Oh those... pictures... are interesting. They look like BFL pictures, what were they thinking?

Let's see:

The jally board has one chip. Way more importantly, it has *no* MOSFETs on the 1 volt supply line. Those guys were going to power it off the USB line like some big Erupter. Well, we know that didn't work. But very interesting, no capacitors, no inductors, no nothing. That board would not have been able to do anything interesting.

The little single board is also interesting. 4 chips. 30 GH was the rated speed, I think they were either smoking something or the chips did not do quite as much as they thought they would. One would need 7+gh in order to pull 30gh with 4 chips, and it took eight to make 30, and even that is stressing the board's power supplies.

THAT is what happened. They totally mis-read the power consumption on the chips. They thought you could run a chip at super low power and 4.5gh for the jally, but it turned out they needed full power plus. So they had to use fully powered SC boards plus two chips because one wouldn't quite hash it (hah, I kill myself). Which sank the possibility of passive cooling, so into the dustbin went the coffee cup warmer cases.

The single/30 needed 8 chips, and you can't even run 4 chips in the box there and expect it not to overheat. Believe me, I tried, fail. Even with all eight, the power FETs were overheating so they had to add bottom cooling. Can't do that in a little single box, so they had to build the bigger box with space under it and a side fan. Made one box for 30 and 60 (dual 30's) at which point they just said "screw it, we'll use the little single boards and mid-quality chips for the jalapenos, offer a "bump up" to try to recoup costs by putting two grade A chips, and delay the singles and 60's.

And that is exactly what happened. Although running at full 30gh is at the edge of what the single board can handle without blowing FETs so they wrote code to limit the hash speed to 30+.04%. And they slowly shipped 30's and 60's, which explains why people there were grumpy.

But imagine being in the BFL factory: You have to put down twice as many chips, had to scrap a whole pile of jally cases, and worst you had to fill jalapeno orders with much more expensive quality cases, fans, power supplies, and fuck knows what else including boards with full power support for a product that cost several times as much.

And THEN you have to build new cases, double the heatsink counts, chip counts, and run the thing at the edge to meet the 30gh "promise".

Now your jallies hit the streets, and people start modding them. Word gets out, BFL leaves a lot of performance there, boost it up dude! The jally people can get away with it, and then the single/30 and single/60 people start doing it....

If the single/30 had split the chips across both sides of the board the users might have gotten away with hot-dogging it to 35+gh. But BFL was already way under the money rock with this; they needed to keep costs down so they sold the other side of the board with no components. Not needed. And they reduced the new speed sold to 25gh, which is much safer and will probably last forever.

So the Single/30 and Single/60 people load up code revs with no restrictions. Power draw goes way up, FETs explode, and people start bitching on the forums. Because they thought they could make their singles faster, expected it.

Ooops. Poor BFL. They have really tried to do the right thing here, even when many other companies said fuck it and quit. I do have to give them a lot of credit here, and I think the bashing is missing the point. They weren't malicious, indeed their solution was pretty damn impressive.

Maybe this is what happened. But the chips and pics and stories are all coming together with what I am seeing here totally independently. I wouldn't go over 6 chips....

Fascinating.

Well hm....

So let's think about this: The jally was a (stock code or not-stock code?) unit, two chips were added, it came up, and now does nothing. Let's try some diagnostics:

1) Does the front light flash on power-up and then go solid?
2) Do any lights on the back come on? There should be the power LED by the power plug, then at least two of the eight LEDs along the back between the power plug and the USB plug.

It should light the rear power LED, then flash the front light, then stop flashing the front light and light the appropriate number of rear LEDs from that set of eight. That indicates the system is up and running.

Nothing we did here should affect the JTAG port; have you ever had it programmed before now? In all my cases, I could always erase memories, then reprogram. Yep, checked my notes, even when the thing was dead as a doornail.

Can you get pics of the board without the heat sink on it? Something's odd.

Before I did my first chip, I knew I had to go to 1.2.9 firmware. I tried Tarkin's code stock and it failed my Jally before I even put another chip on. I had to realize that one has to define LITTLE_SINGLE and not SINGLE and compile to get things to work.

If you have the 8 pin programmer on backwards you will get the 0 volt thing. Always a good idea to do stuff one step at a time, never change two things (new programming and new chips) at once if you can help it.

I'd say have the person check the LEDs and report back, and make absolutely sure pin 1 on the dragon JTAG is on the red wire side of the 10 pin connector, and the jally's pin 1 is on the red wire side of the 10 pin connector. On mine the dragon has to be upside down in order for the cable not to have a 180 twist in it. If this person is going straight he (or she) is doing it wrong.

If you're still sunk, drop me a line and maybe I can take a look at your unit. The JTAG thing makes no sense, even shorting the +1 supply didn't stop that from coming up (and I spent hours doing that one fun night)

C

That thinking is in error for a coupled system like bitcoin.

Do you understand why?

Answer: They're coupled: If everyone was buying bitcoin in Jan/Feb/Sept then prices would have screamed up just as they did in the last week. Difficulty would not have gone up, so mining would be far more profitable. That is because bitcoin price and difficulty are linked, you can't change one without the other.

So *never* feel bad about the choices you made or did not make in the past. It all brought you to here. I paid in money, I earned bitcoin which is suddenly worth "money", and the lack of new miners is keeping me in the "money". All linked together.

C

Hmmmm. Can you post pics what were the temps how.was it cooled and how did you get 25gh on 4 chips total?

Check the fets and does it smell odd.

C

I'm sorry, was that line noise? :-)

Technically you're ripping yourself off with that offer. According to Genesis block it will mine at most .01xxx bitcoin, so .02 is the most.

However I did just take a look; I got it for $25 back when the difficulty was at 67m, it probably mined .14 bitcoin, with a max profit of $119. So 119-25=94 or so each, almost $200 profit.

So.................. Even though at the time it was the stupidest idea on the face of the earth to buy it, turns out it was a reasonable deal. Oh well, so maybe it *is* worth .035btc now, would you like to pay by bitcoin? :-)

C

See if it hashes at 30 or 60. You can also select Display, "M" option to see all the engines it sees. If it only sees 8 then something is definately odd.

Can you tell if both top fans are running inside the unit? Any smell of smoke or burned at all when you stick your nose to the external fan openings?

C

CK, ok; thought so. I have my BFL call itself all sorts of things, WAIT A SEC I can load that with all sorts of diagnostic messages if I want to. Thanks for the thought, now I have a better way of getting internal state out to the world without screwing with the USB port....

Anyway, from my POV that looks like a totally normal little single. Running at about the same temps as my jally with 5 chips, I'm cruising at 55c or so with similar voltages. So it's sinking heat. Also that hashing level looks like the limit is enabled, as it's really close to 30gh+4%. This is a stock firmware, right (yes, I'm asking again, just verifying)

Just as a cross check can you try it with BFGMiner? But I'd guess half the unit is down and the half running also powers the USB interface (it does have only one USB interface, right?)

C

CK, I run BFG myself, but how do you know if something is a little single, single, or truck? Reason is if this person loaded a custom firmware and you base your "what it is" based on the string back then I could see how cgminer would fail to load all the chips.

C

Take a look at my pics on the beginning of the thread. I put a big heat sink on the bottom, clears the board's vias through the AL plate, with a layer of heat sink grease. It drops the temps on the board by a LOT; very worth the time to do.

Ah, thermal compound. I'm using heat pads from frozencpu.com, seems to work well and flexible enough I don't worry about crusing the chips. Although as of late I have just been putting a touch of grease on the two original chips; they don't mine very hot, and it puts them and the new chips in prety much the same plane.

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Mmmhm. I am not going to exceed 24-27gh on my jally single based on this. Can't wait to get another chip so I can see if the temps on the FETs go up linearally or geometrically with load.

The problem with the warranty though is that they should be able to replace your unit. And if it takes 2 weeks to do that, it's two weeks of not hashing at current difficulty, the result may be a 20% hit to your profits or more based on diff changes.

That could be fixed by BFL offering some sort of conditional cloud hashing during the time your unit is being fixed. Man that would be a public relations *WIN*! Say when you get an RMA you get put into a special hashing queue where your hashes are immediately escrowed while you send the unit in.

If you didn't mod it, and they fix it, they send it back and when you take delivery they stop the mining in their cloud and give the money to you. If you did mod it, they keep the hash money.

That is a no-lose solution, someone suggest it to BFL. In fact that would be the biggest PR win in this kind of community and it would not cost BFL much of anything to do.....

Just a side note, from what I am seeing the two 30gh sides of the 60gh unit may be independent. In other words, failing that burned side should not affect the right side's 1 volt supplies.

Or, remove those FETs, fire it up (with fuses in the power supply lines) and you should be able to restart hashing at 25-30gh on the remaining side. Half a loaf is better than none and all that. I'd say 75% probability of this working.

Good luck!
C

Congratulations! I think the horozontal chips are the easiest to add; you have air around all four corners, best chance for a good reflow. Thanks also for the 450c for several minutes, I'll use hotter temps from now on. Likewise light 3 tells me a lot; mine is off, so I know which ones are at the corners now. Will verify tonight.


If you go past 4 I am going to highly recommend putting heat sinks on your FETs, possibly top and bottom. The little copper ones are working perfectly for me at this time.

What kind of pastes were you using?

A year or two. I've been working on this stuff since I wrote a credit card online web site in 1994, we even did the "charge your card $20 and bank the micropayments on our site" thing. Other people tried to do it, numerous failures.

But hey, back in the late 80's we were all supposed to hook up to the AT&T CONNECT X.25 network. Boy that and that mail gateway thing (MTS? What was it again) really didn't go anywhere....

C

Classic arbitage, but to be honest the right answer is just don't buy these things. They're cute, funny, but they are not for real mining.

A worthless item on sale for 50% off is still a worthless item.

C

By the way, someone shared with me an interesting set of pictures of an SC30 that was having issues. The important thing from my understanding is that SC30's have only one side of chips, including only one side of power FETs.

That is very interesting. It implies that the two sides are actually independent, boosting this is the possiblity that there are two power feeds from the power supply. If that's the case, then it's possible that an SC60 could have a power failure either in the supply or the +1 rail that would shut down half the unit and leave the other half running (depending on which side also runs the USB logic).

So if your unit is only hashing at half power, see if you can check the power supplies. If one is down, do NOT try to backfeed with a big power supply unless you put a fuse in series, something like a 6-7a fast blow. For proper testing I would use a 3a fuse and not start hashing (just see if the board comes up). If the fuse blows, you have a short on that side of the board.

If you send unregulated power into a shorted FET, there will be... smoke....

C

I smell a deal forming here. .035btc each, I have two..... Hell, I'll even put them in an envelope with a postage stamp :-)

C

I think people have been reading this thread. Yes, I need another chip myself, might be awhile. On the other hand I helped some people who were trying to get rid of the chips, so I guess I did a good thing overall.

Indeed, that's a huge order size, especially given the chips have been around for awhile. If the price was in the 10-20 range I'd give it a go.

No, I think what they did was fair; I bought a 4.5gh unit and I got a 5gh unit. They used mediocre chips on mine, but I was still able to get to 7.3 which was not bad at all. It also got our units shipped earlier, as I think they used up all the taller gen 1 chips on the jallys because they were ready to go.

Please do and feel free to link back from this thread. A lot of people seem to be reading it, and I'd be happy to serve as a clearing point for knowledge and ideas and such.

C

Sure. It's probably one of the better ROI deals out there right now. We have the equipment, one just needs to get chips on them. Problem is I don't have quite the confidence in myself yet to do this for others, or the spares pool to make up for any errors.

Keep watching, and if you think you can do it give it a shot. What's the worst that can happen? :-)

C

Sweet. That's a pretty good set; I could not get more than 13 cores running on one chip. Enjoy the extra gh.

C

It was a zip file with the elf. You load the elf on the Jally with Atmel studios through a Dragon or appropriate JTAG programmer.

The person who made a great 1.2.5 elf is ckolivas

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