Indeed guess ill sell some ltc this month to pay bills. Drat.

It's a pretty weird little pump but nice. LTC does well as a way to pay people reasonable amounts in a reasonable time. And it's not Bitcoin-C/Trash

15,000ish is a reasonable number to wake up to otherwise. I'm HODLing and seeing where things go....

Agreed. I'm figuring out the S9's, and if they're anything like the S7's this may not be too hard a fix....

C

Interesting. The 27402 buck controller is pretty dirt-simple, feeding a 60a low side FET and a pair of 60a high side FETs. Given the voltage differential is minimal they can get away with this using 60a FETs on the low side with a fast switch cycle of ground. Clever. Still I wonder why it's not coming up at all...

If this is what Antminer uses on the S9's then these are really simple to troubleshoot and fix. Hm....

This is fun. I'm working on a pair of R7 boards that are down, tried a 50k PCB variable resistor between R17-U2 and ground, no dice.

So I started checking things. The voltage on a good board at the choke with the board plugged into a PS and no controller is about 8.5 volts. So there is a stock setting. One the two bad boards, the voltage is a solid 0.0 volts.

Checking resistance on a disconnected board I see about 18.4k at R17-U2 and ground on a good and bad board. Thus I think the variable resistor is ok.

Checking resistance on the choke to ground shows a resistance cold of about 30 ohms, so the chips are good.

Checking resistance on the +12 to ground I see the 1k and up reading as the caps charge, so that's good.

Checking the FETs I see the gates are not shorted to ground, source and drain go to ground normally. It's *possible* the low side FETs are shorted, can't tell yet (If they were, the controller chip would shut down the high side FET when it saw the cut-through current go way up).

So it looks like the buck regulator here is bad. Either it's the controller chip, or the low side FETs. Interesting.

Next up: test the low side FETs manually. If they're good I think I have a dead power converter chip. Not too bad to replace, but man I hate QFN packaging...

C

It's like the undead, rising up from the graves to challenge the blockchain just one more time.....

Just to put this in perspective:

S7's are profitable
KNC Neptunes are profitable
Fucking JUPITERS are profitable.
I'd be willing to bet Monarchs are profitable.

It's that weird....

Depends. If you have an ohm meter can you check resistance between pins 4, 6, and 8 to ground (pin 10). If pin 6 is low (under 100 ohms) the cube is bad. If pin 8 is low I can fix that, likewise if pin 4 is low.

Remember: Don't run them too hard to burn the plugs and always power down before removing any ribbon cable anywhere. And with litecoin going up in value you never know.....

Well, looks like I am back in Neptune business. Maybe I'll fix all of those oddball boards I have here and bring them up again. They do work well with water cooling blocks.....

Holy crap. Are neptunes positive?

That rinmac looks a lot like how I used to drive my 67 911S. Rear wheel steering....

Meantime Bitcoin seems stuck at 15k and litecoin's jumped to 125. Switching to LTC for small stuff, how is the dumping of bitcoin trash going?

Way back when I was a tot, a number of friends founded a major ISP. With that one of the founders (a true hacker type) didn't get stock, but did get a brand new Maybach for his time. Year or so later his apt lease ended and he didn't have a place to live.

So he just moved into the Maybach. Would park it in million dollar home neighborhoods in the evening, curl up in the back, sleep, eat, live. The champagne chiller and built in fridges were nice, as were the automatic curtains and such. Took his showers at the office, and lived a homeless man's life. Likewise his sound system was amazing....

No one ever hassled him for the 6 months he did this. And the fact that his car was worth more than my house (and was nicer to boot) made class comparisons pretty... meaningless.

Depends. I really like good quality Porsches and such: Quality costs money and if you buy quality over hype then you can really enjoy your purchase. Yes, Lambos are mostly hype, I haven't driven many Ferraris but then V12 engines sound goooooooooood. When they run.

But yeah there is a big difference between my Prius and any of the Porsches.

First check the temps. In the advanced tabs under CGMiner_Status, the first temp is inlet and the second and third are temps on each side of the unit. Are temps on sides 2 and 3 about the same?

Check for power supply issues, maybe one side is running with an undersized supply. What is your 12v input voltage?

Try throttling down the max frequency to 100. What do you see performance-wise, is it stable?

Set the max frequency speed to 400. You should get around 3.2th or so. See if that is stable.

Main problem is maintenance. You can buy the Ferrari, but can you afford the time/parts/etc to maintain it? They can be finicky.

Thus you need to make enough to support it. Other cars may have a lower maintenance cost and have benefits like being able to live in them when times are bad (see my posts on my homeless friend who lived in his Maybach).

C

Why do people keep trying to pump bitcoin trash? (BCH)

No not at all, this is fascinating. I'm just putting it in between other paying work, it's good research.

So short Bank of America and ML? Got it....

They're starting this Sunday? Oh boy.....

Fair enough. You can start the generator early, but you need what is called a power transfer switch with line frequency sync in order to do a transparent cutover.

What a PTS does is fire up the generator, bring it up to speed, then slow it down a bit so that the 3 phases of the AC waveform match the phases of the power company. When they match perfectly the switch closes, the generator is on line, then the power line is cut off so the supplies keep running.

Now.... If the frequency phase of the generator does not match that of the power company then your generator will line up in a fight with the power company and your generator will try to force the power company to speed up or slow down. That won't happen; your generator will get a surge and blow up. In the 1950's my dad remembered working on the generator at his college, they had 3 120 volt light bulbs bridging the generator to the mains with a big switch. The trick was spin up the generator,  speed up/slow down till the 3 light bulbs went out (no current difference, in phase) then throw the big switch (at which point the generator would be synced to the mains). One time a student closed the switch with the bulbs barely glowing. The resulting WHOOM rocked the generator (it was the size of a small building) on its mounts as it came into sync....

C