Well, right now I have a lot of stuff in flux. One of the new jallies is at 16gh, one is at 12, my main one is at 20, another two are at 8, and I'm probably going to leave it at that for tonight. I need to rewire the power supplies and start running off the real power from the corsairs in order to go higher. I would be doing that now, but my *&#@(* power cord didn't come from BFL.

Still, it's pretty hefty. And it's seriously starting to get warm. I have the window open in the mining room and I may start moving this project out to the work shed.

C

Wow, been mining since last night and I have .163 catcoins in the bag! At this rate I will have my first catcoin well before I have my next bitcoin with 120gh of capacity.

:-)

Well, I got my Black Friday jallies. Not bad overall, I've already added a chip to 1. Instant +4gh.

The chip came from LentBT, I ordered two to test, chips arrived well packed and quickly. Chips are new, new style ones, and went on the board with no problems. I'll put the second one on the other board later tonight, then stick the next four (yes, I ordered 4 more) to make these 5 chip monster jallies.

Moving right along :-)

Well, my BFL order came. Minus the $20 PCI-E cable, I guess it's on back order and I'm glad that they didn't wait for it. But it does mean I have to use the BFL cables for the moment....

Anyway, some thoughts: The miners do work, and seem to be working pretty well. There were three, well packed, clean, and new. Fans all blow down, they only have two drilled holes in the bottom of the back plate to see the LEDs, and they all use the newer style fan mounting which is much better than those stupid spacers of yore.

Put them all online and tried to read them with the BFL Commport tool. Well well well, they all do not respond, the tool thinks they are mining. Whatever the software load it looks to be different than normal. That's odd, I'll have to reflash them but I thought I would take a look at the statistics first.

Speeds are not bad. One is at 8, one at 7.7, one at 7.0. The two with green dots on the back are the fast ones, the red dot is a slower one. I can see how BFL is doing things.

Taking them apart they use the normal new style heat sink, which blocks the front vents somewhat. Yuck, I don't recall if my older ones do that, will have to check. Pulling a heat sink showed a thick pad of heat sink compound (ie: krud), I took that off and put on dabs of Radio Shack heat sink compound. Much better.

These things run hotter than my older jallies, not sure why. Temps were almost 50c, blowing down on the FTDI chip is probably a good way to fry it. Switched one of the fans, temp is at 45c. Bit better but still hot, odd.

Took one of the units and put it on the torture table for another chip from lentbt. Two chips came today, 4 more ordered today, guy is selling very good stuff. I recommend. Chip went on fine with the preheat to 350f for 5 mins, then 450c for 90 seconds this time after using a thin coating of flux and aligning the chip. Don't go by the markings, use a magnifying glass to look at the balls. They must be aligned perfectly, otherwise you're wasting a chip.

Put fan on pointing down and left sides off. Unit is at 48c, hashing 12gh, three lights on back. Nice. Will take another one to 12gh tonight, then when I get the extra chips will probably boost both to 16gh then do something else with my remaining chips.

Overall, good product, but running hotter. I'd recommend flipping the fan if you're running it with the sides on, otherwise take the sides off and look into replacing that crap on the bottom of the unit.

C

Anything? Seriously I sized an Evo monster heat sink, the problem is you just need to drill and tap holes to fit the BFL board. The keys are:

1) Pull heat off the board any way you can. Oddly enough you can pull a lot of heat off the bottom, put a big-ass sink there.
2) Keep airflow on the backs of the chips for 2 reasons: It will cool the FETs and keep the stock AL sinks cooler. You know those don't completely cover the ASICs, right?

C

Blasphemer! Catcoin is the only coin!

Been thinking about replacing my ibm x41 laptop with a pi for when I move this mess out to the solar shed. Quick question:

Can the Pi draw it's power from a powered hub?
If not, can one use a non-powered hub to drive about half a dozen devices?  These would be jallies and a chili; I'll get rid of my stupid crock-erupters.

C

Indeed, running a side fan against those components is key. But I wonder if it's possible to keep them cool with the case together and on.

*sigh* I wish BFL had sent me one of these things back in November when I was first researching this. Could have saved a lot of time, flamage, and RMA damage. I'm beginning to think that a single heat sink on the 1850 chips would prevent everything from blowing up.

C

Honest answer, not worth it. Older servers might be 32 bits, which are way slower than 64 bit systems for things like scrypt. And the supporting chips on server class systems burn a lot more power for what they do than cheap-o trashtops.

I remember running Seti@home in the 1990's on a 16 processor NCR4300 with Ppro chips. It was one of the fastest systems on the network, but it was eclipsed in a few years by a pair of P4's.

C

Thanks. What happens when you run it with the case on?

Reason being my big flame-out with the little_singles is the 1 volt supply. On the big units the 1 volt supply is a hell of a lot better protected with sinks on the top and bottoms of the FETs yet it still blows up. Why?

My begining theory is that people take the cases off, which is bad. That messes up the cross flow that is supposed to happen. Worse, the way those sinks are mounted the 1850 chips are behind capacitor banks and some other things. Those chips are very, very critical as they are the high frequenc push/pull for the gate drives on the FETs. With more power drawn those drivers are worked harder. Heat them up too much and you blow the chip, then that locks the FETs *on* which causes them to blow up with a smoking foom.

Solution in the old days was to run something like a 2708 high current FET driver between the signal generator and the FETs to ensure they were forcing the gates down as needed. This is lower voltage stuff, but still if the 1850 overheats then that board is going to go.

Question: Can you check your FETs above the hashing chips (other side of the board from power and USB) and tell me if one little square chip is hot as hell?

C

I give up. Configured my miner to cpu mine *CATCOIN*

Oi.

C

No. They won't. There is absolutely no end to human stupidity on Ebay, when someone will pay $200.

That's TWO HUNDRED DOLALRS

For a blown jalapeno.

Yes, they can be fixed. But swapping out the FTDI chip is *HARD*.

Morons. There is a universe of morons on Ebay.

C

You rock. I've replaced a few of those on the BFL devices; bitch in heat.

How did you do it on the Chili? And what is with those chips?

C

This is going to be a thread in which I think about cooling issues on the BFL larger boards.

So I'm fiddling around with the BFL30's, and I noticed something odd in pictures about the cooling.

It looks like the aluminum heatsinks are put on the board in such a way that their fins are 90 degrees out of phase with the cooling air from the big fans. In other words the end fans don't seem to do dick.

Worse, if they're blocking the cross-flow then the 1 volt regulators are sitting in the shadows of the aluminum blocks.

So just how do the fans work, and which way is the air supposed to go? I think if one rotated a sink 90 degrees then the crossflow air would go through the fins instead of just bottling up against the end fins.

And which way do the fans on the heatsinks blow? Up or down?

C

I wonder if that's it: The normal BFL chips don't take so much of a hit on an error because they all run all over the place. The Chili runs itself in lock-step, so when it has an error it's a total fail on all chips and not just the one chattering.

Which brings up a point: Is the error due to a heat issue? It's amazingly constant, maybe the microcode runs things fast enough to have that many errors or something.

But yes, 38 is pretty darn good. Might just enjoy that.

I'm in a state of shock, but it's from a different bitcoin thing, so at this point nothing will surprise me.

In the meantime the BFL commport thing was written by Red_wolf, and it's probably the most useful thing in the planet. Let me find the link.

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/jalapeno-single-sc-support/4564-diagnostic-tool-bfl-com-port-scanner.html

He made a bunch of versions, start at like page 4 or something. It's really useful.

C

Gee, if I give that info out then everyone will buy the item in question, the price will scream up, and no one will earn anything.

However using one's little ole noggin and some thought, one can make 100% return bitcoin for bitcoin.

C

Christ, maybe they scraped the total bottom of the barrel and used three Z grade chips. I have noticed that if you set the max frequency too high that chips may not fire, never seen one so screwed up it wouldn't start on 7.

That's kind of cool actually. Just saw your image, holy fuck it does have three chips enabled. That's cool!

Try speed 3,5,6 and see if it comes up a bit faster. One bit at a time. If you load up the BFL comm tool you can actually see what the chips are hashing at, which could really be interesting.

128lb ones can be flashed, I think eoakland figured out you have to set the compile option in the code to be for a 128kb chip. It does work, but if you don't do that you brick. And sounds like one of your bricks is crap, cool.

C

Given that I'm 45 and have a lot of experience behind me (including dot.coms and a fair net worth) I do have to say there were some pretty lucky moments in my life that would have set things on a very different course.

Sure it's nice to think we made our wealth by the skin of our own hands, and in a sense that has some merit, but I know way too many dot.com people who worked like hell at places like intercon, digex, and the like who ended up with dick. And some people from ftp and the like who made out exceptionally well. And some people who got lucky, thought it was "skill" and promptly lost it all in the next venture.

And luck is a tricky thing: Looking back I see that I was exceptionally lucky to be kicked out of college in 1986 for inadvertently crashing the VAXes (hey, you run batch jobs that resubmit themselves and sometimes shit happens) because my compatriots went on to extremely ordinary lives.

Never confuse luck for skill, or skill for luck.

Still hashing this morning at 39+Gh, peaking at 40gh, but the third statistic in BFGMiner is still about 2gh less (the one that is shares submitted to pool and accepted). Still not quite sure why, the rejected shares is <1% and errors are at a solid 5.5%.

Have heat sinks coming for the FETs, yes they are hot even with a fan on them. But man this $49 water cooling thing from newEgg is incredible. I have a dead jalapeno board coming in without chips so I can use that to see how/if I can fit water cooling on my J units. Well worth it.

C