Thats a very handy thing to have, ive been thinking of getting something cheaper to control using GPIO or raspberry pi. More so to start the units one by one rather than put full load on ATX at same time. Which fpga board are you using that needs power cycle to recover? Ive been recently mining with ztex 1.15y, and so far the only failures ive seen is when starting cgminer/bfgminer, it fails to configure the FPGAs. A power cycle would fix it, but ive figured out that cycling the USB on the host also fixes that problem, so no physical power cycle needed. Since we are on topic of preventing outage, is it try to assume that using the "normally open" connector will continue to give power to the mining device if the relay board itself fails? |
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Personally I'd just drastically overbuild the machine controlling the miners. I'm basically got a dual cpu rack server with raid5 setup for this purpose. It's just a smallish webserver that I've repurposed.
More things to go wrong imho. Now you have introduced a new point of failure - the raid5 controller itself. Keep it as simple as possible, and use more machines. If you have to use a full blown computer, just load everything into memory and run off it. Immunized from disk failure as well.. you typically wouldn't care about running changes being persistent... hmm maybe even boot from LAN. |
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If you have 10 mining units being controlled by 10 raspberry pi (which is quite stable imho no moving part + linux). If one of them breaks, you loose 1 miner. Say downtime of 24 hours (before you can physically fix it).
If you have 10 raspi, assuming one of them to FAIL once a month. Your total loss per month would then be 1 miner for 1 day. Calculate the amount. Im sure investing in some sort of failover would be more expensive.
Personally im interest in your topic for academic reasons. I wouldnt consider investing in failover for actual money reasons. Instead of one device that fails once a month, you now have 10 devices at 1/10 the hashing power, each failing once a month, 10 failures/mo total. You're right back where you started, except you've bought 9 more devices, and you have to fix/reset them 10 times a month, instead of once. So from a downtime perspective, there is no improvement. But the "USB switch" lead you mentioned is a good one, especially if you can control it remotely somehow. The difference is ur not completely out when the outage occurs. With rising difficulty, it is better to run at 90% performance for 12 hours rather than possibility of 0% , minimizing the risk of total outage when difficulty is lower. Think of it asif the mining unit came built with ethernet port which you hook into interwebs directly... only difference is that the module is user replaceable. Id say the odds of mining unit crashing is higher than the odds of a well supported embedded system on a chip. Embedded systems should be a lot more resilient to failure. Much fewer components(more importantly immune to mechanical failure). I bet you that if i intentionally corrupt the SD card (or yank it out) of a running raspberry pi, it will continue mining for few hours (or until next reboot). And the SD card would be the weakest link in the host since ive heard electrical surges on the usb port can corrupt it. |
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Here's the build arklan ended up using: Win64 | Win32what am I doing wrong? getting this: plz help I think u need cgminer 3.1.1 |
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There has to be a better method available than just taking a shotgun approach, as that just staggers your down time occurrences.
I've also found that the host device is usually the weakest link in the mining setup (next to the PSU/brick), so introducing a new point of failure is still an improvement if that point is more reliable than the hosts connected to it.
Assume, "What can go wrong will go wrong" Now for each single point of failure, calculate the probability of it failing, and also calculate the damage caused by its downtime. If you have 10 mining units being controlled by 10 raspberry pi (which is quite stable imho no moving part + linux). If one of them breaks, you loose 1 miner. Say downtime of 24 hours (before you can physically fix it). If you have 10 raspi, assuming one of them to FAIL once a month. Your total loss per month would then be 1 miner for 1 day. Calculate the amount. Im sure investing in some sort of failover would be more expensive. Personally im interest in your topic for academic reasons. I wouldnt consider investing in failover for actual money reasons. Now if you still feel failover is cheaper than probability of host outage + downtime loss, then another method could be rigging up some kind of USB switch that can be controled by multiple host computers who monitor each other and "elect" a master. The master commands the switch to point to itself as host. If no such hardware is available u need to get one made by a electrical engineer... BTW just realized the keyword to search for is "usb switch" :- http://www.iogear.com/product/GUB231/http://www.amazon.co.uk/USB-2-0-switching-hub-switch/dp/B000I3WV1U/ref=tag_stp_s2_edpp_urlThe USB ports are switched from one user to another with the touch of the button ^ The "touch of the button" here can be rigged to the gpio of multiple raspberry pi... http://www.amazon.com/Belkin-F1U200V-4-Port-USB-Switch/dp/B000EJUCVEBut all failure scenarios need to be tested. Often times the failover itself causes a fail if not properly tested/practiced. |
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Watching That's nice. I'm not sure anyone reading the thread really cares who is watching it...? he is just hunting posts and spamming every thread with useless posts like this one.. +1 It amazes me that people post mundane drivel to increase their post count. Quick aside: Should I get a turtle or goldfish as my next pet? I can be your pet... given that you feed me bitcoins.. |
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8. Can I submerge the pcb in oil without losing the warranty?
You can submerge it in (non corrosive) oil to cool it. If you handle this correctly its lifespan might be even longer than with fan cooling.
Can you provide more details about how to do this? Submerging in oil will not short circuit the board? Should we submerge the whole blade or only the ASICs? I do not want to risk damaging the blades. Regards! |
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Power Adapter
cUL, FCC
Input: 100 - 240 V, 50/60 Hz; 1.6A, maximum
Output: 5 V / 4 A
Cable: 1.2 m (6 ft.) so 8 erupters... |
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post office run for the canadian packages first
I hope Asian packages also....  |
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Was reading up about USB over ethernet a while ago. Basically u attach the usb devices to a ethernet thing... and then send USB packets over ethernet to them. the 2 hosts could monitor each other... and possibly take over if it sees no usb activity or smthn... But now you have new points of failure. Perhaps some devices like this one.. A lot neater/cheaper way (assuming you have multiple hardware you wanna control) is to divide the devices to different host machines. Could be something as cheap as a raspberry pi or a tp-link router with usb port. That way if one of the host machine dies it only takes out the miner(s) attached to it. Horizontal scalability FTW. |
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Hubs: http://elinux.org/RPi_VerifiedPeripherals#Working_USB_HubsGet only these. I got a belkin model not mentioned in the list, had to fiddle a little to get it to work. It has to be a powered hub. And keep in mind the usb erupter needs 0.5A power... so if your hub comes with 5V 4A adaptor then in theory u can have 8 USB block erupters on it. Is it accompanied with a diode to prevent the shortcut between the 5V PC port and the 5V extra power source If it isint, then ud need to block/cut the pin 1 (+5v) cable off the USB connection between the pi and hub. In theory u can have 127 devices on a single USB.... but i doubt if the raspi has enough CPU power to control them all.... I use raspi to mine 10 ztex 1.15y boards .... and cgminer eats 20 - 25% CPU. the cpu usage of cgminer has been proportional to the number of boards i hook up. ymmw with USB erupters... |
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For those planing on using a raspi make sure to consult http://elinux.org/RPi_VerifiedPeripherals#Powered_USB_Hubs before buying a hub. For my ztexes i bought a belkin hub (exact model not on list) assuming it would work since other belkins are good. turned out i was wrong. Raspi would see the belkins but not the ztexes attached to it. After an hour of fiddling got it to detect the boards by forcing raspi to usb 1.1 only. |
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I'm just leaving for my 36 hour Bangkok round trip. I won't be checking in again until I get back. So don't worry that I'm not responding here - I'll be back with PIC chips and parts and proto-boards etc. No test boards yet but maybe next week. I hope when I get back FC4B will have some money in PP so I can sell some btc for that scope.  Let me know if u got some time to spare... ill buy you a beer or 2... |
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In theory yes... but... For a stable connection, the devices connected to the 12 Port hub must not exceed a combined current of 5 volt 2A That means 4 erupters.... but i guess 5 should be fine |
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If any of you ebay whores wanna buy 2 units from my order... All I want is ~1 BTC markup for me plus some bribe for arklan for shipping/last moment changes.
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Suggestion : Also offer fabrication in exchange for Avalon chips... say u 1 K16 in exchange for 20 (or whatever ASICs).
That way you would have spare ASICs to sell full products.
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Very cool stuff, pusle and TheSeven! Would be very interested to know hashrate/price/power of the 28nm version. I suspect it would work a lot better than current generation ASICs. It won't get close to current generation ASICs, neither in power nor cost. With the current open source designs for Kintex-7, a quad board would get ~2GH/s, though I suspect 4GH/s is possible when more hashing cores are rolled into the design. Power would be less than 100W at 2GH/s. Price? Well K160T chips are ~90$USD each so maybe a BOM of 800$USD? ASICMINER blade is for $6200 (49.9 BTC). @10 GH/s If BOM of $800 so total cost $1000 is sane assumption? Including assembly, pcb, etc? Would need 2.5 to 5 (4 x K160T) boards for 10 GH/s ~$2500 - $5000 Power is another story... ASIC way way more efficient. If someone can build this, and the $/GH is same as ASICMINER blades(or whatever ASIC unit is shipping at the time) im sure a lot of people would buy irrespective of power usage simply because the barrier to entry is lower.... but maybe by the time someone manufactures these... Avalon DYI projects churn out much cheaper $/GH.. |
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Can you share some more information with us? Hashing speed, watt usage, estimated price, drivers etc? It would be nice, if it will turn into a "product" which is able to sell. But really nice work anyway.
I assume Hashing speed and watt usage will be very similar to ztex 1.15y since its the same IC. Very small variations between different implementations of LX150 |
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Would be very interested to know hashrate/price/power of the 28nm version. I suspect it would work a lot better than current generation ASICs.
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Any updates for the second batch? |
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