It's nice to hear from a dev.  Do you know anything about that 8-pin interface?  If it's just a serial link then perhaps I could mod a USB-RS232 adapter and recompile cgminer to pick up it's device id?  Probably some link aggregation going on in that usb interface chip.  I did notice that the NEC chip is just a USB hub.  There's another chip next to it, but I can't read the numbers.

Found that device id in Bitmain's cgminer repo, so I can confirm that is correct.  Since we have two blades and only one device ID, I think we can conclude that the blades are not USB.  I think there must a separate controller chip that is communicating with the SOC using an on-board USB interlink.  Probably some custom serial hardware, so much for rolling my own controller :-(  Sure hope Bitmain replies soon.

got four antminers in the mail today.  One of them has a bad controller, the chains are not found.  

I noticed in the log that there's a problem with the USB:
Wed Dec 31 19:00:11 1969 kern.err kernel: [   11.870000] usb 1-1.1: device descriptor read/64, error -32

And this in dmesg:
[    7.150000] usb 1-1.1: unable to read config index 0 descriptor/all
[    7.150000] usb 1-1.1: can't read configurations, error -32
[    7.260000] usb 1-1.1: new full-speed USB device number 6 using ehci-platform
[    7.290000] usb 1-1.1: device descriptor read/all, error -32

When I run lsusb on a good miner I get:
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0409:005a
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 4254:4153

But with the bad controller I only get:
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0409:005a
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002

Does anyone know anything about the interface of the mining blades?  If they're just a USB interface then I should be able to build my own controller and compile the software from bitmains repos.  Kind of strange that there's only one missing USB device though, if they are USB.

pw,  I had various coins stuck at coinmarket that I was able to withdraw yesterday.  They were only up for a short while.  I wont trust them again until they've been up and running stably for a week or more.

The price of AntMiners is falling faster than one could mine with them.  I bought four yesterday at 1.4, today they are 1.37.  At current difficulty one could only mine 0.0237 per day, so it's more profitable to wait until the prices stop dropping than to buy.

AntMiner price is dropping even when BTC/USD is rising.  Any ideas what they are basing the pricing on?