonight I am going to try 2 new things.

1. replace the black hoses with transparent hoses and flush the pumps/radiators. Then I will refill and monitor flow and temps.

2. If the above does not yield satisfactory results I will attempt to find a replacement water block/pump combo and install it.

More to follow...

Alright everyone. I tried a couple things tonight and one of them yielded very encouraging results.

I tried this on the worst offending board with the overheating. At this point I believe that if you have a board with a chronic overheating problem it is an issue in the chips and you aren't going to get rid of it completely but the things I have listed above and what I list here will make it as good as it can be given what you have.

This board doesn't run stable at any power level over 6 regardless of how cool or hot it is. Whether this is because the prior owner abused it by running it too hot for too long or if it's just a manufacturing defect the world will never know. That being said I was able to run this board at around 80C consistently at power level 9 with these changes. It didn't make the board any more stable but it did keep the temps in check. I am running at level 6 now and 670GH from the board with no errors. It's sticking consistently around 70C on the hottest chip.

Here's the skinny. I removed the water coolers from the board and took the boards out. I got out my dremel tool and ground down the spacer so it was no longer holding the water block away from the chips. The metal ring around the perimeter of the chip is too thick and holds you (unevenly) away from the chips. One was particularly bad and uneven. You could see it in the heat paste. The other was pretty good but I ground it down anyway.

After doing this I tried it out. Temps still sucked. Overheating at anything over level 6. Back to the drawing board.

Now I decided to cut the water lines off and flush the system. I got some good petroleum rated 1/4 inch line and replaced them after I blew everything off. I refilled the system with distilled water (just for now to test it out. I will add some ethylene glycol later) and plugged int again. SUCCESS! I'm running nice and cool and getting good GH!

Next step will be to give the whole rig a treatment with liquidpro when it arrives. I will post results of that test as well.

Here are some pics of the process and completed rig.

https://i.imgur.com/VdznceH.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/vhU6ctY.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/sL0X0eR.jpg

Another update. I fired up the other board in the unit and I am now hashing at about 1.3TH total and my hottest chip is 66C. The fans are barely running and the errors are well within range. I'm calling this a win. If the unit runs stable overnight I will move it to a more permanent location and let it eat.

I think what happens is the coolant in the system degrades and little bits of solids hinder the pump performance. I initially drained the system into a cup and there flakes of solids in there. Small ones but solids just the same. We will see how much temps change after the ethylene glycol. I also expect cooling performance to improve after the thermal paste has time to burn in. I have already seen significant improvement in just this short time.

Well I was all excited to get the now famously running terraminer off of the extension cords and into a more permanent location tonight but upon relocating the unit a couple chips decided they wanted to be hot again. I'm contemplating the possibility of faulty temp sensors. I was gentle when moving the unit and most of the cores are still reading great temps. It's not out of line but definitely hotter than I would like. I have the unit in a (near) freezing cold environment so it should hold until the LiquidPro arrives later this week (hopefully). Another interesting thing I have noticed is that the temps start off really high and then settle down significantly lower after running for a few minutes. Do the rest of you experience this behavior when mining starts?

Another interesting thing, the machine with the resurrected battery-shorted board was running 20C hotter last night than it is running today. I'm not complaining but I really wish I could understand the wild fluctuations in cooling performance (or supposed cooling performance if the sensors can be trusted)

More to follow after the LiquidPro treatment over the weekend.

Air in the cooling system maybe?

Definitely not. I have clear lines so I would see any air. Plus I purged it all when I re-ran the lines on that board.

I'm going to take a straightedge and my feeler gauges to it as soon as the liquidpro comes in. I'm willing to bet the chips don't sit straight so sometimes I get lucky and they cool properly but most of the time they do not. That's probably why LiquidPro works so well for people. Until then I will deal with it because I'm getting tired of taking it apart every night. I will post my updated results as soon as my shipment arrives.

What is happening the cores hit 120C very fast and then either turn off or get the frequency turned down so it runs slower at a cooler temp.

If you want to see the fast error just connect the board to a PC with usb and run cgminer.  It will show which cores are getting hot.

Regarding the ring around the cores, what would happen if that was ground down well below the chip height?  Anyone tried this?

Has anyone tried immersion cooling these boards or has everyone just thrown them away?

Thanks. I'll try that out. I don't think it's hitting 120 though because it seems to top out around 95 as best I can see. It could be the UI isn't keeping up though. I really don't like the cointerra UI. I have a couple pi's and a failing controller now so I may swap the failing beaglebone with a pi and see what happens.

With regard to the spacer I ground mine down to even but not below. I checked the pattern of the thermal paste after doing so and there was a significant difference in the contact pattern of the block against the chips. Before I had visible high spots in the paste but after grinding the spacer things were much more even. After running for a couple days I think this change yielded 10-15C improvement.

I am planning on either removing it with a razor or grinding it down further the next time I have them apart (probably this weekend). I will post results for everyone with pics.

So far with the changes I have made one board has dropped an average of 40C and the other 60C and that's on noctua thermal paste. I still have some work to do because I am only running at power level 6 and cannot run higher at this time without the boards exceeding 80C.

You can ssh into your box and with top find cgminer and crond processes.  kill them both.  make sure you are in opt directory then run cgminer.  you will be able to see temp & core setting changes that cgminer does.

I got liquidpro last night and tried it out. It worked great on one of the machines. I'm able to operate at full power and good temps. The other machine it didn't help at all. I may try to reapply or grind down the spacer more. I'm guessing the spacer is still holding me too far away. Its back on the noctua for now.

Do any of you know where I can get firmware and what is a good version? I would like to rule that out as a possibility for the strange behavior of the one miner.

I tried this but I don't see any stats on the temps. Is there something special I need to do? All I see is the hash rate and accepted/rejected.

Another update on the cooling situation. If you read my post from last night you will know that LiquidPro worked on one machine but not the other. I was very particular about how I applied it and I'm confident I was getting good contact where it was needed. The strange thing is on the machine that it worked well on I actually only coated one chip. Despite that fact, BOTH chips were significantly cooler after running the equipment and both are STILL running cool. (This furthers my suspicion of how accurate the temp sensors actually are) Keep in mind I only touched one chip/heatsink. No arguments from me though. I'll take it. Until I get a rework station and replace the bad mosfets I am happy with how this machine is running.

Now for the bane of my existence machine. I attempted LiquidPro and was not happy with the results at all. At best it yielded no improvement and at worst it ran hotter than before. So I put it back together with the Noctua and it ran pretty much back where it was. On the hot side but still under 100C and still running reliably.

This afternoon a thought occurred to me. Every video I have seen of the paste being redone on these machines shows a TON of thermal paste on the chip from the factory. So far I was just using little gobs on each core like I would for a GPU or CPU. I decided to apply the paste at the volume that I saw in the videos. I figure there are still many of these machines out there that are still operating at good temps in factory form so there must be something to it. I applied so much paste that it covered the sides and even the channels between the chips. I still don't think I used as much as the factory but it was easily 3X what I was using before. I turned on the machine and immediately noticed about a 15C improvement. One of the chips is approaching about 20C improvement after running for a couple hours.

I believe this tells me that the top surface of the chip is not the only area that needs thermal conductivity and adding heat transfer to the sides and channels between does yield additional cooling benefits. Basically I believe anything that has the potential to draw heat away from the chips and increase the surface area contacted by the heatsink will yield positive results. I am going to run the unit like this for 24 hours and if the results are still encouraging I may apply more paste between the chips and to the spacer ring around them. I will post my results if/when I perform the test.

Upon further investigation it appears that pasting everything inside of the spacer ring has the potential to increase cooling performance. The air that is normally trapped inside the ring acts as an insulator. Thermal paste heat transfer is somewhere between 200 and 400 times better than air so it stands to reason that you would want to minimize the amount of air trapped by the water block. Tomorrow I will attempt to fill all air gaps and also wiggle the water block down rather than pushing it straight down. This should squeeze more of the paste out from the top of the chips while still allowing me to fill in the surrounding areas.

Fingers crossed. More updates to follow.

Does anyone know where to buy the replacement rubber seal that is inside the water cooled heatsink?

Hello all!  I've seen some recent activity here, so I am hoping that people are still trying to fix these stupid things even though CoinTerra has now officially filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and is no longer in business...   :o

I recently bought two TerraMiner IV's on eBay back in December (before CoinTerra went bust completely).  I thought I got a decent price on them to try my hand at mining, despite the fact that the price of BitCoin has plummeted recently and everyone is saying that there is no money to be made mining anymore already.  (At least I feel good that I didn't pay close to $10,000 for one of these CoinTerras a year or so ago only to find that I won't be able to make my money back on it or anything...)  But anyways...

The first TerraMiner I bought is working BEAUTIFULLY, I must say, and has been hashing away at around 1,618 - 1,622 GH/s since I plugged it in.  I did notice that one of the core temperatures on the CTA1 board is running a bit higher than the rest, but it is still averaging below 100 degrees Celsius and the hashing power is only occasionally throttled back by 2-4 GH/s as a result.

However, the second TerraMiner I bought has been nothing but a headache!  When I first plugged it in, it started out mining okay at around 1,450-1,465 GH/s with slightly elevated temperatures compared with the first miner.  I could not get it to run at the full 1,600 GH/s like the first miner though, even at power stepping level 9.  I ran it for about a week and I checked it daily only to find my hashing rate constantly slipping from 1,400 to 1,300 to 1,200, to finally under 800 GH/s COMBINED for both boards!  (about 400GH/s for each CTA board).  So, I shut it down and ordered some new thermal compound to see if re-doing the thermal compound on the water cooling blocks would make any difference.  I had read enough posts online that these CoinTerras had problems with the stock thermal compound, so I figured it was a cheap fix.  I bought these supplies on Amazon.com for the job:

http://www.amazon.com/ArctiClean-60ml-Kit-30ml/dp/B0007TOR08/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425059487&sr=8-1&keywords=thermal+compound+remover (http://www.amazon.com/ArctiClean-60ml-Kit-30ml/dp/B0007TOR08/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425059487&sr=8-1&keywords=thermal+compound+remover)
http://www.amazon.com/Arctic-Silver-Thermal-Compound-Grams/dp/B000OGX5AM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425059575&sr=8-1&keywords=Arctic+Silver+5 (http://www.amazon.com/Arctic-Silver-Thermal-Compound-Grams/dp/B000OGX5AM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425059575&sr=8-1&keywords=Arctic+Silver+5)

(I know, after I already purchased the Arctic Silver compound, I read this thread and found people were having much better luck with the Liquid Pro product, but I had already ordered this paste and figured I'd give it a try first.)

I carefully removed all of the water blocks, cleaned off all traces of the old thermal compound CoinTerra used off of both the chips and the heat sink, then applied a nice, even layer of thermal compound to the top of each chip and re-installed the water cooling blocks.  I then powered up the TerraMiner, hoping to see some much improved results.  However, the opposite has actually happened and I think I totally destroyed my TerraMiner somehow!

When I first plugged it in, the CTR1 light turned orange, then went off, then turned green (as per normal), then both Miner1 and Miner2 lights turned on and started blinking.  I remoted into the machine and found both boards (CTA0 and CTA1) were recognized, but the hashing rate was WAY down - only about 50-100 GH/s per board!  What is more is my chip temperatures were all over the board!  I had temps from -45 degrees Celsius all the way up to 120 degrees Celsius.  They would fluctuate wildly on both boards and it seems that the miner would keep resetting as my GH/s would slowly climb, then go back down.  Eventually, I was getting only about 5-10 GH/s out of each board and it would keep resetting to 0 GH/s periodically, I'm assuming from overheating? (Or at least the board THOUGHT the chips were overheating...)

Then I started losing CTA's...  First CTA1 disappeared completely, only to be replaced by CTA2 shortly thereafter.  Then that disappeared and CTA3 showed up instead.  This kept going on for about a half an hour or so until I ended up with CTA0 and CTA6 running in the web interface.  Then, finally CTA6 disappeared completely and now I am only running on one board ONLY (CTA0).  WTF???

I finally powered it down (maybe a bit too late now, I'm thinking?) and cracked the case open again.  I didn't see anything out of the ordinary, nothing looked burned and I didn't smell anything burning either.  For the heck of it, I pulled all 4 water cooling blocks again to check my thermal paste.  I had a good coating on all the chips (I could not see any of the writing on the chips) and I had a good coating on the water block as well, meaning I had a good connection between the heat sink and the top of the chips.  (I only applied the thermal compound to the tops of the chips, so anything on the heat sinks was deposited by direct contact with the chips.)  I had some thermal compound left over in the syringe though, so I added an extra drop to each chip, spread it around, and re-installed the water cooling blocks.  I tried starting up the TerraMiner again and found out that only one board was still working.  I now only get CTA0 to show up in the web interface and it is only hashing at 200-250 GH/s at best.  If I power step it to 9, it will slowly try to run up to over 300 GH/s, but it shuts down after an hour or so, I'm assuming due to overheating.  I have been running it somewhat stabiley (?) now at power stepping level 7, which is as high as I can go before the miner will reset periodically due to overheating.  I have run it for about 6 hours now like this and the highest hashing rate I can get out of the one board is about 275 GH/s.  That is not even HALF of what one of these boards is rated for!

I also tried removing the cover and watching it boot up since I lost the CTA1 board.  The CTR1 light lights up normally, but then I only get the Miner2 light to come on.  On the boards themselves, during boot up the board farthest away from the power supplies (to the left looking from the front of the machine) seems to power on okay and I get the KITT sweeping LEDs on the board changing from orange to green.  I also see all of the blue LEDs on the "Beaglebone" board (why they call it that, I have no idea and it frankly sounds ridiculous to me, but whatever...) mounted below the first miner board.  I would think this board is the CTA0 board, but for some reason it is indicated as Miner2 by the LED lights on the front of the machine.  Weird...  Anyways, the other board closest to the power supplies (to the right looking from the front of the machine) does not seem to power on anymore for some reason.  There are no KITT sweeping LEDs lit up on the board.  I also noticed that the right most front and rear fans no longer run at all.  When I first apply power to the bottom power supply, I can see these fans turn on for about a second but then they immediately shut off.  I checked for power at the big power connectors going to the boards and I have 12 VDC going to BOTH boards, but for some reason only ONE is working.  What gives?  Did I fry a board somehow?  I have 2 green LEDs on both power supplies above where they plug in and I have tried swapping the power supplies as well just to see if it made any difference and it does not.

Is there any way to fix this machine and get CTA1 back online?  What made it go offline in the first place?  Why is the one CTA0 board only running at a fraction of its potential hashing power?  I wouldn't be quite as upset as I am now if I could get at least HALF of this machine running at 800 GH/s or so and then just run one board and one power supply in this thing.  I would ideally like to figure out how to get both boards up and running again, if possible.  The only thing I haven't tried yet is a factory reset, but I would kind of be surprised if that actually worked.  From reading the manual, it appears this only resets the password and the CGMiner configuration to defaults, or could be used if you "brick" the machine trying to install a firmware update.  I also tried pushing the small black reset button looking things on the back of each board to see if that would do anything, but it doesn't.

I'm unsure which "build" my machine is or when it was actually built.  It looks like the firmware version is 0.7.56 from the web interface and the board (CTA) version is 0.5.39 (from 07-21-2014).  Here are screenshots of all I am getting now from this TerraMiner's web interface: (Please click on the links as I am unable to post images for some reason...)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/199ogg5y4p9myq5/CoinTerra_TMIV_01_02-27-2015_03a.jpg?dl=0 (https://www.dropbox.com/s/199ogg5y4p9myq5/CoinTerra_TMIV_01_02-27-2015_03a.jpg?dl=0)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7hve36fx869jo78/CoinTerra_TMIV_01_02-27-2015_03b.jpg?dl=0 (https://www.dropbox.com/s/7hve36fx869jo78/CoinTerra_TMIV_01_02-27-2015_03b.jpg?dl=0)

Also, on my mining pool, I noticed that the difficulty for this miner is only 301, where as the other TerraMiner is using 1.39k for the difficulty.  Not really sure what difference this makes, but I'm assuming a higher difficulty will mine more BitCoin in the long run?  To me it is just another sign that something is very wrong with this miner...


(On a side note, I also bought an AntMiner S2 shortly after messing around with this TerraMiner since I was losing hashrate from having this miner down for so long.  The AntMiner has been plugging away for over two weeks now with absolutely NO problems and is running about 10-20 degrees Celsius cooler than the CoinTerra's.  It is a ROCK-SOLID machine and has been hashing at over 1 TH/s in stock configuration.  I read some forums about overclocking them with good results, so I decided to try it out myself.  I have been running it for over a week overclocked at 215 MHz with only the stock power supply and I have been consistently getting about 1.09 - 1.12 TH's with it and the temperatures are still nice and cool!  Over a long time, the average hash rate has dropped to only about 1.09 TH/s, but that's still pretty good off of the stock 1,000 Watt power supply!  (Much better return than I'm getting from my TerraMiners at any rate!)  Sadly, "Made in America" USED to mean something, but evidently not anymore!  CoinTerra is a perfect example of how our country is sliding downhill.  It could have been a perfect example of American exceptionalism leading the way in BitCoin mining, but instead they put out a shit product that took way too long to build, didn't meet the expectations their own company put forward (only 1.6 TH/s instead of the quoted 2 TH/s), and their customer support was garbage from the sounds of it.  No wonder this company went from promising start-up to broke in under a year and a half!  Meanwhile, BitMain is a Chinese company and they put out a cheap, reliable, and economical to run miner and have had no problems keeping up with demand and shipping their products on time.  Their miners also will run flawlessly at much higher than rated hashing speeds with no appreciable increase in chip temperatures.  No wonder the Chinese are going to end up taking over the world!  lol...)

Anyone have issues with hashing boards randomly disappearing and reappearing?  Tried replacing the USB hub and cables with no change.

Sometimes, changing pool automatically or pools which don't give enough work for miners.

@FuryFever

If you have a board not powering on please read back a page to my post about shorted boards. If it's not coming on your probably have a short that you will need to 'blow out' before you can start the rest of the board. It's strange though that you have 2 green lights on the power supply so that board may actually be cooked.

Arctic silver thermal compound sucks. The burn-in period is 200 hours so it's really not good for a 100% continuous utilization application. If you are going to use an ordinary non-conductive thermal compound I recommend Noctua nt-h1. Also use TONS of it when applying. You want to fill all the air pockets in the spacer ring and lastly wiggle the water block down to make sure you get any bubbles out. Each of those steps should yield about 10-15C decrease in temps which combined will leave you with a decent working miner.

If you have more questions let me know. I'll try to help.

Lastly antminer is the way to go. I got my terraminers running well and sold them to buy 2 antminer S4s.

@ carman336-
       (as well as anyone else on this board w/ Liquid Pro Ultra expertise):
Can I 'carefully' try "pasting everything inside of the spacer ring" using the Liquid Pro Ultra? Or would this be dangerous b/c of the L.P.U's electrical conductivity?

What about this stuff?

http://www.amazon.com/Coollaboratory-Liquid-MetalPad-1x-CPU/dp/B001CXO4TC/ (http://www.amazon.com/Coollaboratory-Liquid-MetalPad-1x-CPU/dp/B001CXO4TC/)

Has anyone tried using this instead of the Liquid Pro or Liquid Ultra?  It seems like it might be a bit easier to use than the Liquid Pro and be less susceptible to accidentally shorting out your board during the application process.  However, the one downside appears to be that the Liquid MetalPad has to "burn in" before it will be effective.  I think the CoinTerra chips will get hot enough to achieve this burn in temperature, but does that mean you have to operate the miner at reduced power stepping levels until this is burned in and then it will work fine and you can step it back up to 9?

Otherwise, I guess I am back to trying out the Liquid Pro on my chips to achieve maximum cooling efficiency.  Also, how far will one syringe last?  Can I do an entire CoinTerra machine with one syringe or will I need more than that?  2?  4?  (One per group of 4 individual chips?)

I also found this that seems good, although still not as good as the Liquid Pro:

http://www.amazon.com/Gelid-Solutions-GC-Extreme-Compound-TC-GC-03-A/dp/B002P5W4RU/ (http://www.amazon.com/Gelid-Solutions-GC-Extreme-Compound-TC-GC-03-A/dp/B002P5W4RU/)

It at least has a higher Thermal Conductivity than the Arctic Silver 5 it seems.  (The Arctic Silver 5 is around 6.5 - 7.5 W/mK [depending on the site, it seems...  Also, according to a study by the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory, they say that it is only 0.94 W/mK!] and the Gelid compound is 8.5 W/mK.)

earlier in this thread some talked about using the pads and I believe the consensus was that it was not as effective as using the syringe.
As far as how many syringes per machine, I have not tried it out yet and am waiting for more input from this thread. Should I forge ahead I will also post my experiences here.

Hmmm...  So, basically:

"It's Liquid Pro...  Or NOTHIN'!"

http://www.amazon.com/Coollaboratory-Liquid-Thermal-Interface-Material/dp/B001PE5XAC/ (http://www.amazon.com/Coollaboratory-Liquid-Thermal-Interface-Material/dp/B001PE5XAC/)

Of course, like others on here have already expressed, I am a bit wary of it just because it is liquid metal and it is conductive, so it has the potential to short out your entire board if you get a tiny drop in the wrong spot.  So, I'm assuming if you use the Liquid Pro, it ONLY goes directly on the top of the chip and you don't "fill in" the areas around it like it was suggested that you should do with the paste.  Of course, what if you used a mixture of the two (or is that just overkill)?  You could use the Liquid Pro stuff directly on the chip itself, then fill in around the chip with something like the Gelid paste for maximum heat transfer to the cooling block.  Sure, it will cost more $$$ in thermal compound (probably close to $50-$60 when it is all said and done), but if it works and gets your machines hashing at peak performance and you don't have to keep screwing around with them or restarting them constantly, I'd say it is definitely worth it. 

Even my "good TerraMiner" now is having heat issues and it has been throttling back CTA1 on me, so now my hashing power is only around 1,500-1,545 GH/s on that machine.  I have tried restarting it a half dozen times over the past 2 days to see if I could get it to restore its former 1,620+ GH/s hash rate with no success as of yet.  I have even unplugged it and shut it down for a couple of hours, then plugged it back in and restarted it to see if it would work better once it had cooled down a bit and I was still only getting 1,300-1,400 GH/s for the first few hours, then it VERY slowly creeped back up to 1,545 GH/s overnight.  CTA0 is fine, I'm getting the full 812 GH/s out of that board, but for some reason CTA1 won't go over 733 GH/s no matter what it seems.  The worst part is, the temperatures for that board aren't even all that bad that the machine should be throttling it back that badly.  My average temperatures for the cores on CTA1 are 94-96 degrees Celsius, with highs in the 102-110 degree range.  Not exactly COOL, but not all that out of the ordinary either.  The odd part though is the huge temperature difference between CTA0 and CTA1.  The cores on CTA0 are only running at 63-69 degrees Celsius with highs in the 75-82 degrees.  The weirdest part though is that the hash rate reported by my mining pool for the "good TerraMiner" is 1.62 TH/s, even though the TerraMiner itself is reporting that it is only mining at 1.54 TH/s.  That seems odd to me.  Which should I be more inclined to believe - the miner itself or the mining pool statistics?

I have been running 2 TerraMiner IV's for a year now, Feb batch which showed up March 13th.
One of them always ran great until about last month, pretty sure its a pump, some smacking brought it back to life but it looks to have gotten worse.
The other one had 2 great boards for the first month, then one of them always gave problems.
Tonight that problematic one has croaked, only half the larsen scanner lights up, but its probly a pump issue as well.
Had to disconnect the bad board in order to get the good one up an running, also had to leave both supplies plugged in.
Out of my 8 cooling blocks I have replaced 2 of the shitloads of factory-applied thermal paste with a small amount of decent stuff.
They ran pretty much the same as before for me, possibly a little cooler.
Tomorrow I'll try carman336's theory of abundance and pump cleanout to see if I can get the dead one up again.

The only difference I may have from most here is that I run them both from a 240VAC Tripplite PDU and have had pretty great luck with flawless power so far.
I still get anywhere from around 0.02 - 0.05 BTC/24hours from them and, between power and internets, they cost about USD $320/month to run.
I look at it as a dollar-cost-averaging investment over time plus doing my part toward helping the network.

Great work carman336, hope those S4's are working out.

So my board closest to the power supplies was keeping my miner dead.

I unplugged the USB to it and the beaglebone and other board came up fine.
The bad board was lighting up the larsen LED's from 37-40, then it hit 41 and
they all went out. repeat.
Never did 42-44 light up.

So disconnected the front pump, reattached the USB and rebooted - everything
came up but the front set of chips.

I tore it down, opened the bad pump and it looked great inside, clear water with
a hint of anti-freeze, non-swollen silicon and no debris. I put it back together,
tapped it all around with a metal tool and have had no luck with it.
The other set of chips on the board and the other board are cranking along fine.

@Cefalu

There is a guy on ebay who has some spare parts for these at reasonable prices. His ebay user is express_computer. Last I heard he had a complete set of working radiators and pumps.

I would swap the pumps around on your units first to make sure the problem follows the pump otherwise you may have a board issue or controller problem. If it follows the pump though you can just swap the unit and you're back off to the races.

You can also use regular water cooling equipment. I believe I read the dimensions of the water block screws match that of an Intel LGA1156. Most store bought water cooling setups will have a bracket to match that. You will probably need to come up with your own replacement screws though as the length required may be different. I recommend spring loaded screws. That way you get nice even pressure and that takes most of the guess work out of it. Also if you have custom loop water cooling equipment laying around those water blocks generally fit without much fuss. I started setting mine up that way before I sold but it was going to be so expensive I gave it up.

Incidentally the machines I sold are running great for the guy. He's happy and I'm happy they're gone. I get a little OCD when I can't make things work right so they had to go.

Im likely grabbing one of these locally, but might not be able to run it until BTC goes >$300USD.

can they be underclocked for better efficiency and lower noise? I havent been able to find much information about this, but it sounds like there is some sort of power stepping option that might help bring the unit close to 1TH/1kW?

I'll have to see what my electric bill will be this month...  Not really looking forward to it running two of these CoinTerra machines, lol...  But the one miner that is being a huge pain and that I had one of the boards die in it I am currently running at Power Stepping 7 and, due in part to using crappy Arctic Silver 5 thermal compound on the chips, it is only running at around 230-270 GH/s on one board.  No clue what the power consumption at the wall is though.  Is there any way to measure it, really?  If it is still using anywhere close to 1,000 Watts though, then I'll be pissed that I'm only getting that little out of it for how many Watts of power it is consuming!  lol...  I can't run it over power stepping level 7 though or else it keeps stopping mining after a few hours due to overheating.  (It also ironically enough mines at a much lower GH/s rate than if I try to use a higher power stepping level, like 8 or 9.)

My other miner WAS running at a full 1.6 TH/s on power stepping 9 at I'm sure 2,200 Watts of power.  However, it has lately been only mustering around 1,250-1,300 GH/s at power stepping 9, but I have no clue if it is using less power when doing so or if it is still drinking down all 2,200 watts and only giving me about 75-80% of the rated output from the ASIC chips in it due to heat issues.  I tried throttling it back to power stepping level 8 to see if the chips would run cooler and MAYBE I would get better performance out of it, but decreasing it only one power stepping level dropped my mining power to around 950-1,100 GH/s, which seemed too low for my liking, so I cranked it back up to 9.  If I fix the overheating issues with both of my miners and get them running right, I wish I could crank the power stepping level up to 10 and try to get more out of this machine since CoinTerra originally boasted that it was supposed to produce 2 TH/s, not 1.6 TH/s.  If I can get the chips running a lot cooler though, is it possible to max out the machine any more or is it already as maxed out as it is going to get from the factory?

Also, klondike_bar, I have the original manual for these things as a PDF document before CoinTerra went bankrupt and their website went bye-bye.  I could E-mail it it you if you'd like.  Not sure how much help it will be, but it does have the specifications of it and it explains the settings in the Web UI and how to set it up.

(BTW - I'm also still waiting for my Liquid Pro to show up...  Probably Monday.  I was hoping UPS would have delivered it on Saturday, but unfortunately no such luck!  So much for 2 day shipping, Amazon!)

Get one of these  ;D

http://www.homedepot.com/p/P3-International-Kill-A-Watt-EZ-Meter-P4460/202196388

Harbor Freight has them for about $15  ;)

Thanks carman336 -
I bid on Ebay for a partially working system, 50%.
I'm going to swap the cooling for the bad board.
If that doesn't work I'll pull the bad board and replace with the working one from the ebay machine.
I keep them at an industrial site so I must make a trip to mess w/ them.

FuryFever - I measured mine when I was running them at home @ 240vAV.
I bailed on that as soon as I set up the industrual site, so LOUD and paying for 240vAC at residential rates is still tough.
with an inductive ammeter - seems like it was around 1850 Watts @ 1.622TH/s.
I probly wrote it down and will look through my notes.
If you are running at 120vAC you can use a Kill-a-Watt but for higher voltages you will have to use an ammeter on one
lead or get a power strip with monitoring built in. Like this:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/APC-AP7841-METERED-RACK-PDU-24-OUTLET-20-C13-4-C19-Power-distribution-strip-/380867202390?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item58ad744d56

Yeah, but those things are pretty expensive just to monitor your electricity usage.  Plus, they take up a whole outlet, so that's not good.  I'd have to use like a 3 foot extension cord on each outlet on my receptacle box to plug one of these into and then plug my miner into the meter.  They DO have a 10 outlet power strip that will monitor your power usage of everything plugged into it cumulatively, but that's like $80 and I'm not sure if it is rated at enough amperage draw to even plug ONE TerraMiner into it and leave the other 8 plugs unused.  That seems like kind of a waste...  If they had like a 2 or 4 outlet mini-strip that would monitor whatever was plugged into it, that might be a viable option though.

Maybe Newegg or Amazon has something like this cheaper.  (Or, like you said, Harbor Freight - although I wouldn't really trust anything from Harbor Freight for heavy-duty use like this...  Just plugging one TerraMiner into it might make it melt down! lol...)

YAAAY!!!  I finally got my Liquid Pro today!

Now I'll have to find the time to re-do the entire cooling system in my TerraMiners sometime this week.  It may not be until the weekend though, depending on how busy I am with work.  I'll try to update (with photos, if possible...) once I find the time to crack open one of the cases...  Fingers and toes crossed that this actually helps me get improved performance out of these things!

So I checked out the ebay unit I got - one board was completely dead, no lights whatsoever. The PS showed the orange right-side light. Voltage 0 across the leads from it. The other one was working.
I pulled the cooling and put it on my 50% dead board, no go, still dead.
So I guess some of my chips are fried? I need to re-read what carman says above.

Anyway, I replaced my board with the good ebay board and the cooling system which came with it, all is well.

One odd thing - when I initially tried the ebay machine and noted the dead board,
I measure voltage across the dead unit and the working unit - as mentioned, the
dead was 0 but the working one was at 18+vDC ?!

I should have measured again after I got it all back together, but it took a long
time and I forgot. Will check it next time.

Also, I took your advice carman, I slathered the things in thermal paste, I forget what,
some decent stuff. They are running well, quite cool.

Glad the new thermal compound worked out for you. As for your totally dead board, power it up on a car battery using my instructions a couple pages back. One big spark, one pop and a few seconds later and you will see the board light up save for one dead core. If you want you can then replace the bad mosfet otherwise just run it on 7 cores. You won't get the orange light anymore after you short it. Just make sure you get the polarity correct.

Well,killawatt meters aren't meant to use full time,IMO  ::)   I plug em in just for awhile to insure voltage & amps are what I think they should be  ;)

I bought mine from HB & it's exactly like any others,just as good,but a few bucks cheaper  ;)

ya, I'm looking forward to trying this

I may have to try this in an attempt to resurrect the dead board in my TerraMiner as well.  As you recall, I have one machine that is only running on one board as well.  It kicks on for like half a second and then immediately turns off.  So, why do you need to run it on a car battery to "fix it" (or, rather, from the sounds of it, to blow up the one bad mosfet or chip that it preventing the board from working and then the rest of the board will work) like you explain?  If you try running it off of the power supply, is the board just telling the power supply to stop supplying power because of a short, but the car battery doesn't care and will keep supplying power until it blows up?  That doesn't seem to be my experience though as when my machine is running, I checked the voltage at the big power connectors to the board and I was getting 12 VDC to the dead board, it just was still not turning on and working.  I would think then that this would be the same result if I apply power to the dead board from a car battery - it will try to turn on for half a second and then turn right off to try to "save" the board.  (Which, in actuality, is still ruining the board since I can't use it either way! lol...)

Thanks for the tips and pointers though!  I know I definitely appreciate it as a CoinTerra noob, lol...


(Which, BTW - due to being very busy with work lately and coming home at 8:30-9pm at night, I still haven't had a chance to open up one of my TerraMiners yet to try to redo the thermal paste with the Liquid Pro that I bought.  Hopefully one day this week I will get a chance to do it.  If not, definitely by Friday or Saturday then.  I'll keep you all posted with how it turns out whenever I get a round to it.  In the meantime, I just bought a used AntMiner S5 off eBay for (probably a bit too much money, but...) $600 with a Corsair 850 Watt power supply.  I just hooked that puppy up and got that mining away at 1,156 GH/s or so for a couple of days now.)

I also found a sale on metal shelving on eBay last week, so I bought a 6-tier, 500 Lbs per shelf rated tubular steel shelf with casters for $69.99 with free shipping to put all my miners on.  The cheap $14 4-tier plastic shelving I bought at Home Depot to temporarily put my miners on wasn't working out and the weight of these CoinTerra monsters was bowing the shelves pretty badly, even though I put them as far out on the edges of the shelves as possible and staggered them to try to prevent that from happening.  Well, at least I have a more safer shelving solution to put my miners on now that is a lot more sturdy and stable.  I should have just bought one of those in the first place.  Oh well, live and learn, I guess.  Now I have a nice, purdy, shiny rack in the corner of my basement for all my miners, lol!  Check out some pictures of my setup:

Here is the old plastic shelving I was using (BAD!):
http://www.Pittinaro.com/images/basement/BitCoin_Miners/Old_BitCoin_Miner_Shelving_01.jpg

Look how bad the TerraMiner is bowing the shelf!
http://www.Pittinaro.com/images/basement/BitCoin_Miners/Old_BitCoin_Miner_Shelving_02.jpg

Even my AntMiner S2 did a number on the shelf it was sitting on:
http://www.Pittinaro.com/images/basement/BitCoin_Miners/Old_BitCoin_Miner_Shelving_03.jpg

Here is half of my new shelving that I assembled with the wheels on it (All 6-Tiers was just slightly too tall to fit in my basement, unfortunately.  Thankfully, this shelving was semi-modular, so I could construct two 3-Tier shelving units out of it, which came in handy.):
http://www.Pittinaro.com/images/basement/BitCoin_Miners/New_BitCoin_Miner_Shelving_03.jpg

Now, the guy who sold me the AntMiner S5 told me that it is important to have the bottom closed off to improve airflow so it will cool it properly.  Since these shelves are open wire mesh, that wouldn't be the best to put my S5 unit on.  So, rather than buying some wooden boards to put it on, I cut up the box that my shelving came in to make a decent base to put my miner on:
http://www.Pittinaro.com/images/basement/BitCoin_Miners/New_BitCoin_Miner_Shelving_05.jpg

The box was obviously slightly larger than the shelving unit, so I had to round out the corners so the cardboard would fit between the posts that the shelves mount on:
http://www.Pittinaro.com/images/basement/BitCoin_Miners/New_BitCoin_Miner_Shelving_07.jpg

Here is my new shelving with my two AntMiners mounted on it:
http://www.Pittinaro.com/images/basement/BitCoin_Miners/New_BitCoin_Miner_Shelving_09.jpg

And finally I added the TerraMiners to the bottom shelves and powered everything on:
http://www.Pittinaro.com/images/basement/BitCoin_Miners/New_BitCoin_Miner_Shelving_10.jpg


I just still can't get over how quickly these miners are improving though.  Look at the AntMiner S2 next to the latest AntMiner S5.  The S5 is WAY less than half the size and weight of the S2 miner and it has about 100-150 GH/s more mining power to boot!  It also uses almost HALF of the power to do so (not quite, but pretty close...).
http://www.Pittinaro.com/images/basement/BitCoin_Miners/AntMiner-S2-and-S5-Side-by-Side_02.jpg


(Oh, and sorry to hijack a thread about fixing CoinTerra miners with pics of my mining setup, but I figured it is somewhat topically related at least...)

Your antminer looks bent. The S5 on the side?

Looks like someone gave it a nice kick.

FuryFever - maybe consider orienting the intakes ( the fronts ) for the Terraminers to point toward the wall.
The exhaust fans create a jet of hot air which is easily felt 4 feet away.  
Mine are also next to a wall, I shoot the hot air into the center of the room and pull cool air from near the wall.
Just a thought

Lol...  Yeah, I think that is just from shipping.  The sides on the S5 are very flimsy plastic.  They are not metal or anything.  I guess as long as it just helps direct the airflow, who cares what they look like?  (Of course, me personally I'd like it to be nice and straight looking, but what can you do?)  To aid in cooling the S5, I'd actually like to put a rear fan on it too to help suck the air out from the back instead of just having one fan to push the air through the front of it.  But even so, it is still running fairly cool, despite being in close proximity to all those TerraMiners.  It seems odd to me though that one board in the S5 is running "cool" (relatively speaking...) at 52 degrees Celsius, but the other board is running "hot" at 68 degrees Celsius.  Both of the boards have their heatsinks facing inwards with the fan blowing on them, so I would think it should equalize the temperatures better than that.  Maybe at some point after I'm done fiddling with my TerraMiners, if I have any Liquid Pro left, I can redo the thermal paste on my AntMiners to see if they will run any cooler as well.  Couldn't hurt, right?  At least for right now, the AntMiners are running about 20-40 degrees cooler than my TerraMiners, so I'd say they aren't really an issue.

It sounds like your problem may be different if you are reading 12V at the big connectors. Do you have any orange lights on your power supply?

To answer your question though the reason you need to use a car battery (or a monster bench power supply) is because you have a short in the mosfet (source to drain is most common). This short causes the board to draw too many amps from the power supply and the overload protection kicks in. I believe the terraminer has a 1100 watt power supply so if we assume that one channel is drawing all 1100 watts then that's roughly 91 amps. If you are going to blow out the short you need to supply more than that. It's possible a supernova 1300 could supply enough but the easiest and cheapest thing to do is just get some #12 primary wire and hook it to a car battery. Most car batteries are capable of supplying in excess of 600 amps at 12V plus there's no overload protection so even if you draw all 600 for a few seconds it's not going to kick off. That will be more than enough time to overheat the shorted mosfet.

Now on to what I think your problem is. I suggest swapping power supplies to rule that out as a possibility. If you take the retaining screws out from the back of the terraminer and depress the release clip they slide right out. Just switch the 2 you have and see what happens. If it follows the power supply then that's bad. If not then you have a board problem. I still suggest trying the car battery approach to rule that out as well but it's likely something else failing on the board. Usually catastrophic failures can be spotted visually. Remove the board and carefully inspect all hardware. It's also possible that the board is not detecting the water pumps. You can try swapping the pump cables from the board that works just to see if it will run. DO NOT start mining like this because you will overheat it almost instantly but it will at least help you narrow down the issue.

Let me know how all that works and we'll move on from there.

Anyone try to update cgminer on these units? Would it be worth it? Mine are running 4.3.5 and the current is 4.9.1 so I would imagine there have been some improvements in the last year. Mine run fine but I wonder if they would run any better with newer code.

What do you think?

I wouldn't expect any improvement. CGMiner uses a custom driver for Cointerra devices and considering they went under I doubt there have been any improvements since the latest firmware release. Furthermore the problem was never really with CGMiner in the first place but rather the trashy firmware on the terraminer. If yours are running fine, pray and don't look to hard at them. That reliability can change at the drop of a hat. 

Yea I hear ya .. if it aint broke ... right?

I actually just found this post from ck on the matter .. I may give this a shot and see if it does anything. Easy to fall back if needed. I have a node running CKpool on a server in the same rack with these miners so I can easily test it out.


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28402.msg10717197#msg10717197

If you read back a couple of pages to my original post about my TerraMiners, I had already tried all of those things that you mentioned prior to first posting.  I read through this thread and tried some of the "quick fixes" first to see if I could narrow down the problem.  Both power supplies work fine and are supplying good power to the boards.  I tried swapping the power supplies and the problem stayed with the board closest to the power supplies not turning on.  I have two solid green lights on the back of each power supply.  I tried swapping the pump connectors and couldn't get the board to start up that way either.

Now, on to what I have NOT tried yet since my first post about this due to lack of time:  I have not yet tried physically switching the locations of the two boards.  I have not even tried removing the bad board to check out underneath it yet.  The top of the board looks good though and I can't see anything out of the ordinary.  The tops of both boards look identical and nothing seems blown.  I haven't tried removing all of the Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste that I slathered on all of the chips yet either.  I THOUGHT that stuff was supposed to be non-conductive, but is it possible that the thermal compound could be shorting out one of the chips or something?

For now, I have it running on the one "good" board.  The Arctic Silver 5 compound SUCKS @$$ though and I have to run the board at power stepping 7 and I'm only getting about 200-260 GH/s out of it right now.  Even if I can't get the bad board to start running again, if I redo the thermal compound on the chips with the Liquid Pro and get it running on one board at 812 GH/s, I'll be happy with that for now, I guess.  It's better than nothing and better than what I'm getting out of it now, lol.

Even my other "Miner formerly known as the good TerraMiner" has gone down the drain and I haven't even touched that one.  It was running at the full 1,622 GH/s when I first got it and set it up to mine.  In less than a month (and dozens of reboots to try to get it to start mining better, which only seemed to result in losing more hashing power each time, which is annoying...) it is now down to barely 1,000 GH/s!  (It is currently running at 1,035 GH/s at the time of writing this.)  It looks like CTA0 is still running at max capacity as I am getting 811 GH/s out of it, but CTA1 is the problem.  It is throttled WAY back to only 220-225 GH/s and it is still running temperatures around 60-75 degrees Celsius.  Looks like it is time to redo all of the thermal compound on that machine as well.



Haha, small world, right?  I've been mining on CKPool as well with my miners.  It has been pretty decent for me, but the guy who sold me the AntMiner S5 told me to switch to the AntPool for better payouts.  He said they don't charge any pool fees, as opposed to CKPool's 0.9% pool fee.  IDK, for some reason I still like mining on a smaller pool to help distribute the hashing power of the network more so everyone isn't just mining on the same big pool, but the no fees is definitely a big lure for me...

OK. Sorry about that. If you are getting 12V at the input connection then swapping board location probably wont help you. It sounds like an issue with the board. Arctic silver 5 is non conductive but it also sucks. Noctua is much better IMO. Do any of the status LEDs light up at all?

Just wanted to let you know that running the goldstrike's directly into a linux box and bypassing the BBB did not yield and noticeable results for me. I ran several different versions (from 4.3.5 to 4.9.1) of cgminer and the results were all about the same. I was using the binaries and did not compile but I would expect the results to be the same.

I got around to attaching my dead board to a battery yesterday using the cables which led to the
power supply. I pulled the board and walked it to my car.
 I had another person with me, neither of us heard audible pops
and we didn't see anything is bubbled/charred.

The first time I hooked it to the battery all the LED's lit up, then went off and all but one relit. I think it was D38.
All the others, including D45, lit up and stayed solidly lit.
I left it attached for like 10 seconds, we neither heard nor saw anything.
Did it again, same deal.
Did it again, seems like something had changed, the point where I attached the pos cable to the battery started to sizzle.
I disconnected, thought I'd just not pressed hard enough.
Repeat, pos connection started to sizzle.

definitely something wrong with that board. Has it ever worked properly or was it that way since you received it? If it's always been that way I would say try switching the polarity. I can't say from experience but I have heard reports of these shipping with reverse polarity and flipping the cables helped. D45 light means you have a dead chip but all LEDs should only flash on for a second and then begin cascading.

Carefully check the board again for bits of solder sticking out where they shouldn't. When mine blew it melted out the bottom and oozed out from under the surface mount mosfet. It doesn't sound like you had the same problem but it's worth checking anyway. If you have time you can try testing what components you can with a multimeter. You can get a good idea of the status of the inductors, resistors, mosfets and capacitors without removing them. Just look for a reading that's significantly off from the others. Then replace or remove the faulty component and try again. It's not a sure fire test but it's way easier than breaking out the rework station.

Besides that I'm running out of ideas. It's likely there is a serious issue with that board that's beyond my ability to troubleshoot remotely or even at all.