Because death and disaster was one of my roles, is there a fail-back plan in the event that either you or WK get eaten by a lion?

Things happen. Also I hate to say it, but you guys should really be charging for your time if this is anything more than a sheer hobby/jake. I used to fix things for free, then people really started to burn me out and saw no value in what I did. Which kept other people from learning how to do it and ultimately led to a collapse of knowledge (why bother learning when it's free).

Thus why I charge to fix miners, watches, clocks, broken hearts. It sets a baseline for expectations and allows other people to come in and undercut my ass (which they do, which is the WHOLE POINT from my view). End result is that knowledge is maintained because people value it. Or not in which case it was a waste of time to try and save it anyway.

There you go. I'm spreading my little bitty miner power between eligus and eclipse these days. It's only a terrahash built up out of a lot of turbocharged BFG stuff, but it's something. And yeah eclipse is maddening when it goes 30 hours for a 2.8 cent payment due to crap luck, but that is the nature o' luck. It all evens out in the end.

C

Heh. I remember going over from Czech to Germany in the 90's. Nice friendly border guards, no problem.

Took the train back to Prague and stopped in Cheb, which was apparently the border town. I was reading a magazine and heard to my left:

MNMNWEEWKJHQWI

Which I quietly ignored. Then

NMFMNJTJTWHJJKHTEJK WTJHWTEJKHT

Still reading.

Then I felt a gentle tap on my side, right between the ribs. Gentle. Turned and saw a camo dressed man with a Kalashnikov barrel pressed gently against my side.

MNMNWEEWKJHQWI

Which I instantly translated as "Your passport, please" even though I spoke minimal Czech.

Not sure if the US border guards have gotten this odd yet.

BFL Singles and nitro jalapenos. They might be second generation, I don't know. But nice little boxes no doubt.

The real fun would be to replace the chips with a Monarch chip. Yes I am thinking about this... :-)

C

Not yet by far; my 60gh units are still making more than their electricity input.

I've also been working on a concept: The units generate a lot of heat and pull a lot of power, but the usage is not linear. If you reduce the power to the chips and reduce the clock speeds, then the heat output will go *WAY* down, at the cost of 5-8gh of performance.

Thus there is a horizon coming up where "is the last 6-8gh worth the extra 50-100 watts of power?" That might be the spot to hit, then you get to run with less electricity, less cooling (going to be important in the summer) and so forth.

It was bound to happen, time to turn the red giant into a nice cool little red dwarf.

C

I love the "coming out in the next 60 days" thing. Does that mean this summer?

C

Send all of your evil coins to my wallet. It will be hell, but I will deal with them.

Yup. I throttled myself back from 800gh to 300gh to do the payment a day thing and I'm behind 50 other blocks. Yes I will get paid, no question there, it's just basically a 14c payout window instead of a 4.

And I can't change my settings because my wallet is the Android one that doesn't have signature ability. I should fix that one of these days. But to be honest Eclipse had another pothole of bad luck these past few days so variance is the name of the game. :-)

C

Nice design. Two quick questions:

1) What motherboard/cpu combo is that?
2) Do you need a PCIe16 extender cable for the first card? Reason I'm asking is I am trying to build a scrypt miner here with a Radeon 4xxx card. Taking the heat sinks off and plugging it into the PCIe16 slot works, but using a powered 1x riser causes the whole computer to not boot.

Thanks!
C

I am now at almost 800gh here. My top floor is 80 degrees when the outside temps are in the 20's. This is insane.

However I know how to throttle down the BFL singles to <50gh and very low power consumption so I will be running everything through the summer....

Dude, if the "Beast" checks his/her coin with the level of SHA256 hashing, then I'm ok with it.

C

I like this. When they build a Bitcoin stock market exchange in New York City I want that engraved in Marble in 10 foot high letters over the bronze doors.

C

However I will say this: The BFL units are putting a fair bit more than a few watts of heat from the FETs. There's also the issue of imbalance due to thermal conductivity issues at work here.

Personally I prefer IGBTs, or single power FETs.

C

This is why Mr. Teal builds boards and I fix them. Excellent explanation, and thank you.

C

Running 750 watt Corsairs here at 700 watts with no problems, so I think a good supply makes a difference.

Then again I ran it at 800+ for a few days, so a really good power supply makes a difference.

C

Blown FTDI? I wonder because I have a jally here with a perfectly good FTDI chip but it's not talking to anything. Weird...

C

Well, I thought about it, but the problem is these situations are so far beyond normal it's not funny. Posting videos would give the impression that this kind of thing can happen normally, when it really is a test bench sort of problem.

The most a normal jally would do is smoke the FETs then fail the power supply. And since it's in a case it wouldn't damage anything else (which is probably what happened). So I'm posting as a warning to other people doing work on stuff; be careful and always take proper precautions.

It's never dull.

C

Got em. And movies. Pretty.

C

I do have a fire extinguisher, and yes when I saw the first fireball I thought "grab the extinguisher". But this was merely a 12 volt, 2 amp mini fire, not a 300v 10,000 amp one. With a 300 volt fire (or a 36v fire if you have several thousand amps of power) you literally throw the fire extinguisher *AT* the IGBTs so that it's mass will blow the parts far way enough that the plasma arc will go out.

Been there, done that.

So the unit stayed on the heat plate (which is all about heat) till I was able to dig the fire out.

C

Update: The fireball is now hashing away at 5gh. Bit slow, but I have seen worse.

What did I do? Why dig out the fire, like a coal mine fire. Literally, I dug through the board substrate, removing layers till I got rid of the ground plane for the right side FETs. Then removed all the caps in the region, removed the right side choke, and fired up the unit.

Came online with the left side FETs. Put heat sinks on the FETs to control temps, put a big fan on pointing *DOWN*, and it's hashing away at 5gh.

Yes, anything can be fixed if you have enough insanity. But still the little fires were pretty.

And no, I am not turning my back on this one. It will go into the museum of weird stuff.

C

Update: I just had that shorted jalapeno erupt in a mini fireball on the bench. Cool!

Apparently removing the incinerated FETs allowed 12 volts to go through the little caps. Each cap lit up like a little sun on 2 amps of power, then the next one went off. Counted three before I could crowbar the supply.

Wow. Like little arc lamps on your jalapeno!

Note: This one was a June 2013 model with little FETs. I think the fan threw a blade, and the unit overheated the FETs and started a small fire on the board before the power supply blew. Very interesting.

C