According to the efficiency rating in my cgminer (84% currently), it doesn't look like BitMinter supports rollntime. Have you considered adding support for it?

It's a easy 1to1 wire. The dimension of the IDE or Floppy connectors(holes) are to big.

I done them my self with these connectors and cables:
- connector 0.08€ -> post connectors
- cable 10 pol 3 meters 1.95€ -> ribbon cable

I have the prog3 from enterpoint. You need to install ISE and with that the drivers will install too for it. No drivers from enterpoint.

It's simple plug&play.

How i do a recover:
- connect the JTAG cable to the JTAG port of the conrtoller
- start IMPACT (from ISE)
- flash the bitstream to the controller
- repower the board
- done

SPIprog.exe is only working with the ftdi usb, but this is not working when you have the 1.4 controller.
With xc3sprog you have to give the correct option for the cable you use. Prog3 cable is the option -c xpc instead of -c cm1 with the usb cable.

eb

Apologies for the inconvenience and we will try and not make the same mistake again. We do know now what the issue is simple 2 '1's instead of 'z' in a logic function that drives i/os back to the FT4232.

There are a range of cables available to program with. Parallel port types are very cheap but obviously have a problem that not many people have a parallel port. We do one at £15 (+vat if applies) called Prog2 but there are many other others. For a USB solution we offer out Prog3 at £50. Cheaper solutions at one of our competitors http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Catalog.cfm?NavPath=2,395&Cat=5 and Chinese clones as well. You can generally find the Chinese clones in Ebay.

There is also a possibility of reprogramming a Cairnsmore1 Controller from another Cairnsmore1 (suitable updated) and by connecting headers up to up and down to down using standard up/down ribbons. We will have a look at that. If it is viable it might take us a couple of days to sort that out. An extension of this technique might allow us to a cheap recovery module for the Controller and we are looking at that as well but that will take a few weeks to design and make.

testconpastas,

what happens if you DON'T plug into your usb hub its power cord?

they work fine but sometimes randomly (maybe one time after 2days or maybe after some hours) usb devices disconnected. and i have to turn off PSU to recover them




Try this with just ONE board plugged into your usb hub and then with two and so on.
in my  7 port usb hub without power cable i have 6 cm1 working almost ok (except some random disconnections)


If your hub works like mine you'll be able to attach all the boards to your hub without problems, otherwise after two or three boards your host PC should start having problems (slows down to a crawl/freezes altogether).

Im working with a powered usb hub ( but with power cable disconnected) from the begining because if I "power" it my usb drivers fails to install and do strange things. my usb hub unpowered works almost fine except some random disconnections.

maybe my motherboard GA P55A ud5  with 1500ma usb instead of 500 is the cause I could use unpowered usb hub ok




Beware, if your usb hub takes power from its usb cable and then gives this power to its usb ports, you could end up damaging the usb port in your host pc and/or your boards.

I know that but thanks . but i dont know where in this thread i've read that cm1 usb isnt used to feed boards and has low energy consuption. what scares me more is some kind of uncontrolled feedback current to my board but what  I hope is my usb hub has some kind of filter/ diode to avoid that .

I'm not resposible for any damage arising from this test!!!

spiccioli.

With Rev 1.4 you have the option to pair up boards to use a single USB interface. On the Master board all 4 com ports are used to support 4 pairs of FPGA 2 pairs on the Master and 2 pairs on the Slave.  So long and short of it is that you get to use half the USB cables that you needed previously.

We are also experimenting with removing the power feed from USB to the controller to see if it is just better to power the Controller always from the 12V feed. There is a possibility that might cause an ennumeration issue so it's not confirmed we will do this yet but if does look the better configuration we will cut that in to production on boards serial number 0700+.

PS. Apropos usb power: I'm using now a powered (but I don't power it) no-name 10 ports usb hub which works very well because it does not take power from its usb cable (I don't know if it has no power wire inside) and/or it does not deliver the power it takes to its own usb ports.
I believe it has to be like this because I cannot attach more than three boards to my host PC if I don't power them (PC freezes) while right now I have all of them connected and hashing happily since at least a couple of weeks.
So, I'd say, cutting the power line should make things easier for new users.

1. Do I need to do this w/ one board plugged in at a time?
2. If I don't, do all boards need to be idle?

I'm getting this error w/ 8 boards mining, 1 board idle.

Could not open FTDI device (using libftdi): unable to claim usb device. Make sur
e the default FTDI driver is not in use
FTD2XX/WIN: Can't set VID/PID to 0403:8350. Expect failure
Using FTD2XX,
JTAG loc.: 0    IDCODE: 0x3401d093      Desc:       XC6SLX150   Rev: C  IR lengt
h: 6
JTAG loc.: 1    IDCODE: 0x3401d093      Desc:       XC6SLX150   Rev: C  IR lengt
h: 6
JTAG loc.: 2    IDCODE: 0x3401d093      Desc:       XC6SLX150   Rev: C  IR lengt
h: 6
JTAG loc.: 3    IDCODE: 0x3401d093      Desc:       XC6SLX150   Rev: C  IR lengt
h: 6

Try a diff usb cable, I would get this error with bad usb cables.

I thought that's what you meant. Why would you ever want to do this?

[2012-08-04 21:39:32] Started cgminer 2.6.2a
 [2012-08-04 21:39:32] Icarus Detect: Test failed at \\.\COM20: get 00000000, should: 000187a2
 [2012-08-04 21:39:32] Icarus Detect: Test failed at \\.\COM21: get 00000000, should: 000187a2

Steamboat

This might not be the problem but we have seen cases where the USB gets screwed up in Windows and once it does the com port is never seen again. However if this is the problem all is not lost. Basically there is a FTDI utilility to do a driver removal and cleanup after which a clean install of the driver usually sorts the issue. If anyone things this is their problem send an email to our bitcoin support email "bitcoin.support" AT "enterpoint.co.uk" and the relevant person will see it early next week when they are back in. Once I have the full details of how to do this myself I will try and get the recovery process listed on one of our webpages so it is easy to find.

On a different point if we do happen to have a DCM issue with power noise then we already have a tested fix. That's what we used to test a Glasswalker2 variant last week at 200MHz operation on an early board and it's very stable. It's not the same as the Controller build as publically available but because we built in a very flexible clocking system into Cairnsmore1 we don't actually have to use DCMs within array FPGAs. Simply we can direct supply a 200MHz clock, or anything similar 0-300MHz , straight to the FPGA to run the logic on. If this looks the way to go we will expand testing of this technique over a larger board sample.

Over the last 2 days we have been running Makomk's 190 build on rig of 20+ boards and we have very good results on our testing.

I know this seems simple but did you open the command prompt with administrator rights?