Oh please, ppl really need to stop blaming the flux capacitor, we all know that thing'll survive anything.  It's the biomimetic gel, everyone knows that.

This being a 1384, I'm still betting it zombied out and the dude just didn't power cycled the thing.

Did you power cycle the sticks?  Even when they're not doing stuff, the circuit's actually still doing stuff, it just draws like 1.5watts.  I've found with these and the 2Pac, at a certain point when it zombie out or does weird stuff, you need to power cycle it.

I do these in order:
- uhubctl power cycling the entire hub where USB hub support software power cycling (I can be lazy and do this through software, usually work)
- pushing the button if USB hub has them (now I have to get up)
- physically removing and then reinstalling the stick (now I have to get up and do physical labor beyond pushing a button, grrrr)

The chips need to be completely power cycled to fully reset.  Unless you pulled the power cord and USB uplink cable on your hub or something, a lot of errors can persist through CGMiner or computer restarts.

No worries, don't trouble yourself with tests. Upper 80% really great for these little AC/DC blocks,  no good way of getting better than that without spending nearly $100 on a real ATX PSU anyhow.

Just put in order for 3, looking forward to seeing how far I can take the Acasis USB hub and my 5 NewPacs.  

Review of Acasis USB 3.0 Hub
Photo of the setup https://i.imgur.com/1czvtRM.jpg

Example Link https://www.amazon.com/Splitter-Adapter-Individual-Switches-Computer/dp/B07BNBLXTS/

Products I have
7 Ports US Version (w/3A PSU) purchased from Amazon
2x 10 Ports Version (w/4A PSU) purchased from AliExpress and imported from China.

Pros & Vendor Claims

• Individual port power button - Good for turning on/off your RPI or hard reboot 2PAC
• 2.1Amps 5V per port (Vendor claimed) and I have tested this to be relatively true
• Hub recognized as a smart USB power hub by uhubctl utility for software power reset.  Have NOT tested this.
• Work with RPI 3 flawlessly thus far running 12+ hours

Cons
The supplied PSU is pretty weak, the 7 ports came with a 12v@3A and 10 ports 12v@4A.  I am currently running the pictured hub with my Anker 5A PSU pulling 49watts at the wall measure by Kill A Watt.

Summary
I like these as they have individual power buttons and worked with the RPI and has uhubctl support.  Uhubctl allows you to software cycle a logical hub and port to hard power cycle a zombied stick even though I have not had a chance to test it out since the NewPac has been good enough to not zombied out.  Supplied PSU has better efficiency than my Anker PSU even though there are weak and would only be enough to power 3 sticks.

As you can see from the photo, my sticks has modified heatsinks (40x40x20mm and 60x60x10mm).  The heatsink in horizontal fin position worked out very well, I can hold my finger on any of them permanently with the fan blowing and not get burnt, though the one with slightly less airflow in the front is a bit warmer than the other.  The other 3 are lukewarm.  The downside to these mods is obviously the GS hub is not really an option for me as I would only be able to use 4 ports at best.  That's why I used this hub with a single linear row of USB ports instead.

Testing condition is 4x NewPac running at 450Mhz.
https://i.imgur.com/nvVfTkR.png

Will await more $ available to get the 7A PSU from 419Mining and see how many sticks I can run.  I have 5 NewPac, a 2Pac.  And yes, the spacing does allow me to fit 6 in there even with the 20mm heatsinks.

Caveat found during testing with RPI
There is some sort of flaw in the setup when plugging in too many NewPacs would trigger a kernel panic on Pi Zero W, though there can be multiple causes there from power feedback into the Zero, to too many adapters to get it hooked up.  Since running 4 x NewPac with a Pi 3B it has operated 1 day 14 hours plus at of this posting without kernel panic.  Previously I was able to get runtime up to 3 days continuously with a connected Pi Zero W and 2x NewPac,  but when plugging in 4x NewPac the Zero W kernel went crazy after a few minutes to 15 minutes max.  The crashes are observed with multiple known good Zero using multiple known good 32GB Samsung EVO Select cards.  The problem appeared more with the Zero than the hub, though I do not have further time nor equipment to test conclusively and have given up using Zeros as controllers.

@419Mining,

I'm interested in that power supply,  do you know what the power efficiency is for it under decent load like 5-6 Amps?

I'm getting pretty terrible efficiency with the blocks I have, USB meter reporting ~9watts and the thing's pulling 12+ at the wall for ~80%.

Heatsink upgrade project going well.  Test unit with original 2Pac finally finished and going through post-upgrade stress testing.

https://i.imgur.com/3lDmkQP.jpg
You're not seeing things, it glows under UV light...

https://i.imgur.com/BIZPiWi.jpg?1
The 2 x NewPacs have been disassembled and awaiting conformal coating to dry before heatsink upgrade.  Waiting for tiny clamps from Amazon.

So far with the upgrade 40x40x20mm heatsink, she's running just slightly above room temp doing stable at 175MHZ on a lousy Anker USB hub.  Run so cool my thermometer refuses to measure temp (I'm using a human thermometer since I don't have an electronic or cooking thermometer).

Will be upgrading the NewPac with a 40x40x20 and a 60x60x10 and see how each does.

I think I need to order a few more NewPac sticks...

I don't use the big miners and don't know enough about them since I use the USB sticks.  But if the big miners are Linux based on what you're describing, you can use Ansible for automation. Ansible is what Amazon uses to control their fleet of servers, or so a friend who work there tell me.

I use Ansible to completely configure and manage my of Raspberry Pi armada, including auto-downloading of BFGMiner, CGMiner, compile, setup, and configuration changes.  You can set Ansible scripts to auto-configure per host or group.  You can take a look at my example of an Ansible playbook to configure a special version of CGMiner here https://github.com/IRMooBear/ansible.cgminer .  It does something very similar to what your script does,  except once I set up SSH access to a host,  the playbook can be applied to an unlimited number of hosts or specific host from my comp.  If a configuration changes for a host or group, the playbook will also apply that to the remote configuration.  Basically, anything you can do with SSH, ansible can automate in a better way for you.

New miner her, just bought 2 x NewPac in addition to the 2Pac I already got last week.  I'm enjoying the potential modding possibilities here as a pet project and wanted to ask if anyone can share experience in replacing the heatsink or other fun mods?  I would rather not try to drill a hole in aluminum, I'm a horrible driller and have an old corded drill.  I think my options are either a single hole or using thermal adhesive compounds, not sure if there is enough surface area on the chip to hold a bigger heatsink.

My experiment is putting these stick miners completely on mini solar panels with the Pi Zero W and see what they can do.  So far I have the Pi Zero W with the current 2Pac running at around 4-5w at the wall,  waiting for solar panel and meter (and NewPacs) to measure more accurately DC draw.

Some discoveries of interest are the Pi 3b has a current limit,  was only able to go to 143Mhz before power maxed out, on the Pi Zero I actually got it to hit 300Mhz and was drawing 12w from the wall.  Got scared was gonna burned out my Pi Zero and turned it back down,  but interesting nevertheless that the Pi Zero will pull a lot more power and apparently as much as you can give it.  That's why a larger passive heatsink is something I'm pursuing.  Also, found out the Pi 3b has a controllable USB HUB, you can use uhubctl to turn off power to the port.  My plan was to put some solar panels on the back of my car and program a pi to automatically turn on/off mining as it detects open Wifi signal, or go into power saving mode by turning off the ASIC.

If anyone has any experience or suggestions to share, would appreciate it.