S7 chip, but yeah. That is an impressive price, given they wanted $2.50 for BM1384 at quantity 100k. I guess they must have a reel of old stock laying around.

Well heck, that almost makes it too easy.

Well the S3 was both very quiet and very reliable, something that people seem to have forgotten how to do since then. So why not roll back to the best design?

Using the command-line flags given in the first post.

Wow. I've never seen that before. I've seen zero, one and two but never more than the right number.

I see, that makes sense. Hopefully VH sees that and does something about it.

Might turn the voltage up a bit on the 2Pac or something. I don't know if it's a work restart thing or a power imbalance thing but sometimes they'll kick out. The only way to bring it back up is to cycle the ASICs' reset pin, which for most people means unplug/replug because there's no software control of the reset line.

As for why it kills cgminer, that I don't know.

Do the precompiled downloadable Windows executables provided in the first post and referenced in the Windows post not work on your system?

Why are you using a USB scope to look for 1572? It's something you look for with your eyes. It's written on top of the chip. Without a board in front of me I have no idea what the silkscreen label is, but I do know it's the 8-pin SOIC device with PIC12F1572 written on it. Which is all information you had.

But anyways, first thing you need to do is measure the voltage at the place you've been told to measure the voltage (I'm pretty sure there are even clearly labeled pictures in the potentiometer fix thread). If it's not in the range you've been told to look for to see if the PIC is dead, you don't need to worry about all the other information you were given because it's not the fix you need - which is also information you were given.

Sorry if my criticality comes across as dickish. I'm well aware I tend to expect more out of people than they're used to and am frequently disappointed, but I don't intend to change. It either makes people leave me alone or work to be better, which in the long run are both winning outcomes.

Remember when I mentioned you should do some research on how buck regulators work?

Note also the explanation in the first post. The PIC sends a signal to the digital potentiometer tied to the buck regulator, and that adjusts the voltage. Remember how NotFuzzyWarm told you to measure your voltage at the big inductor?

Note how in this thread there's talk of using a PIC programmer on the 6-pin header. That's because the 6-pin header is ONLY USED TO PROGRAM THE PIC. There is no measuring of voltage going on there. The voltage people are referring to (~9V for a dead PIC, >10V for a working one) are measured at the buck regulator output. That's been stated multiple times in this thread and the potentiometer fix thread.

Also note that the 8-pin SOIC I told you to look at says "1572" on it. That's the PIC12F1572.

So what you do is exactly what's been told to you so far. You fire up the board (make sure it's got 12V power and is plugged to the IO board by the 18-pin cable) and measure the main buck regulator output voltage (at the inductor). If it's around 9.3 volts, your PIC isn't setting the voltage probably because it's dead. Buy a new one, flash it with the firmware given in this thread (aaron6 linked you to it) and then power up the board again, see if the voltage is better.

If you power up the board and it's reading over 10 volts, this is not the fix you need.

If you want a 100GH USB miner but you don't want it to run at 10W, it's currently physics and the state of semiconductor technology preventing its manufacture. The best chip available right now could get you about 30GH from 2.5W USB power. I'm currently developing that stick. Take a look at the recent posts in my GekkoScience 16nm dev thread.

Efficiency is good - not great, but good. Makes me wonder if they're running the chips hot or if they're regulated. I'd like to see it with the shell off.

"gekko" -> Compac?

The part you ran installed a wholly different version of cgminer without touching cgminer-gekko. cgminer-gekko is a driver written by Novak integrated into 4.9.2; what you installed is a greatly improved driver written by VH and integrated into the newest cgminer. It works better even for Compacs. You'll probably have to update the directory your software is looking in to find the right cgminer, point it to the one you just built.

You know, the first few paragraphs of the first post in this thread told you the PIC part number, as well as what the PIC does in the circuit and what to look for to diagnose a dead one. Except for explicitly stating what ISP programmer to use, it answered basically all of your questions from the last few days.

My stuff isn't exactly "mass production" on the scale of Block Erupters and U1/U2, but my stick miners will run about as cold as you want them to. The 2Pac will get about 8GH at stock USB power if you set it to baseline voltage and 75MHz.

The reason there are no mass-produced stickminers at all right now is because the industry doesn't care about anyone except themselves and high-dollar commercial customers. That's why the only miners made in the last two years are >1KW 80db monstrosities requiring industrial power and exhaust. Why should they focus efforts into a $30 miner and get a thousand annoying customers to wrangle when they can make a $2k miner and sell a thousand to one guy?

Assuming you're talking about 2Pacs, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1764803.0

It was on page 2.

I haven't done any serious mining in a couple years. The last thing I bought new was a single S7LN; before that it was a single S3. Power's cheap enough here I can make do with older gear but mostly I've been mining for heat. New gear prices have sucked for a long time. Pretty much since the S5/SP20 price wars followed by the S5 openly unapologetic price gouging (when it jumped something like 30% in one day, the reason being "because we know we can get away with it"), that was kinda what killed it for me.

You, me and about a thousand other people are really looking forward to those upgrade boards.

He's already talked to me. I told him yesterday what's said in this and other threads - when the PIC is shot, the board boots up to about 9.3 volts instead of over 10 volts. Without a bus sniffer or a good scope to check the I2C lines into the DPOT that's the best way to know if it's working or not.

...huh? There were some BE200 stick projects in 2014, but as far as I know the BE300 never saw production. Engineering samples were tested and data released in December 2014 with efficiencies between 0.2 and about 0.35J/GH, making them almost equivalent to the BM1385 which appeared something like 8 months later.

My BM1384 Compac was originally a dev step toward making a pod. There was never intended to be a stickminer product, but the first step was to make sure we could talk to one ASIC. Enough people wanted a stickminer that I went ahead and finished designing it. I kept working on pod stuff on the side, but honestly I was limited by drivers. Novak's Compac driver was a rehash of U3 support in Icarus and we had no real idea how to support multiple chips natively. VH spent weeks reverse-engineering the signals coming out of an S5 controller to do it and now has a driver that works for an arbitrary number of BM1384, from 1 to a couple hundred. That's the real key that makes my job as the hardware designer not necessarily easy but a heck of a lot more possible.

It would have been nice to have worked with BE300 instead of BM1384 in 2015, if ASICMiner had not evaporated. Those looked to be some pretty solid chips, and with ASICMiner's open support of third-party dev with BE200 - compared to Bitmain's hostility toward everything and everyone that isn't Bitmain - everything would have been a lot easier.

Anyways, USB Block Erupters.

I just received prototype boards for a new pod formfactor and the USB hub today. Gonna try and get something working in the next week or so, but manufacture comes first since I'm way behind on 2Pacs.

VH is working on the first steps for BF16 code. I've got a few things to run by him that should make the advanced controls necessary for a full-scale pod easier to get going. The first step is a stick (already have everything for a proof-of-concept, just need driver code) followed by a half-scale pod (new formfactor) based off stick controls; the next step is a full-scale pod with advanced controls and then the S1/3/5 refit boards, which will basically be three of the full-scale pod integrated on a single board with a single controller.