A2 Terminator Controller Board

[mjgraham]

I am looking for some real good photos of this board I want  to replicate one, I don't have a miner and it looks like it is not going to be coming, I might be able to get some boards to play with, most of it seems pretty simple. I have found them on aliexpress but would rather not buy one if I don't have to. Looking at the limited photos it looks like it uses more than just the SPI interface from the raspberry Pi, I am guessing power is backfed to the pi. Anyway any help or pointing me in the correct direction thanks in advance.
thanks
Jarrid

[mjgraham]

Anyone wouldn't happen to have a good photo of the back and front would they? I would be happy with a list of the ICs on the board.
Thanks

[emdje]

I don't have a good camera to make such pictures otherwise I would. But a phone camera would not cut it. Plus mine is mining :p

[mjgraham]

yea I figured most were working so it is hard to do, but I had to ask, however I did get a blade directly hooked to the raspi. After a little data sheet tracing , my only other issue I have only been able to identify two chip selects other than the CS for the SPI I figured there would be three maybe to get up to 8 boards, I guess there is a address decoder or something on the controller board to individually address them, no hashing yet the board don't have any heatsinks. It would be cool if i knew what I/Os it used for what in the driver  but then it would be easy. At first I thought man two dead chips, but there was only 10 anyway got a little over excited. Something I don't understand yet is when you use the --hwreset option it puts a very high frequency random looking waveform on one of the chip select lines, were talking 1.5ns pulses, and I don't really see anything else sent but a few seconds of that.

[emdje]

Do you already have the programming guide: http://www.usbminers.nl/Innosilicon_A2_PG_v120140424.pdf
Might be usefull

[mjgraham]

Yea I got the guide, where I am still using the micro controller on the board I don't have to use any of that low level stuff, just have to determine how it selects the boards from the Rpi, got most of that figured out but something still does not add up yet.

[mjgraham]

Well today's results were good, I got the board hashing directly connected. A couple things I have learned it does take much to break it, most of the times just stopping cgminer kills the comms to the MCU, at first I was turning everything off and back on then realized that the MCU reset it broke out to the 10 pin connector and just needs a low pulse but for some reason there is a resistor missing to actually connect it out to the world. I don't know what pin actually toggles this off the RPi yet.



Test setup. Don't have a heat sink so I attached it to a very massive piece of aluminum gets me a little bit of testing.


Hashing test


I don't know if anyone is really interested in any of this but it is kind of fun to tinker with I am wondering what the code on the STM32F103 is now... humm

[emdje]

Looking very good. I took some time to take the controller board out of the miner and making some photo's with my phone. I merged the photo's with photoshop, that is why some parts look a little weird. (somehow the back didn't want to merge that well). You can download all the individual photo's I took using this link, most are nice and detailed: https://www.dropbox.com/s/suec37oeqsswtp7/Photo%27s%20controller%20board.rar?dl=0

[mjgraham]

Thank you very much for this, I have finally be able to determine why I have not been seeing the output that I have been looking for. Long story short the RPi that I have is the B model Revision 1, well turns out the terminators use Revivsion 2, there are 3 pins that hook to different spots on the RPi ARM processor GPIO 3,5 & 13, turns out the other CS signal I was looking for is on 13 and there is a reset on 5, on my RPi these are mapped to the camera interface connector. This also explains why it will not work on a B+ version even if you hooked the pins in the same place. All things aside I'll make up some pretty stuff on how to hook a blade directly to a RPi if anyone wants to test anything in a simple matter, shoot people may already know this info but I couldn't find anything out there.

Now just to find heatsinks and a great price, and decipher the controller board a little more, pretty much guessed about the LVC244s and the HC138 but wasn't expecting the LVC11, now to try and make a schematic of this board.

[mjgraham]

Well the controller was easy enough to replicate in a PLD, really worked just like it should despite my best efforts to mess it up. While the FPGA I used is a million times overkill it was something I had should be able to fit it in a $0.90 CPLD

[emdje]

Looking great