Very interesting post tolip. I appreciate the link for the JTAG and mentions of neppy boards as I haven't had a jupiter or neptune to confirm.
Would be nice to make those bridges cheaper, my new batch will be ready this weekend (for those that don't want to make their own). Also note, the bridge boards aren't just rewiring pins. There's a voltage regulator on there, hence the burning out of some boards, that will also have to be taken into account if you want to make your own (you can use a Harwin M20-7872042 and a Farnell 1256663 for the connectors to fit with the Pi).
I'm not too sure about having control over that cyclone though.
I was suggesting above that if you run power to the Pi thru the original Pi power connector you can use the voltage regulator that is already installed on every Pi. If there is ONLY a voltage regulator on the bridge and not also a voltage level shifting logic part that might explain why they are going kaput before their time. In that case I'd suggest adding a part to deliver the proper voltage level logic(as if it were a BBB) the controller is designed for. It's still just a bandaid and using a BBB is cheaper than 0.5BTC for a new bridge board. (this assumes that someone ports the software) I posted a few times in the OC thread instructions for setting up a BBB to compile software. Has anyone asked kfc if they have a BBB flavor of tit FW??? If one must throw BTC at something I'd suggest asking Luke-jr what he'd charge to port the kfc Pi 'utility' code to the BBB. He is/was quite fluent in the details of what goes where on the Pi and BBB. (just an idea if there is no willing tit programming talent in this thread) I think in one of your posts you mentioned burnt traces on the bridge boards. This kinda does not make sense, I could see killing Pi's happening or killing a part on the bridge but not burning copper. There should not be enough current between a Pi and a controller to smoke PCB traces. A Pi runs fine powered by a typical USB port, this means less than 0.5A @ 5VDC, equates to 2.5 watts or less, mentioned already by others. The Cyclone IV on the controller gets it's power from the 65217A power chip also on the controller. The FPGA depends on the 65217A being set up correctly before it will operate. Thusly, troubleshooting a controller should start by verifying power. I'd guess that some large portion of dead controller boards are just blown 65217. It is an easier part to repair than the BGA Cyclone. Definately the 65217 is doable with US$50 hobbyist reflow tools and they are under US$10 each qty1. I'm not trying to ruin your fun, rerolling the bridge PCB artwork sounds like fun if it's for something that interests you. But it doesen't sound IMneverHO like the ideal cost effective long term solution for the wider audience of tit users. You might try one of theese instead... https://www.adafruit.com/products/2426or https://www.adafruit.com/products/2427They are already 5V tolerant but may not lead to correct IO pins. It's a common enough challenge for solutions to have already been found and commoditised specifically for the Pi. Why re-invent the wheel? If you like to solder start here... https://www.adafruit.com/products/801and add your favorite 5V to 3.3V buffer chip. As usual, YMMV  I get it, you want to use what we have to fix our shiz. Problem with this cheap solution is that it requires more people that don't care enough about it and rather not invest the time. Hence my conclusion to just get the PCBs made on a mass scale. The more people that want, the cheaper it will get which is the best it can get with bulk orders. And I am certain the copper blew out on the bridges. All of my boards have had that issue on multiple controllers with multiple different PSUs after working with the same ones after some time. Just bad design is all. And yeah, rerolling these loafs of bread are fun and why I enjoy everything about cryptocurrency generation. I will gladly help anyone who is willing to take the bridge/controller situation further (software/build wise). If there's any of you out there that care enough  |
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Very interesting post tolip. I appreciate the link for the JTAG and mentions of neppy boards as I haven't had a jupiter or neptune to confirm.
Would be nice to make those bridges cheaper, my new batch will be ready this weekend (for those that don't want to make their own). Also note, the bridge boards aren't just rewiring pins. There's a voltage regulator on there, hence the burning out of some boards, that will also have to be taken into account if you want to make your own (you can use a Harwin M20-7872042 and a Farnell 1256663 for the connectors to fit with the Pi).
I'm not too sure about having control over that cyclone though.
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Nice suggestion but I have no idea how to do that second part. Also, Im strongly against any sort of centralization of the miners, which is what ur proposed idea would do.
I get the centralization part. But that's just for those that choose to use it. It can be optional. I can help create the second part if you just feed and get cube data from a web API. Would be a very helpful option, and pretty good for statistics. |
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Ok, time for another question to all ya guys!!!!
If there was a way to keep track of last used volts / clocks for any given cube which was previously plugged in or swapped around on the pi ... would it be useful for yall?
I believe i can code something up that would do this, using the serial number of each cube to keep track of their previously used clocks & volts on a specific pi.
IE: If I coded this up, this is what would happen: lets say you have a miner with 2 cubes and you moved those 2 cubes to different ports or even swapped them around(on the same pi), the next time you boot the miner up ... the voltages & clocks would have moved automatically w/ the cubes to their new slots.
That would definitely be a selling point for me. I moved around my cubes a lot (aside from making it look like I was doing cool things). What would surely sell me, is if you created a mini cloud webservice that would save cubes and their clocks/volts so that when I move them from controller to controller they would not need re editing. Would also be nice to see the average amount of cubes and their clocks/volts globally too. |
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It's not about bandwidth (I mentioned bus to refer to protocols and speed). Speed IS a factor here when dealing with an ASIC that has it's performance rely on speed. You don't think your miner would hash faster if the program that was feeding it work was on the controller board rather than your PC? I mean, it's a micro improvement but that's all it takes sometimes. It's about the microcontroller on the controller board. This is how companies keep hardware closed down so that they control the flow. Any ASIC, any FPGA. It's how we do things.
I suppose you could leak all the cables and just get obscure information, but that's slow and may not result to anything if everything is encrypted (knowing KnC, they would encrypt it). It would be much easier to reverse engineer a chip that we know the schematics on. I've been working on exploiting the cyclone on the board with some overflows and some old techniques, but i'll need some more time. Like I said, it's nothing like the old Cyclone chips.
**EDIT** I stand corrected. Tried sniffing the cables. Looks like building a software solution will be possible, unfortunately, speed would be the problem.
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...I seen a couple posts about the jup and nep having similar physical boards but the titan is a whole other ball game. It has a cyclone microcontroller on it, which i'm in the process of reverse engineering but it's a new one and it's not as simple as the cyclone III. I can see why KnC decided to go with it for the controller board. If I can pull out some compilable binaries from from the chip than I should be able to duplicate the whole controller like I did with the bridge.
Why does the controller need to be duplicated physically at all? It should be doable in software. At that point, it's just a matter of hardware bridging to serial cables, which can be bought off-the-shelf. I'd love to be able to control my cubes via ethernet or USB, and eliminate the controller entirely. Edit: Let me also say I seriously doubt that KNC runs their cubes on same little turd controllers they gave us to use. I would imagine that KNC uses some other form of cube control in their data center. We should be able to replicate that somehow. The problem is, they put the software that knows how to communicate with the cubes, on an encrypted chip sitting on the controller board. Most ASICs (not just miners) have controllers that communicate with the hardware much faster than a computer's available bus will allow. Having the controller not be part of the host allows the titans to be independent and their efficiently won't be reliant on the host computer (raspberry pi in this case). The controller is definitely needed when dealing with these kinds of things. If you compare and contrast with the BFL monarchs, they directly connect to your host PC, but rely on modified BFGminer binaries. |
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This is probably a dumb question but I have not seen it addressed anyplace.. I don't suppose the bridge connector used on a mercury/saturn/jupiter/neptune board could be used as a bridge or at least modified as such? again unlikely but just for clarity I figured I'd toss it out here..probably not one being a BBB to port board and other being PI to port board and a 2nd newbie question... I have read that the boards are the same between the say the previous BTC KNC boards *jupiter/neptune* etc ....but if that is true is it only for the NOV such boards? and by the same I mean PHYSICALLY the same. I realize the FPGA chip I think it is has not be reverse engineered thus no clone Titan Controllers anyway just catching up on the stuff here beyond my expertise (which is much) Yeah the beagle bone uses different IO pins so the bridge would be significantly different and wouldn't work. Yeah I seen a couple posts about the jup and nep having similar physical boards but the titan is a whole other ball game. It has a cyclone microcontroller on it, which i'm in the process of reverse engineering but it's a new one and it's not as simple as the cyclone III. I can see why KnC decided to go with it for the controller board. If I can pull out some compilable binaries from from the chip than I should be able to duplicate the whole controller like I did with the bridge. |
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Hey GenTarkin any ETA on version F  No version F, not exactly sure what the next version will be called. The reason for the long time between releases currently is because of my lengthy testing of "Energy Saver" ... to date its the most complex thing Ive coded into the firmware. Im goin on vacation in a couple weeks, if its not out by then it wont be till January sometime. Have you decided if you're going to keep KnCMinion bundled or not? I was thinking of making a more user-friendly web interface from scratch to deal with the backend (I hate switching between minion and advanced just to check if configs work in real time). If you're willing to let me work on a web interface, think you could PM me your firmwares web files? Do you have a titan with my firmware installed? If so, all the web files are located in /www of the pi ... u can use scp to copy that folder out or if ur on windows use winscp and modify away =) Im not really focusing on any more webgui enhancements at this point in time except working with whats already there. I am going to keep KNCminion because it doesnt get in the way of any coding changes I make so its like a freebie for everyone =) I actually don't have any functioning titans anymore (my bridges burnt out, and fried one of my PIs that had your firmware on it.) so I can't really pull any files  |
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Hey GenTarkin any ETA on version F No version F, not exactly sure what the next version will be called. The reason for the long time between releases currently is because of my lengthy testing of "Energy Saver" ... to date its the most complex thing Ive coded into the firmware. Im goin on vacation in a couple weeks, if its not out by then it wont be till January sometime. Have you decided if you're going to keep KnCMinion bundled or not? I was thinking of making a more user-friendly web interface from scratch to deal with the backend (I hate switching between minion and advanced just to check if configs work in real time). If you're willing to let me work on a web interface, think you could PM me your firmwares web files? |
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I think you've got another issue if you've got PSUs giving jolts that fry hardware, friend. I've measured power consumption of the entire Titan controller with 5 cubes and the LCD... 2.5w. Nowhere near enough to burn anything out.
Actually it's quite interesting. I've used their recommended PSU's and Platinum grade PSUs. All of them eventually burn out the bridge. It's not 2.5w (power consumption). You have to realize that with anything using a molex/atx, sends a slightly higher jolt of electricity to the device, hence why transistors and resistors exist to keep control. The bridge isn't designed for multiple changes in voltage ever. This means, changing PSU's, unplugging it and plugging it back in, power cycling the controller, all can present such a problem. Same thing happens with every electronic device. I've already had about 5 people contact me with the same issue. I've gathered some statistics, and it's not the PSU's. It's the bridge. |
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Those of you who need a bridge connector for your titan controller, i'll be having them manufactured and sent to me to test. If you need one it'll be 0.5 BTC.
I've increased the copper thickness on the bridge, so if you dont need a bridge but want your controller to last longer, than you'd still want one of these. PM me for more details.
A bridge connector? What is that? the only real piece someone can make between the raspberry pi and the knc ported board....supposedly it is a common port of failure of controllers I will likely get one ..just to have stuff around in case something goes boom on 1 of my 2 titan controllers....got a raspberry pi B+ I could use in a pinch ...getting stuff together for the re paste of a cube or two...with fans and heatsinks (Swedish guy mod on youtube do a search of knc titan he pops right up) glen trakin's firmware for the knc titan 3rd party stuff know how to make a replacement ribbon or what to do if a voltage plug goes 'pooey' on the cube proper to replace so with the bridge (comes out to about 80 bucks piece of mind per titan) wtf.....the only point of collapse after that point in time is the titan data port board itself..that folk have said would have to be reverse engineered anyway.... (i've spent 0.5 btc on 'dumber stuff" anyway my logic in for all this anyway (damn i'm an 'asic prepper' need to get a camo sticker to stick on my titan cubes...sorry they are 'evil' they will brick themselves will i be prepared Yeah, Searing is pretty much correct. The bridge connector is the PCB connecting the RPI to the bottom Titan board. If you're using any other PSU than the one they recommend, that bridge will for sure burn out (6 burned out on me). I've designed some better ones with thicker copper junctions to stop the PCB from burning out when the PSU gives it a jolt. |
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Those of you who need a bridge connector for your titan controller, i'll be having them manufactured and sent to me to test. If you need one it'll be 0.5 BTC.
I've increased the copper thickness on the bridge, so if you dont need a bridge but want your controller to last longer, than you'd still want one of these. PM me for more details.
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Pricing of any product is BASED on demand of that product. Higher demand, higher price. Scarcity is also taken into consideration.
Sooo...how many have you sold so far? Only 2, but that really isn't my point. My point was how pricing works. Right now, only those than can afford will buy it. I'm not trying to offer cheaper prices as if this was a bulk. Go look at how low I brought down prices just because of the sole fact that I had a lot of them. It's not like i'm a company here. These aren't retail prices, everything is negotiable based on availability and margin. |
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Can I please have some of what you are smoking to think that is an even remotely reasonable asking price for these pieces of hardware?
Those things will likely never ROI at the asking price and it really looks like you are trying to fleece someone with this "deal" here.
If they are making you money I highly suggest holding onto them instead of looking to pass on your "earnings" to some other user.
You should probably see if you can get the units fully working as well before you attempt to sell them.. Selling broken merchandise is shady.
You're not using your brain. If you read through this thread, you'd realize (and my other BFL thread since you're so interested in if i'm claiming these as a "deal") that I have fully working cubes, and some sets with non fully working cubes and are selling them on a cube to cube basis. Not how KNC sold them in batches. If you can get a hold of a 4/4 die working titan cube for cheaper let me know. Oh wait. you can't, because anyone who has them, wouldn't sell them. Any way, since my boards are shot (just the connectors), only my cubes are for sale now. Just sold two a few weeks ago, more on eBay currently and they come and go, keep eyes out there for a look at the market.. Normally wouldn't weigh in with something like they but since you are trying to tell everyone no one is selling fully working cubes I figure I would chime in.. Why would you chime in now without any available for sale? I never meant that anyone with fully working cubes wouldn't sell them anytime ever. When it's profitable, then they wouldn't sell it (unless they don't want to make a profit in which case this thread no longer applies to them). Since you chimed in and can't offer any links to fully working cubes, my statement is still valid in this context. I don't see why everyone has to be so hostile here. If you don't like the pricing, then just leave. Then just state your price and leave it at that, don't presume to know what everyone with a Titan will do, and use that as some sort of justification.. Just state your price, whatever it may be and stick to it, stop with the bullshit and you won't get comments from me.. Am I missing something here? When have I changed the pricing? That doesn't make sense. Pricing of any product is BASED on demand of that product. Higher demand, higher price. Scarcity is also taken into consideration. You obviously don't know what you're talking about. I did state my price, and I *expected* humans to know why I stated that price. Since for example, you, didn't know why, I gave some context. There is literally no bullshit/false information in anything I said. I don't see why my pricing even would anger you at all to call bullshit on... i don't know what bullshit you are talking about because I literally am only stating real life information. Anyways, if you ask instead of poking and probing maliciously, maybe you wouldn't get such a dry response. |
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Can I please have some of what you are smoking to think that is an even remotely reasonable asking price for these pieces of hardware?
Those things will likely never ROI at the asking price and it really looks like you are trying to fleece someone with this "deal" here.
If they are making you money I highly suggest holding onto them instead of looking to pass on your "earnings" to some other user.
You should probably see if you can get the units fully working as well before you attempt to sell them.. Selling broken merchandise is shady.
You're not using your brain. If you read through this thread, you'd realize (and my other BFL thread since you're so interested in if i'm claiming these as a "deal") that I have fully working cubes, and some sets with non fully working cubes and are selling them on a cube to cube basis. Not how KNC sold them in batches. If you can get a hold of a 4/4 die working titan cube for cheaper let me know. Oh wait. you can't, because anyone who has them, wouldn't sell them. Any way, since my boards are shot (just the connectors), only my cubes are for sale now. Just sold two a few weeks ago, more on eBay currently and they come and go, keep eyes out there for a look at the market.. Normally wouldn't weigh in with something like they but since you are trying to tell everyone no one is selling fully working cubes I figure I would chime in.. Why would you chime in now without any available for sale? I never meant that anyone with fully working cubes wouldn't sell them anytime ever. When it's profitable, then they wouldn't sell it (unless they don't want to make a profit in which case this thread no longer applies to them). Since you chimed in and can't offer any links to fully working cubes, my statement is still valid in this context. I don't see why everyone has to be so hostile here. If you don't like the pricing, then just leave. |
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Does anyone need the Titan bridge connector boards? (PCB between RPI and KnC Controller). I'm thinking of cloning the boards if KnC doesn't grant me the schematics (hell, they may even grant schematics for the actual controller boards since they dont support or manufacture the titans anymore.....haha I crack myself up).
er...i don't see any point in your working that hard on this....UNLESS that is a common point of 'failure' on the controller board? So far, all three of my controller boards burnt out because of this "bridge" connector (the one with the LED labels on it). right under it, one of the paths burn out if your PSU surges. I switched from an 80 Gold PSU to an 80 Platinum PSU and it burnt it out for all my boards. When it burns out, the RPI fails to even be powered. When manually powering the RPI, the burnt bridge still won't send any data to the board. So yeah, for me it's been the main reason my miners are always so hard to move around. I think I can clone it pretty well, so if anyone else has some burnt ones, i'll be able to provide. |
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Does anyone need the Titan bridge connector boards? (PCB between RPI and KnC Controller). I'm thinking of cloning the boards if KnC doesn't grant me the schematics (hell, they may even grant schematics for the actual controller boards since they dont support or manufacture the titans anymore.....haha I crack myself up).
I BADLY need the schematics for the titan cube pcbs. I have a connection that can re manufacture them in a professional pcb manufacturing facility, and they can be sold at a very low cost, and BETTER quality. Let me know. Vegas Well even with the schematics for the PCB, the controller has a Altera Cyclone IV on it that I could maybe reverse engineer last resort. KNC would never give up the schems of their chips, but the cube pcbs could be redone. I'll take apart a cube or two and see what I can do in the lab. Have you tried sending the cube PCB to a chinese PCB cloning facility? I've done it a couple times for some older complicated FPGAs and they do a really good job (minus hacking the microcontrollers/firmware etc). Thats what it is. I have connections to a few chinese fab facilities but they want the schematics. If we can make this happen, then I may create a group of investors to reman these as it can get costly. That's a good idea. I meant the actual PCB cloning facilities. Not the fab labs. There's a couple companies that will take the PCB you send them, and literally copy it but creating gerbers for you. It's just the only thing they can't do is dump the microcontrollers, which is where we'd need to hack it beforehand. |
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Can I please have some of what you are smoking to think that is an even remotely reasonable asking price for these pieces of hardware?
Those things will likely never ROI at the asking price and it really looks like you are trying to fleece someone with this "deal" here.
If they are making you money I highly suggest holding onto them instead of looking to pass on your "earnings" to some other user.
You should probably see if you can get the units fully working as well before you attempt to sell them.. Selling broken merchandise is shady.
You're not using your brain. If you read through this thread, you'd realize (and my other BFL thread since you're so interested in if i'm claiming these as a "deal") that I have fully working cubes, and some sets with non fully working cubes and are selling them on a cube to cube basis. Not how KNC sold them in batches. If you can get a hold of a 4/4 die working titan cube for cheaper let me know. Oh wait. you can't, because anyone who has them, wouldn't sell them. Any way, since my boards are shot (just the connectors), only my cubes are for sale now. |
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Does anyone need the Titan bridge connector boards? (PCB between RPI and KnC Controller). I'm thinking of cloning the boards if KnC doesn't grant me the schematics (hell, they may even grant schematics for the actual controller boards since they dont support or manufacture the titans anymore.....haha I crack myself up).
I BADLY need the schematics for the titan cube pcbs. I have a connection that can re manufacture them in a professional pcb manufacturing facility, and they can be sold at a very low cost, and BETTER quality. Let me know. Vegas Well even with the schematics for the PCB, the controller has a Altera Cyclone IV on it that I could maybe reverse engineer last resort. KNC would never give up the schems of their chips, but the cube pcbs could be redone. I'll take apart a cube or two and see what I can do in the lab. Have you tried sending the cube PCB to a chinese PCB cloning facility? I've done it a couple times for some older complicated FPGAs and they do a really good job (minus hacking the microcontrollers/firmware etc). |
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Wow. All of my titan controller board bridge connectors burnt out. Well there goes this thread.
Damn, that sucks. On the miners or the controller? If you wanna dump them on the cheap I may pick them up and see if I can fix them. The controllers. I may dump them, depends on how much. |
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