It will be interesting to see, if all it requires is an MCU reflash that shouldn't be to bad, granted not everyone has the tools to do that , now swapping the MCU makes me wonder a bit I pulled the MCU code off the A2 boards and they really hadn't used much of the memory space. I was looking into getting an A4 but I guess I will hold off a little longer although the power savings in my case is about to make my A2s non usable. I have about modified them as much as I can wanted to use them to heat the house this winter so I built a PWM fan controller so they didn't sound like airplanes in the house and I have about repaired all the boards I have parts for.

While it is not as easy but works decently, in repairing boards I have had a lot of ones with burned off power connectors so either I remove them and just add a screw terminal or some have dual headers for a 6 or 8 pin. I only have one unit with an atx power supply most have the DPS-1200FB units can get them for like $20 if your lucky, although it involves a certain level of messing up stuff that you have to work around.

I am just running a bunch of A2s but I have found Prohashing to work pretty well so far, now if I could just find parts for my A2s that seem to be dieing off slowly.

everyone lives so far away with their old A2s 

Well I was hoping it would hold off as long as possible but I guess they are out there now, would like to see the insides of one, been looking for broken A2 boards on this end, been trying to keep my stuff running as long as I can.

I had that issue way back when, I got a bunch of molex to 6 pin adapters but found even though the wire was marked 18 AWG it was more like a 26 AWG , outer diameter of the insulation was right but not the wire, gets you thinking when your at work and wires start burning. Of course those cool PCIe risers didn't exist like that either.

Wish I could help ya here, sounds interesting to troubleshoot , if you finally get to a point you figure it is a lost cause maybe I can reverse engineer one for you. It looks like it uses a PI2 on the controller? Looks like some board in between them maybe just some LEDs and then an FPGA and maybe a switching controller on the bottom board. Buying a new controller just leaves the cubes or the Pi or whatever it is. I'll help with what I can I know some of these other folks are more current with this device, I would have to dismantle it and start with logic analyzers and oscilloscopes and such.

I did this once a long time ago to a bunch of computers, there are some unique issues , powering on once you turn on on the other one gets power and some stuff comes on but it doesn't turn on until you press it's power button. I think I bought a bunch of ATX extenders and hacked them together, it is not worth the effort really ATX power supplies are so cheap.

I agree very nice setup, thanks for showing us, makes me miss doing stuff like that.

You shouldn't have a problem as long as all the grounds are common, done this kind of stuff a lot.

What it means it for some reason it is not communicating with the PI through the controller, I would try swapping two of the cables and see if it is found then, you may have a bad data cable or controller. Blinking lights are a good thing, at least the hash board is OK.

Never fooled with this one (unfortunately), so I cant help any, but it sounds like you have had some bad luck.

up

on the board that doesn't work have any LEDs on it and if so what are they doing? I am guessing there blue boards?

no problem I started about like you did, except I just had two has boards and got them working , was your a 110 or a 90 version?

like I said be dang sure the ribbon cable goes back in right or the pi doesnt make it

yea should be user:pi password: innosilicon
is the norm

the pi gets power backfed from the controller board via the ribbon cable, trust me if gets hooked up backwards things don't make it.,Does it have an atx supply?
just a couple of checks, pull the pi out and see if it works normally, also when you turn on the power do the fans come on?

Yea it will boot , just take it out and hook up your stuff will let you know real quick. if I remember right you may be able to hook the HDMI while it is still in there , pull the top off and hook it up.

Here is what I do and it can be done in windows if you put the SD card in windows you get a partition that has some files in it, this would be the /boot in the linux machine, look for the cmdline.txt file and open it in write or notepad , should have one line in it something like.

dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline rootwait

add this after the console line

ip=192.168.x.x::192.168.x.x:255.255.255.0:rpi:eth0:off

basically it is this
ip=<client-ip>:<server-ip>:<gw-ip>:<netmask>:<hostname>:<device>:<autoconf>

you don't have to use a server-ip that is if you want to net boot the root filesystem so lets say
ip=192.168.1.200::192.168.1.1:255.255.255.0:rpi:eth0:off

should set it to 192.168.1.200 with a gateway if 192.168.1.1 , etc, this overrides anything in the /etc/networking
give that a try, else you are going to need something that will scan MAC addresses if you not on the same subnet normally your not going to scan them

Anyway that is a very handy line to use, I NFS boot all my miners, that way shouldn't have any SD card failures.

But I guess how to find them is to hook a monitor and keyboard to the pi and after it boots login and look in the /etc/network/interfaces file should tell you.