Reserved for something.

Reserved for tech stuff. UPDATED JUNE 2017 First tech tip:

0) Neptune controller boards can work with Rpi and the bridgeboards for Titan miners. They are the same controller board.
0) Neptune BeagleBone Black CPUs can now work with KNC Titans. We figured it all out on pages 28-30, it takes time but it can be done.

0) I managed to hack the KNC Titan code so it can run on a Neptune BBB. Link is at:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/vfks74mxqlrfyf9/knc-lightfoot%204gb%20version.7z?dl=0

You need a 4gb or larger SD card, use admin/admin to log into the web page. This was a lot of work, feel free to donate.

1) If the controller board isn't seeing the miners it might be because one of the capacitors on the TPS chip's power rails is shorted out. This seems to happen, might be crappy caps or something else. Regardless there are three power rails feeding the FPGA and if one of them has a shorted cap the controller will refuse to turn on the FPGA.

* A second problem is a blown FPGA. This seems to happen a fair bit, however the BGA chip can be replaced, and I can do this as well.

A good way to spot this is to watch the bright LED on the side of the control board. If it comes on bright during boot then goes out, the TPS chip is probably good. If it comes on a quick flash, off, on, off, on, off then the FPGA chip is probably shorted.

Send it in I can fix this.

See page 3 or so for a nice set of pics on how I fixed this.

1a) I can fix the following Titan issues:

Blown bridgeboards for KNC Titans
Blown power connectors on Titan cubes
Incinerated power connectors on Titan cubes
Cubes that short out the 12 volt power supply
Cubes that shoot fire out the back of them
  (These usually wind up shorting out the 12v supply)
If your Titan has one die, I can try to get it to 3-4 dies
If your Titan comes up with no hashing but can be seen in KNCminer, I can fix it
If your bridgeboard is dead, I can fix it but you have to replace your Rpi too.
If your Rpi is dead, just get a new one and power it via the USB port. Lazy but works.
Any and all controller problems (reboot, etc)
Little displays that don't display anymore (sometimes)


2) If fire is pouring out of your miner like molten lava through a jungle village you might have run the DC-DC supplies a bit too hot and set fire to the capacitors. Replace them with 22-24uf caps and try to keep the DC-DC temps below 60c or so. Given the lack of airflow over them and that weird-ass insulated blanket thing on top of them, that would be a good idea.

I can fix this.

3) I've been able to get many blown boards up to what I would consider to be full power (600gh, <300 watts) not too bad. Do have to trim a bit since one of the power supplies runs a tad bit hotter, and the other unit is currently cooled by a water block. Weird.

4) If you're nutty enough to overvolt/overclock your Neptune or Titan here is a very important tip: NEVER MOVE IT WHILE RUNNING OR HOT. Power it off, wait 15 minutes for it to cool, then move it around. Why? Because the chip can get so hot it is softening the solder underneath it. Moving it with that huge heat sink can squish the solder into short-ville. Bye bye unit.

5) Never plug or unplug the molex thing from a running power supply. Always power off the supply then plug it in or unplug it. Why? Because all the caps on the power supplies will cause a powered molex to SPARK and damage the plug. Then it overheats and you feel the burn.... If you see your molex plug is discolored, has burned pins, or is a charred hunk of wreckage, drop me a line:

I can fix this.

6) If you have blown Neptunes or Titans and want me to look at them, let me know. Getting pretty good at this, I can now fix shorted Titans and Neptunes that don't talk to the controller. Rates are reasonable in bitcoin :-)

7) If you think your beaglebone is screwed, check the bottom of the board while powering on. The left LED should come on then the right LEDs should flash in a nice little show. No right lights, no booting. If they don't boot try re-installing the KNC firmware. If that doesn't work reflash it with a stock debian build then re-install the KNC firmware.

I can fix this.

I did have one BB that would not come up but made a high pitched whine on power up. Turns out putting a micro-SD card cleared this and allowed boot. Turns out DPO (dreaded previous owner) must have picked up the board and pressed down on the SD interface pins, bending one to short power to ground. Don't do that :-)

9) Both Titans and Neptunes seem to have "islands of stability" in terms of frequency and voltage. For example 350/450/450/450 at -.3v will yield a solid 600gh, but backing down to a 200/450/450/450 will cause the first pair of supplies to stop putting in current. Weird, but happens on several cubes and several controllers so this is not a fluke.

Run your Titans at 250mhz per die max. Really, the diff between 60 and 80mh is where the death zone is.

10) Never unplug the 10 pin connector from the controller or cube while power is applied. Always shut everything down. When plugging in the cables make sure they are on top of all 10 pins in the Titan and oriented properly. Doing this wrong blows up the cube and controller and yes, I can fix this

More to come. Donations of parts and junk welcome.

Ok. So someone asked me if I could fix some broken Neptune miner boards that would not hash, partially hash, and so forth. I said why not and sure enough a box of junk appeared.

What this thread will be is a technical discussion on what is wrong with these miners, and how someone with medium SMD rework tools might be able to get them working again. I'll cover the basic boards, controller boards (got two of those too in unknown condition) and the like and see how far I get.

Second post will be pointers to things I have found, as trying to read through a hundred pages of KNC threads is a bit complex.

What's the worst that can happen?

(Edit: Fixed to Titans first since we're now in the ALTCOIN section)

Quick question: Trying to get a Neptune board and BBB/controller working. Doesn't see Neptune, BBB up and running, only 3 i2c devices in ssh.

Is there a command line way to verify if the bbb can see the FPGA? Likewise do you need 12v on the neptune up just to see the voltages or anything on the dc-dc converters?

root@Neptune:/boot# waas -g all-asic-info
Error opening /sys/bus/i2c/devices/3-0050/eeprom: No such file or directory
ASIC board #0 is non-functional: Bad EEPROM data
Error opening /sys/bus/i2c/devices/4-0050/eeprom: No such file or directory
ASIC board #1 is non-functional: Bad EEPROM data
Error opening /sys/bus/i2c/devices/5-0050/eeprom: No such file or directory
ASIC board #2 is non-functional: Bad EEPROM data
Error opening /sys/bus/i2c/devices/6-0050/eeprom: No such file or directory
ASIC board #3 is non-functional: Bad EEPROM data
Error opening /sys/bus/i2c/devices/7-0050/eeprom: No such file or directory
ASIC board #4 is non-functional: Bad EEPROM data
Error opening /sys/bus/i2c/devices/8-0050/eeprom: No such file or directory
ASIC board #5 is non-functional: Bad EEPROM data
{
Error opening /dev/i2c-3: No such file or directory
Error opening /dev/i2c-4: No such file or directory
Error opening /dev/i2c-5: No such file or directory
Error opening /dev/i2c-6: No such file or directory
Error opening /dev/i2c-7: No such file or directory
Error opening /dev/i2c-8: No such file or directory

Thanks!

There's no problem, it is a very close to *perfect* marketplace with *perfect* competition, as close as you're going to get.

   

• Perfect market information--Yep, Bitcoin is transparent. Everyone knows what everything is to the second.
  
     
• No participant with market power to set prices--Yep, I can't charge more for my mining abilities over anyone else, as the product (hashes) has no added value. For a pool, if they set prices or fees too high people leave. Poof. If a mining company charges too much a new mining company will come in (assuming the profits are high enough). But with the glut of mining stuff out there this is not too much of a problem.
• Non intervention by governments--Pretty much. They're trying though, but at the moment it's pretty simple to mine.....
• No barriers to entry or exit--Not really. You can get into the market for the cost of a miner and a PC. Very little licensing, factory making, whatever...
• Equal access to factors of production--This might be the difference if miners consolidate. However someone else could just build another miner from silicon.
• Profit maximization--Fuck God Yes!
• No externalities--Everyone's gotta pay something for power and/or heat disposal.

So with that, I think this quote sums it up best from Wikipedia:

And given that this is normal profits, the following from "Profit (normal)" really should be read by any miner:


Fun stuff.

When the halving happens mining profits will be... well halved. Unless bitcoin doubles in value mining gear value will drop. Likewise new mining gear will mean older less efficient gear will become worthless due to difficulty.

And of course remember that it's a perfect marketplace in a zero sum game,

So no, rig prices will not skyrocket. However the concept of a "universal rig" that can mine different types of coins *could* be a good idea. Banks and junk would buy them for their private blockchains, put your own chip on them with your particular altcoin hack and go.

Of course that's not a good idea for the banks......

Sorry, I was thinking bitcoind. I've noticed I have been drawing more stupid-fire ever since I brought up a full node, even more than when I started running a tor relay. Simple enough to deal with, still kind of lame.

I'll try limiting the connections some. The proper solution though is to probably fire up a ubuntu system on an old laptop and run a copy of bitcoind inside network peered to the outside one and others. That should bring it back to sub-second responses while allowing the externally facing one to serve as a full bitcoin node and a p2pool node that can supply blocks to others behind nats.

Pretty much unlimited. Otherwise if p2pool crashes and restarts it can't get a connection. Besides, this is a nice thing to help the network overall.

Okies. I tried compiling from source but got a runtime error on launch. Will work on it. Interesting, I just checked the node (not mining) and I see:

Warning: LOST CONTACT WITH BITCOIND for 4.0 minutes! Check that it isn't frozen or dead!

Is some flunkie DOSing the nodes again? Hm. Actually python is running hot at 94% with bitcoind running at 15%.

Well Gbt latency seems to be a problem on my node, even after bringing mintxfee to .000whatever2 it's still climbing and requiring a sw reset of bitcoind every day. At the moment it's at 4.72 seconds, with spikes to 15-20 seconds. At that rate I would fail everything with p2pool, correct?

(Mac mini server, 0.11.1 bitcoind, 8gb memory, SSD boot disk and bitcoin block disk)

Honestly just solo mine with it. There is a chance you could hit a block, small but why not? Don't buy a miner, it is a zero sum game. Buy some bitcoins instead. Or a hooker. Or two.

Indeed this is interesting, I think it would be useful to do at least 12-24 hours to see how the variance levels out.

For myself, I've found my 3 hour averages will swing a bit, but the 12 hour ones more closely track a local p2pool node (which is about as close to "I control everything" as it gets :-)

It's a bit more than the chips. Plenty have made chips, then failed on the implementation.

For example: Power: How are you going to move 500amps@.5 volts an inch across a chip without significant drop? Are you going to put your dc-dc converters in a nice hot line so they commit fraticide, next to your USB control chips so they blow those up, or around the chip in an implosion style that causes the DC-DC's to miss the air cooling and... well, implode?

Heat: Heat is the ultimate bullshit detector. Where are you going to put the heat generated from the chips, from the DC-DC's, from the 12 volt input lines (oh that's always funny). from the control boards? Which way is the heat going? Up, down? Through that wonderful silicon? How are you going to move the heat somewhere else, remember the more complex the more likely it will break in shipping, handling, and general user error.

Signal noise: Nothing funnier than having your outputs corrupted by noise from those big bad buck supplies you built there. How do you handle that?

Mounting: Nothing like having the ole air cooled heat sinks falling off due to glue problems.

Users: What are you going to do when your purchaser runs it in a sealed room in the middle of a desert?

Optimism: Design for the worst case, it will probably be worse than that.

Coding: Greatest chip in the world is useless if you can't get the answers out super quick and new questions in. What is your queuing tools, language for talking to it, ways to handle errors?

Companies that have had success have been through iterations already with their earlier technology and have had time to figure out what works (ant's concept of small chips instead of big dies is a very good one, despite the repeating power and control parts) and how to keep it going (note the S2-S5 designs being very similar. Reason for that, it works). You're stepping in with a knowledge level of zero. There are probably a ton of other gotchas waiting around.

This is complex stuff. As in "Intel looks at you like you're nuts" complex. And even if you build the ultimate miner the difficulty will probably render the investment moot unless bitcoin goes to da moon. In which case wouldn't you have been better off just buying coin and hodling it?

Someone should stamp MINING IS A ZERO SUM GAME and NO FREE LUNCH on every miner. But in a way they are selling a dream. Don't sell dreams......

Please remember that mining is the ultimate zero sum/queen's race game there is. The faster the miners that come out, the higher the difficulty and the quicker they become totally obsolete. It is a perfect market, therefore long term profits are impossible.

* Queen's race: Where you have to run faster and faster just to stay in place.

Open temp probe perhaps? Not sure if they used a single sensor or a bunch of them running separate a/d's. Never used an antminer, how many temps does it normally report?

Right, and as your power use increases lineally the heat output increases linerally but the water flow/pressure to the turbine increases by the oh fudge this is math, probably pir^2. Regardless your pipe is getting bigger, thus the flow through your heat exchanger is increasing faster than the chips dump heat into the water.

Hm. How much would an abandoned dam cost I wonder.

How much temp rise? Well, the size of your pond after the tailstock would determine the temp rise with 1j of energy rasing one cc of that water 1 degree c. It would probably take a bit....

Hm. Now I'm thinking of building a dyson swarm around a star and harnessing all the star's power output to run bitcoin miners. I wonder what that would do to the difficulty assuming we use all those generation 1 Avalon chips. Hm. That may not work due to latency/lag between the chips and the closest bitcoin nodes. Oh well...

Um. Unless you're thinking Hoover dam levels of power generation the waste heat would be minimal. Remember your turbine needs water flowing by it to work, so that flowing water can take the heat away. Now if you build a nuclear power plant.........

Oh yeah, but then you're using the grid as your battery. If you're doing this in a cabin far from humanity that's what you will need.

Also it's interesting to note how much power you need to run a modern-ish life off grid. A fridge pulls 100-200 watts 24*7, there's 20% of that amount. Lot of batteries and panels needed to run the modern life. So go hug your utility guy sometime....

Stepping this up, if we replace 5 watts with 1,000 watts we simply multiply everything by 200. In other words:

30w*200=6kw solar array
12 volt battery@22ah*200=4,400ah battery pack@12v

That will mine 1,000 watts 24*7 with no utilities. Best miner right now is that Avalon thing, 2.7gh?

Got kinda big there....

Or a 1,000 watt peltier water turbine attached to a 1kw generator. Bit smaller. :-)

Let's see: How about if we build the smallest miner and go from there:

Raspberry Pi CPU with hardwired ethernet: 400ma @5v=2.0 watts
Silly little Block erupter (300mh/s) 500ma@5v=2.5 watts

So we have a unit that pulls 4.5 watts per hour. Round up to 5 watts. For a 24 hour day you will need a total of 120 watts of power in a 24 hour period. How do we get that?

Solar: Since the sun don't shine all the time we need to generate 120 watts in the amount of time the sun is shining. Normally in the US you get about 4 full sun hours a day plus 2 more hours for morning and evening. So 6 hours. 120/6=12 watts. Or a 15 watt panel.

Now, you need a battery bank big enough to be able to support the rig when the sun ain't shining, so 18 hours*5 watts=90 watt hr battery. If this was a 6 volt battery you would need a 15ah 6 volt battery.

However batteries are not perfect in terms of charge/discharge so you need about double the solar size. So a 30 watt panel which happens to come in a 6 volt configuration (7.5 volts actually so it's enough to charge a 6 volt battery).

And you don't want to flatten the battery every cycle, so go 33% deep and get a 45ah 6 volt battery. Now you can handle a day without sun *except* if you do the panel will have trouble catching up. But you doubled the panel size so you will probably make it.

And there you go. To generate 300mh for free get a 45ah 6 volt battery, a small dc-dc converter to maintain 5 volts regardless of battery level, and a 30 watt panel. Or a 22ah 12 volt battery, same 30 watt panel (now 12v) and one of those 12-5v USB converters.

Get a better USB stick and you can do 2.5gh or so on that same power input.

Hydro would be much easier, just generate the 5w 24*7 and off you go. Minimal battery to smooth out fluctuations, but much simpler.

Perhaps, however remember that any reasonable ASIC bitcoin miner is going to be stepping power down from 12 volts to .5 volts or so for the hashing chip. Fluctuations in the incoming power supply will make the FETs work a lot harder (ie: hotter, blow up, etc) so it's in your interest to have a stable supply. A car alternator can put out 13.4 volts regulated from a wide variety of input values (because the field current can be regulated with precision) and that will make a good 12 volt 100ah battery run for a nice long time (5-10 years).