Morning all!

SOLUTION FOUND. REPLACE THE FT232 CHIP AND YOUR JALLY WILL LIVE AGAIN. GET SOMEONE WHO KNOWS HOW TO DO REWORK LIKE XBOXES TO DO THIS FOR YOU. THE PART IS $3.00.

I've been hacking away at my BFL Jalapeno and have been noticing that a number of people have been saying their Jalapenos (jallies) have been failing with either a power supply failure, or a failure to connect to their desktop computer with USB errors. Or both. Or they get a new supply and now their jally isn't talking.

This seems to be happening in the EU, England, and Hong Kong. After reading the reports and such I think I know what the problem might be, and will be updating this thread as it develops. I'll keep this post for summary advice, and put the details below.

NOTE: I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING YOU DO, DON'T DO, OR THINK! These are only the observations of a random Internet user, please don't take my advice as legal counsel, gospel, or whatever.

Anyway, what I would do if I was in another country with 240 volt mains is this:

1) Get another power supply on your Jally. Get one that is UL/CSA/Whatever your country considers a standard for grounding and tolerances. This would be a good idea IMO.

2) If you can get a true Isolation transformer, plug the jally into that depending on local codes and laws.

2) Put a USB Opto-isolator between your jally and your computer. Note I have not tried this yet, as I am in the US and this is not a problem, but I *think* this will prevent the USB from blowing up. Something like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Multi-purpose-USB-Isolator-Built-in-DC-DC/dp/B00899UVGW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1386683733&sr=8-1&keywords=usb+isolator

Back when I was working on high voltage DC electric car stuff, you would always use optoisolators on the RS232 segments to prevent a ground loop from causing problems.

3) If you have GFCIs (Ground Fault Circuit interruptors), plug your stuff into one of those. I don't know power in Europe, or if thes exist.

Regardless, if you have a Jally outside the US and want to comment, please feel free to do so. I'll update this thread with some thoughts.

Thanks!

Actually that makes sense: One of the outboard fets failed, it's companion blew shorted when you used the big power supply. Pull them and replace them then try with a supply with a 7 amp fuse.

Watch the temps on those FETs. I can't stress enough; that is the weak point. I put little copper sinks on mine.

C

FUCK ME.

Are you in Euorpe?

The FETs should not have overloaded on two chips. How big was your spare power supply, capacity? Picture of the board?

Want to send it to me to review? You're good, and it's out of warranty, but I'd like to see this fail mode.

C

Well now....

I think I see my problem. Chip light 2 is lit and should be the middle one, but it's the corner one #3 which is occupied. Which means that 3 is shorting out 2 and 1, which kind of makes sense.

So there we go. I could pull 3, then resolder it and 2,1 but things are so screwed up that I dare not. 8 is still open, but I put so much heat on that slot when I was trying to set a chip that I blew off some caps. I think I'm at the limit for now. Just need another jally sometime.

C

It's not a device permanently plugged into the mains. It has two wires, it's like a walkman. It's not a desktop computer.

The power supply is supposed to prevent this, but thanks to a conflusion of events I think it goes foom.

C

Ok. Here is what is happening to all the jallies:

What I think is happening here based on a lot of research this weekend is that the power supplies are failing in such a way that they put the voltage on the jally's negative side. Specifically I am guessing they have a cap between the primary voltage and secondary to improve the rather crummy power factor. Now eurpoeans use 240 volts, which is 120 volts on either side of a common ground, each leg 180 out of phase. The problem is when you drop ground, the device is charged with 120 volts.

Normally this would blow a fuse, but the jally is not grounded, it's a two wire connection. So it's ground plane (including the USB) goes hot. However your PC is, and I'll bet that your PC's USB cable is tied to ground to keep you from getting electrocuted when you take your iphone into the tub while it's plugged into your PC. That's nice. But when you plug a jally that has a hot USB to your grounded computer, 120 volts goes through the USB circuits on the jally and blows them open. Would also blow out a "smart" hub if that was in the way.

Doesn't blow your computer since it's the ground. Your computer ok, your jally go foom, you go waah...

See?

So.... Fixing this would be a bitch on wheels. My guess is the FTDI chip at least is toast, plus possibly the ATMEL chip's serial FIFO buffers. That's why the rest of the thing comes up but you can't communicate. At best the FTDI is reporting garbage.

Worth fixing? Maybe. But not when you pay more for the unit than it's worth. And even for someone who owns one, if the thing will only hash $200 worth of bitcoin how much could you charge to fix it?

Who'se at fault? Well, BFL maybe for sending out crappy power supplies. Ok, so they RMA. Now in a perfect we have infinite amounts of money world then one could have put in optoisolators on the USB segment, but they didn't. Who does? No one normally. We do this on 300+ volt electric car power drive systems because there's nothing as hilarious as a 300 volt 1000 amp short to ground in a car. Ok, maybe there are other things, but I don't want to know about them.

Regardless, someone is going to get bitten by a blown power supply; they don't seem to fail safe (shut down) when the caps fail. However since the cases are not grounded I think it would take someone taking their jally into a bath to kill them. Note I have NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT, these are simply observations.

But it would explain why most of the failures are european. In the US, the 120 volts is hot/neutral with neutral bonded to ground at the breaker. A jally doing this in the US would either immediately blow up the power supply and breaker, or would have the neutral tied to the 12 volts which is tied to ground anyway. If someone had their outlet wired backwards (NEC code fail of the highest order) *and* plugged it into a grounded computer on another (properly wired and grounded) circuit *and* had the cap short (which is probably does less often due to the lower voltage) then this might happen. But that is rather unlikely.

Solution?

Buy a USB optoisolator. Use an isolation transformer, not just a UPS (think 40 pounds of iron weight). Use a better power supply. That sort of thing.

Now, everyone can tip me for this answer for saving everyone's precious jalapenos that are worth oh so much. 5% would be good :-)

By the way, I think you identified what has been killing jallies with USB failures and the rest of the unit working.

Nice job. Hey, by the way are computers in the UK all grounded as a matter of course?

Fixing it will be a bitch though; I think I know what and how to fix, but since jallies seem to be worth more dead than alive I'll let it be.

:-)

Someone who accepted my offer of .20 btc (a bad offer on my part) elected to tap out since they got an offer from BFL for a replacement, and a "working unit could then be sold for more than .2 btc to someone else".

Greed. Fair enough, I don't mind since I would have paid more than what the unit is worth. And after researching why things are failing on the jalapenos I know what the problem is, and what it would take to fix it.

Maybe I'll tell people if enough jally users donate to me :-)  Yes, mildly grumpy since some chips I was going to buy for .02btc each went up to .05btc each due in part to my posting about success in boosting the jallies in general.

Not sure if they are worth it now, Oh well.

C

Hee hee! My single Jally... Yeah, it's hashing at 20gh. But that's because I rule :-)

The point though is that from today (well tomorrow going forward) a jally that falls into my hand and starts mining can only mine another .15btc due to difficulty going up. That's why I posted the calcs from mining.thegenesisblock. Now I did assume 5gh and not 8 partially because bringing a 5 to an 8 requires at the least a $50 dragon and some skillz.

So I think it is a fair deal. The problem is you can "get" more than that on Ebay now for a working jally (.6btc at 1,000 rates) but this is not because the jally is worth it intrinsicly but because people are stupid as all hell. I could sell my block erupter for $45 now even though it will never even cover it's electricity usages.

It's that crazy. So no, I don't expect anyone to take me up on the offer, but it's not because it's a fair offer. It's because one can skin a more gullible person out there out of more money, which is the definition of "greed".

C

Pretty much, however if BFL had shipped earlier then the difficulty would have gone up earlier. It's a pretty simple world when you get down to it.

In the meantime I'm going to try not to buy into the hysteria. Going with what I have, if someone wants me to fix this problem then I'll get a unit for research. Just not going to pay through the nose to help people :-)

If you could post the lights to sockets, I would appreciate. It would tell me which of my chips is hogging the bus. :-)

Waiting on 2 jallies and a few chips myself. BFL should ship them soon...

Other stuff: I bought an extension cable for my jally, hoping to hook it up to my atx power supply. Learned something: That ain't going to work :-)

The problem is the wire gauges are like 18g, and the cable was getting warm from the power supply. Oh, and the voltage drop was down to 11.0 volts from 12.2 at the supply leads. So I think I am going to need to custom build my own cable as a 20gh jally draws a *lot* more current than a 5gh jally.

Back to the drawing board. I did order an ATX-3jp cable from BFL, but I don't know when all that is going to ship. And since I'm concerned about these power supplies and ground loops blowing the FTDI chips I would be happy to get off it...

C

Ahhhhhhhhhh.... Thus a 128kb code will fit in the 256kb space, but you have to explicitly define for 128kb chips.

Thank you for posting this. You should post it in the parent thread for firmware updates, on forums.butterfly and take full credit.

This solves the problem of adding chips to 128kb devices. Nicely done, you saved a lot of jally owners problems.

C

Could be queueing, maybe your queue is too long and work is being rejected as stale?

I shortened up my queue to 3-4 and it's added a gh to my speed at eligus.

C

That's actually kind of true, when the stock market imploded in 2008 I was too lame to sell anything so I just kept putting money in as usual because I was too depressed to change the allocations.

Made a lot. of. money. on that fail.

C

Honest answer? You now own 1.3 bitcoins. That's kind of cool, might want to buy a few more as the price goes down, but don't bet more than you can afford to lose.

Myself, I have 2 now from mining and my miner will just putter away. I'm buying mining equipment in bitcoins, so it doesn't matter if the price goes "up" or "down", it simply is.

C

*Really*

Hm. That sounds exactly like the FTDI error everyone keeps complaining about. It's not due to heat or reflashing, we seem to have that under control and my unit is not dead. I've been offering a bounty of .15btc for one so I could fiddle with it. But now we have someone with a clue that has it, so fix if you can.

Questions:

Examine the USB jack. It's not secured well, any chance one of the 4 wires is broken? Use a loupe/tester. If you're running sans lid there is no support, but even with the back plate a good shot on the cable will damage it IMO.

If not, let's look into the next thing up the line which seems to be the FTDI chip. It's programmed when the system boots so swapping it may work.

C

Ok, It's time to measure the depths of human greed, and human altruism. This is an experiment on my part, but the money sums, offer, and bitcoin involved are real.

I've noticed a lot of problems with the Butterfly Labs series of miners as of late. People are having jallies that are arriving bricked/going bricked shortly after purchase, 50gh units mining at 25gh, 25gh units mining at 10gh, devices that can't be recognized via USB/FTDI, and people setting fire to their Singles by overclocking.

With the exception of the last thing, all of these seem to be either user error or hardware problems. Given that I have roasted my Jally board at 400 degrees C, I doubt it's heat. And I have published all my work on boosting jallies for free, open. I want to know what's going on with this hardware. And I will post all my results here and on BFL for free. So it helps others.

And I'm willing to back it up with cold bitcoin. So let's see how rational people are here.

For the first Jally with a dead FTDI/DOA/runs but blows up, I will offer .15btc. That's what it will mine assuming difficulty goes to 895 in 3 days. And assuming the damn thing WORKED.

http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/a/72878a2ba0

Yes, it is less than what a person paid for it, but if you return it to BFL and get it mining Jan 1 you will make .0625

http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/a/3b12d07370

For the first SC/50 running at 25 or whatever, I will pay .75btc. Which is what it will mine assuming I get it running *NOW*

http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/a/a842525930

and almost as much as a brand new 50 will mine in Jan (.803) assuming you return it to BFL now, there's no shipping, and you get it back Jan 1.:

http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/a/71d1af3573

For the first SC/50 or SC/25 that is totally dead, I will pay .40 or .20 btc. This is based on the fact that they are totally dead, intact, and not stuffed in a turkey and include my risk assessment.

So let's see if anyone responds. I'm curious because I'm wondering if people will be rational, or will hold onto junk. The interesting thing though is I promise to publish all research and such for free on this forum. So others will benefit.

We'll see if that trumps greed. I'm making this offer because I got "lucky" by getting my Jally earlier than many, and have a pair of bitcoin to rub together. Why not try and help you all.

Let's see. And a serious question: Does anyone think this is fair? Stupid? I'm curious as to what people think.

C

So I thought I would write up summaries of some offers. Here's a recent one.

Person had a 50gh unit that would only hash at 25. Odd system, looks like half the chips are dead, no flashes done. Offered .75 BTC which is what a 25gh unit would hash, was told too low because 30's are selling for $2,000-$2,200 on Ebay.

Right. If someone could explain to me why a rational person would spend (assuming $1,000 bitcoin) 2.0btc on a unit that would only mine .75btc I'm all attention. Seriously, I built myself a 20gh Jally for $169+$100; why would I jump at an offer for a broken one.

Sad thing is that this is why the problems won't get fixed, and why people with FTDI jallies, or SC's hashing at zero rates will lose: Because everyone expects someone else to pay their loss plus a profit so the problem can be fixed and given away for "free".

Interesting business model we have here. :-)

I like the case; it's kind of cube-like and keeps my kids from screwing with the fans. Yes with it off heat is not a problem. Oddly enough perching the unit on the heat sink has it at a nice 60-65, so I'm good.

C