This is WO. Everything seems to be on topic :-)


*yawn* All part of the plan, no biggie. You can set your watch by this stuff.


It's why the world is so stable. Just like predicting that bitcoin falls on April 14th when everyone cashes out for taxes. Like clockwork.

My concern is not what the rabble are doing, the question is what are the keys doing?

And at this point man, I'd hate to be a key.

And no sooner had I hit the enter button before we boarded the rocket and went to the moon.

Enjoy all, it's been great being on this journey with all of you.

Yep, last block and I have my old Turbo Jally up and mining.

This is, as they say, it. :-)

Gentlemen.....

Hm. Let me see if I can still access my wallet seed. I wonder what I've got these days.

Yeah that 10k drop a few days ago made me think "Ah the good old days are back!"

Fortunately I didn't have a sell wall at that point. But still yeah those can wipe out a backup position quickly. Then again that's why you have them so you don't wind up catching a 30k falling knife.

I noticed it was hanging at around 69,420 for awhile there this weekend. Go figure :-)

Sure, but all it takes is someone to order a pizza with one.

Hm.

It's the same thing said Pooh.....

(House on Pooh Corner, Milne A.A 1928)

Yeah I had to tell my boss I was knocking off work. I can't work under these kinds of conditions.....

Moar trains plz.

Meantime now that I have a cool running unit I want to stick the thing in my ATX box here with my Raspberry Pi's and just run it in slow and cool mode. Maybe I'll hit a block.

The real problem is the mining software: The driver.bflsc.c files in cgminer don't work.... well with the board. At 400mh speeds, the board is reporting only about 41 and 38gh speeds with a lot of "failed to find nonce" type errors. Bashing the code a bit, I can see that the error nonce being returned is always the same value, but the core number bounces around. Unfortunately cgminer can't show individual cores like bfgminer can, so that's not going to help. Running bfgminer shows 446/407gh speeds.

So about 90% of the cores don't work. But if I use bfgminer and look at the summary values per core I can see the core naming scheme is different. It labelels the chips as BFL 0aa, 0ab, 0ac.... through 0az then 0ba-bx then 0ca-cz... all the way up to 0ex. That is different as it's not splitting the engines by die but mushing them all together.

So 26*4 (a-d)+24 (ea-ex) =128 cores total. Or 64 cores per chip (each hashing at 4gh. I really wonder if they just took their old chip design and instead of putting one per chip they put 64 of them per bigger chip using a smaller fab process). But that's not important, if they are using 128 cores and the software wraps at 64 cores then yes that could be the problem.

Need to figure out how they did chip addressing. Hm. If they counted by hex numbers (0aa-0ae) then skipped to 0ba-be then 0ca-oce then that could be a problem. Only 5*5=25 cores would work which would still give us 100gh of speed instead of 400. Not right. About 12 cores should be working. Hm.

Having fun dredging up old memories. One problem is that this 725gh miner here will mine at 725gh. Full blast out hot 71c chips, fans running at max, very much running on the edge with the FETs running at 90c even with the big heat sink on the back. Yes it will run, but not forever and any error will probably nuke it.

However. On the 3 power plug Monarchs there was a hack from BFL that allowed you to send it a command through USB to either set the clock speed (from F0X to FAX I think, maybe higher in hex) or the voltage from V0X (makes it a 3gh miner) to VAX (and maybe higher). The system would accept the command and auto-tune the voltage to produce the fewest errors, so it was best to just stick to playing with the "F0X" commands.

There was sort of a way to do it on the Bfgminer command line but it never worked for me. What I did was use the following command in a DOS/CMD prompt:

set /p x="F5X" <nul >\\.\COM12

Where COM12 is the COM port assigned to the Monarch's USB device (find it in Device manager, then expand the Serial ports). I put that in a batch file called mine.bat
Then I wait a few seconds and run bfgminer.

With F5X I get a nice 437gh speed, temp of between 50 and 57C, and most importantly I think the power efficiency goes from 1w/gh (at blazing full speed) to .5w/gh. Result is a nice warm 200 watt space heater that will mine 8 times as much coin for the heat as a BFL 50mh tube unit.

NOTE: You have to set this each time you power cycle the miner. When you power cycle, the miner will auto calculate speed and such for max hash rate which will turn your miner back into a seriously on the edge thing.

NOTE: I don't know if this works on the older 2 plug miners.

NOTE: Of course 8 times 0 is zero but hey, it is working :-)

Now to try and figure out why cgminer is barfing. I'm guessing they changed the response format of messages and never bothered to document it. Still I should be able to throw something into debug mode to find it out......

Interesting point @notfuzzy: Thermal expansion is going to be needed, but any air that hits the pumps seems to fuck them over. Yaknow, I cut open one of the radiators and it is basically a two sided thing with one side going from the port down to the bottom of the radiator, where the bottom connects the two sides, then back up to the other port for output. If the pump catches a water bubble it's going to lose prime.

Putting the radiator upside down is a master stroke, it would solve the bubble problem, keep the pumps primed at all times, and of course BFL didn't do it :-) But I never thought of that....

Currently I'm running with an absolutely full radiator and rubber hoses that do have some give. Not sure how much added pressure there is, but maybe I should look into either a small air bladder type expansion tank to allow the fluid to expand without introducing air to the mix. Hm.....

Hm. Never would have thought that AI's are nocoiners. Well they ain't going anywhere. :-)

Same old Proudhon.

Pretty much. I mean it's been awhile since I've been on there and you kind of worry about people and hope they're ok.

Proudhon still on?

Speaking of which, how is MindRust holding up? Anyone need to check in on him?

Well I don't have a watch for bitcoin prices, but I am in the market for a pair of confetti cannons. Want to put them in my office to go off when Bitcoin hits 75k.

Any suggestions?

Never seen one with 4 molex plugs. The ones with two do burn the plugs, I can replace those.

But I took the water loop apart and found some interesting stuff:
1) The loop was low on water. This is a big problem as the pumps *cannot* self prime. They need a full amount of water to work, otherwise you go into thermal la-la land.
2) Cutting those junk hoses off shows that it uses 7/16 inside diameter tubing with flanges so you can replace it with real tubes.
3) The real problem: The propolyne glycol or whatever they put in there precipitates out of the water into thin strings of gruel. This is a massive problem because:

4) It clogs the little water radiators inside the pumps.

If you pull the tubes off the pump, put real tubing on it, and immerse the right tube into a bucket of clean water and suck on the left tube (to prime it) you will get the propolyne out and some of the slime will appear. Dump that water and flush again with clean. Then turn on the pump and see if it pumps water through in a nice stream. If a dribble then you have to take the water block apart (8 screws) and you will find that on the back of the copper plate is what looks like a fine radiator with a white rubber thing in the pump.

What happens is the pump pushes water through the white things which forces the water *through* those tiny fins to pick up all the heat from the copper. If those find get clogged your pump will not flow and will not conduct worth a damn. Clean those fins with a toothbrush and soap and rinse it well.

More on refilling in a bit. Remember the pumps cannot prime themselves so there can't be air bubbles in the water system.