It is for that reason alone as to why we have not accepted new orders in the last few months. We're in the process of changing our business model completely, which will only be an immediate delivery option upon receipt of payment.
Excellent. Only once you get a handle on actual production times for stable miners should you even think about doing capacity-induced order delays. Those of course would need to be kept within FTC guidelines and fulfilled as they state. That includes the need to stop/slow down orders as needed until production capacity can be increased. It is a bitch but has to be done. Our company has turned down 3 large orders so far this year because we are booked into next year. |
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Question: I have 2 boards hashing at 380Mh is this correct for 2 boards? I guess all ASICS are working on the 2 boards. Any way to check individual ASICs?
Opium/ISA would know for sure but sounds a little low. Think 200ghs or more per board is expected. Depends on what they set the clock and such at but I say sounds like a safe setting or maybe a chip has a few bad cores. |
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Kudos! Better than a poke in the eye and at least something for now.
Did they at least get it right that a cable should lead out from a board and not have to be folded over?
Seriously, no reason aside from in-house profit point for an assembler to not use pre-made ribbon cables or even customs from the likes of Digikey. Dirt cheap...
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It seems they also put the ribbon cable in backwards. Maybe they did it twice why it works. Electronics 101, the RED pin on a ribbon cable is pin one. I don't know what they sent me but these boards even have different caps on each of the boards.
Red wire.  The board/backplane are not keyed either so is possible to plug the boards in backwards. You'll have to look back or maybe Opium will pipe in but think the heatsinks face the ribbon cable end of the backplane. But you want confusing??? SMD large cap polarity. Makes no difference if the orientation mark is red or black. Seen both colors used for both + side and the - side. Gotta know who made them and check their data sheet to know. LED indicator chips same way. from several makers the red family use a band to mark cathode yet for green ones the band is the anode. WTF? edit: Looked in my pic collection and big sinks face ribbon connector. Don't forget to feed the little floppy drive power connecter next to it. |
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<snip>
Here is my issue with this complaint about poor parts.
AMT promised delivery on February.
If the boards were coming out of the manufacturer and testing bad in January, they should have informed customers of the problem and like any legit supplier, refunded anyone who requested.
Now we are here 5 months later, nothing but bad shipments if any shipment at all.
The point is this, do not ask people to pre-order if you cannot guarantee that you can deliver. If you can't deliver then it is your responsibility to refund your customer. It is like any other product, if I order 500 barrels of oil to be delivered in February for a price of $100 and you can't do that because of someone bombing your pipeline, then you refund the $100 because you never delivered product.
Has AMT delivered working product? No. So we all deserve a refund. Their manufacturing issues (if even remotely true) is their problem. No sympathy from me. They should have purchased insurance prior to embarking in this risky endeavor.
By and large no disagreement from me there aside from the boards timeline. Even on that someone should have at least said, 'Um folks... Oops...' Not that anyone probably read it but on AMT's site under News they did mention on Feb.10 that multiple versions of boards may be needed. https://advancedminers.com/pcb-prototype-testing-diagnostics/ Why was that not brought here where folks see it?  Gotta love the closer on that page: Note from the swiss: “Several prototype runs of the boards will be be necessary, along with fine tuning and optimizations (especially on the power supply blocks and cooling) carried out by our team along with the highly specialized engineers in switzerland.” This can be a quick or lengthy process, only time can tell Especially agree on the pre-order mess. Still baffles me that the practice is allowed at all.... This endeavor as well as those by BFL, HashFast, TerraMiner and others should have been properly financed 100% by their own sources. Not unwitting Investomers. |
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I am unfamiliar with the "grey market", could you elaborate?
<snip> There have even been cases of chips with no actual die in them! <snip> I thought the chips were ordered from Bitmine, and through them, from Innosilicon. I'm unclear how the manufacturer would have any part of how the chips were presented. I don't know a whole lot about how ASIC chips work but it seems like that would be very hard to miss and take effort to ignore. Then again, I'm no engineer. The A1 chips are not in question as yes they are sourced from Bitmain/Coincraft. It is all the other components on the boards that we are talking about: capacitors, resistors, coms chips etc. For those I'd think the normal distribution channels have enough to not worry. Per what AMT said, I think specifically parts from NXP & LTC which are high-demand parts are what will need to be verified. 'Specially Bitmine pretty much bought up all left in the supply chain at the time. As for chips with no dies/incorrect dies in them, again that has nothing to do with our sitch here. I hope. NXP is one of the companies that *is* plagued with counterfeits. Was a general reference to what has been found in many many cases where counterfeiters have been caught and prosecuted. This issue has hit many industries. A good starting point on it is http://counterfeitparts.wordpress.com/ and http://counterfeitparts.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/avoiding_counterfeit_electronic_components_part2.pdf |
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I am unfamiliar with the "grey market", could you elaborate?
Unauthorized vendors/brokers selling components of unknown origin (not directly obtained from the maker and no paper trail). Think e-bay. The parts might be good and are cheaper because they are legit factory over runs (rare) or someones surplus inventory. But - they might not be and unless one checks every single piece used against spec there is NO assurance that it will be right. <snip> Now to be fair and although they ruined the business we need to not make them look like complete outlaws.They did order from Digi and mouser, but some of the hard to place parts were ordered from "a guy I knew that had them in stock". These were for the harder to find NXP parts and LTC's. But yes,when asked for invoices/proof of purchase we were met with weeks of delays followed by a stack of papers comparable to something you'd find in one of the Junior lawyers offices in our law firm. And "sure you can make copies, but we're closing now,maybe some time next".. bs bs.. Very true and I was not meaning to imply they knowingly used counterfeit parts or that any were used at all. Was just clarifying to the op the possible ramifications of grey market parts and why they should never be used for any kind of commercial product without validation. What does worry me is you mentioning specifically the NXP and LTC parts. NXP largely makes SOC (System-On-Chip) micro-controllers but other things as well. We use then in our lasers for all the background systems control and monitoring. Will be interesting to see what the miners do with them... The LTC ones I assume are the Vdd switching regulators and if different than original spec'd other things (component values) usually have to be changed. Will be interesting to see what was done in that area. |
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I play the wave game as well now and then switching from dgm to pps.. Hit the jackpot on the last 2-day block with over 185 million pps shares good for 0.486 BTC vs the typical dgm payout of 0.046 BTC per-block I get  Usually do not do as well with pps. |
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That explains the spikes I see at times. By the numbers my pharm is running 1.65THs yet often the pool reports 1.8-1.93 THS for several minutes as well as equal dips from nominal every now and then. Overall is on target with the numbers though @ 1.65-1.71
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Just for a comparison benchmark my best s1 OC'd to 190 ghs is 10 raw HW over the past 4 days, worst at stock 180ghs is 11,236 raw HW over the past 11 days.
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Well sumptin' sure is lying there.
For that Ants the stats are also additive but give just 1 hr or over 11 days the result comes up the same. My pool reported rates generally are pretty close/exceed what the Ants locally report and tbh the pool numbers are what pays. So I have to assume that clean work is being done no?
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Well... in theory at least the tweaked cgminer for the A1 is on Github so the code for that can be looked at (not by me - otta my scope of things). Are the calcs from it right and being reinterpreted by the web UI? Oh, standard rule of thumb Bitmain uses for the Ants error % is HW error % = HW/(diffA + diffR + HW) * 100 Following that my S1's range from truly infinitesimal to 0.000012% error. Have never ever had my pool report rejects/errors/stales. Always 0/0/0 even from my worst Jala that BFgminer reports as having 6.7% error rate. And my s2 is in Alaska, UPS says will be here on Tuesday |
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I am unfamiliar with the "grey market", could you elaborate?
Unauthorized vendors/brokers selling components of unknown origin (not directly obtained from the maker and no paper trail). Think e-bay. The parts might be good and are cheaper because they are legit factory over runs (rare) or someones surplus inventory. But - they might not be and unless one checks every single piece used against spec there is NO assurance that it will be right. Counterfeit electronic components is a very serious problem in all industries. If one is lucky they are just out-of-spec factory-rejects that failed testing and were improperly disposed of so someone dumpster dived for them to resell. There have even been cases of chips with no actual die in them! Most common is components which are an older version that have been relabeled to be a new one. |
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-snip-
Furthermore, its not that the miners dont work, its that the manufacture we chose to build to miners didnt do the job well. Because bitmine produces machines that work, and using their same model of bulk purchasing in order cut costs, we chose to do the same.And we trusted a manufacturer which didn't/couldn't get the job right,we're in the position. sitting around boxes of bad boards trying to figure out how to get them to work again. Lets take some pictures..
I'm sorry, I haven't been following the thread as diligently as I have wanted to in the past few days. What exactly went wrong with the manufacturer? Did they not make their parts correctly? I don't really want to go fishing through this thread and the last to find what everyone has said about them. Also, I don't understand what you mean by saying "its[sic] not that the miners dont[sic] work". When I received my miner, 3 of the 5 boards did not work at all. Just trying to get caught up on what's been going on lately. Thanks again, Termonator61 You name it, the contract mfgr did it: sourcing (questionable) parts from the grey market, parts in wrong places (caps vs resistors), copper possibly too thin for the current/thermal loads, no solder mask over some vias, other general assembly issues... |
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Possibly but its better than the alternative being dealt with now. Like I said its a workaround or stopgap, not a full fix. Its something to at least mitigate problems until a more reliable and permanent solution can be found. And the power demands would be fairly minor in comparison IMO. I could be wrong there.
Was referring to the power the USB hub has to supply. BFL forum is full of stuff on that. I take it that the USB/SPI bridge is powered from the hub and some setups draw more than the 500ma/port is supposed to supply. My 2 lil' 10ghs Jala's pull 750ma per-port (and 60w per Jala off the +12v supply). |
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@AMT
If you have any other details or documentation on the drivers that could be of use? Or resources, I am looking at the thread posted by zefir to figure out the HWreset. I did suggest another method that MIGHT work and that would be converting each SPI into its own USB channel SPI/USB. This MIGHT get around the problem. Its a dirty workaround. basically create dedicated channels for each card that extends using USB to SPI connectors. This will address the potenital backplane issue and possibly allow for the cards to work properly. Of course there is still the driver issue with HWresets. I am looking at that now to see if I can figure it out. Based on various conversations I had I started to suspect this was the issue for a number of boards. I just have to learn the needed info to actually fix it.
Isn't USB how the original test boards in the dev thread communicated? Near the end of the thread someone mentions having to change software from USB coms to using the GPOI link. Maybe Bitmine wanted to avoid USB hub issues? Power has been a historical sticking point there. |
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<snip>
And we trusted a manufacturer which didn't/couldn't get the job right,we're in the position. sitting around boxes of bad boards trying to figure out how to get them to work again. Lets take some pictures..
Once I see some examples of what was done wrong, assuming the various connections are correct then at worst it will involve just making sure the right parts are where they belong, are the correct value vs what they say (or I feel they should be) and are soldered properly. Especially the A1 chips for both power feed and thermal reasons. Green mask errors can be addressed several ways, just need to make sure the A1 thermal contact is maintained. If there are signal/power noise/ripple issues they usually can be negated. Safe bet that rework will be needed. As for cladding thickness and problems arising from it - we'll see wassup there and what can be done. Maybe run in eco-mode but provide another blade to make up for the lower hash rate? Would probably be a better alternative vs scrapping them. |
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Again, a reference design is just that: a basic how-to example to make something work and test it. It is NOT an optimized final design much less something ready to be stuffed into a complete miner eco-system . They will give you a list of things to look out for but not their precise solutions to it
Give the Cointerra reference design... you think you can come up with a reliable layout? I am sure someone would be extremely interested considering price point... I mean... $100K can get you to almost 200 THs. That can't be beat! You are obviously not including paying anyone a salary or any other overhead. For a commercial (paid) endeavor sure I could if I had any interest in it. However, I *have* a career and it is not in making miners. Years ago I would have said that any decent electronics design engineer could do it. Sadly, that no longer seems to be the case as more and more are not being taught *why* things work the way they do, just what to do with them. Understanding the 'why' gives insight into what to do when over-simplified models do not produce working physical designs. |
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Again, a reference design is just that: a basic how-to example to make something work and test it. It is a only a starting point. It is NOT an optimized final design much less something ready to be stuffed into a complete miner eco-system . They will give you a list of things to look out for but not their precise solutions to it.
It is not just a matter of taking a bunch of boards and stuffing them in a case, sprinkling pixie dust on it and Volia' - it works. BMch/AMT, & HashFast tried that approach and we see where that led.
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