Hacking KNC Titan / Jupiter / Neptune miners back to life. Why not?

[alain84]

1) Are you running the latest 2.00 Titan code from KNC? If not run it.

YES, version is 2.0 titan code from knc

2) What does the light on the controller board do? It should flash white for a few seconds, then go off, then turn on green if you are running 2.00 code. If it flashes white quickly, then turns off then flashes white again the controller has a shorted FPGA. If no lights at all the FPGA and TMS chips may be bad.

The gold standard test is to ssh into the titan controller with username pi password whatevertheadminpasswordis, then type

io-pwr init

And watch the light. If it comes on green and there are no errors in your ssh session you're good. If you get errors, post them.


After io-pwr init , the light is turn green+red, look like yellow for 30 seconds  and  cgminer say-----   TPS65217 ok. Modificitarion A, Revision 1.2------the system is going down for reboot now! (console)

And the board reset, and big  led is green  and three small led green,but in lcd display say kncminer spimux and not recognized none cubes, and restar every five minutes

in the end, Lightfoot is trying to revive my controller boards with its magic, if for some reason have no solution will keep for sale everything that I mentioned before in this post

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1623340

 thanks for understanding

[1715578979]

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[Searing]

 Hey lightfoot sent you a pm on 3 cubes to send in and a such.....but no reply (just a nudge in case things are slow and you did not get to such)

 fun fun fun in titan land

[lightfoot]

 Hey lightfoot sent you a pm on 3 cubes to send in and a such.....but no reply (just a nudge in case things are slow and you did not get to such)

 fun fun fun in titan land

No problem, just busy on a couple of other projects. And seriously hating trying to do diagnostics on neptunes (because they're kinda like titans without the value)  using my Tektronix scope. It is a bitch on wheels trying to probe SOT type chips, I'm going to have to micro-solder wire wrap to the pins to get test points.

Bitch on wheels.

[GenTarkin]

 Hey lightfoot sent you a pm on 3 cubes to send in and a such.....but no reply (just a nudge in case things are slow and you did not get to such)

 fun fun fun in titan land

No problem, just busy on a couple of other projects. And seriously hating trying to do diagnostics on neptunes (because they're kinda like titans without the value)  using my Tektronix scope. It is a bitch on wheels trying to probe SOT type chips, I'm going to have to micro-solder wire wrap to the pins to get test points.

Bitch on wheels.

Hey, lightfoot.... Im wondering ... since these ASICs dont have on die thermistors ... we dont really know the running temp of the ASIC's.
Im wondering, do you think it would makeany sort of sense to make an array of 4 thermistors mounted to the underside of the PCB in the center of each die? It wouldnt have to be permanently(could just be sticky pads) but we could at least use that as a metric to see temperature delta's between dies maybe? I dont know, its just a random idea. Its hella unfortunate we dont know the true temp of each die ugh....

[402blownstroker]

Weird,Titans are NOT Bitcoin mining hardware so why is this thread in this section still??

Shouldn't it be in the ALTCOIN section??

Discussion re Titans is nopt nearly as lively in the altcoin section.  I pretty much follow gentarkin wherever he goes... 

[lightfoot]

Weird,Titans are NOT Bitcoin mining hardware so why is this thread in this section still??

Shouldn't it be in the ALTCOIN section??

Discussion re Titans is nopt nearly as lively in the altcoin section.  I pretty much follow gentarkin wherever he goes... 

I guess, and if someone really wants to move it, go for it. This started as a bitcoin thread with the Neptunes and Titans are basically Neptunes that make money and have different chips.

What should I look into fixing next, if anything? To be honest, bitcoin mining gear depreciates so quickly that by the time you ship it, it's obsolete :-)

[Unacceptable]

Weird,Titans are NOT Bitcoin mining hardware so why is this thread in this section still??

Shouldn't it be in the ALTCOIN section??

Discussion re Titans is nopt nearly as lively in the altcoin section.  I pretty much follow gentarkin wherever he goes...  

I guess, and if someone really wants to move it, go for it. This started as a bitcoin thread with the Neptunes and Titans are basically Neptunes that make money and have different chips.

What should I look into fixing next, if anything? To be honest, bitcoin mining gear depreciates so quickly that by the time you ship it, it's obsolete :-)

Just tryin to help Mikstang clean up this forum,he's chums with ck so thought I could make some brownie points too  

sacrcasm

You won't have to worry bout fixin BTC mining hardware much longer,no new makers = home miner extinction 

May be GPU's & PSU's ??

[lightfoot]

You won't have to worry bout fixin BTC mining hardware much longer,no new makers = home miner extinction 

May be GPU's & PSU's ??

Yeah, I think it's sad that home mining is going away. The root of the problem though is simple: Mining is a perfect market, and as such it's not possible to make profits. Home people have it worse, mining hardware by nature is buggy and experimental and really crap in terms of quality. It rewards people who are willing to take shortcuts (powering a bunch of miners off a big PS without fusing which equals fire but better efficiency), and it rewards companies who put out the cheapest fastest developed things possible (since checking for errors takes time and time means you lose the window to market to someone who didn't bother to check).

KNC did this with the lack of optoisolators on the signal inputs. Had they done this, 90% of the problems would not have happened. But you can't blame them; spending that time to put in that solution would have put them behind someone else who didn't give a fuck.

It's a queen's race right to the bottom. Drat.

[GenTarkin]

Weird,Titans are NOT Bitcoin mining hardware so why is this thread in this section still??

Shouldn't it be in the ALTCOIN section??

Discussion re Titans is nopt nearly as lively in the altcoin section.  I pretty much follow gentarkin wherever he goes... 

Both threads are relevant here simply because KNC made BTC mining hardware as well, and both topics apply to their whole model lineup. It just so happens that Titans are currently their only model thats still relevant today =P

I also post in both sections because I know people read both =)

[mmfiore]

I have a cube that just suddenly went bad. The dies configure correctly but there is no frequency shown for the cube when I look at it using putty. Any ideas if this is fixable?

[helipotte]

Weird,Titans are NOT Bitcoin mining hardware so why is this thread in this section still??

Shouldn't it be in the ALTCOIN section??

Discussion re Titans is nopt nearly as lively in the altcoin section.  I pretty much follow gentarkin wherever he goes... 

I guess, and if someone really wants to move it, go for it. This started as a bitcoin thread with the Neptunes and Titans are basically Neptunes that make money and have different chips.

What should I look into fixing next, if anything? To be honest, bitcoin mining gear depreciates so quickly that by the time you ship it, it's obsolete :-)

You could repair GPU's.  I have been repairing them with good results.  Many of the ones I repair simply have shorted mosfets or smd parts knocked off the back of the card.

[irritant]

and maybe try to mod them into their professional counterparts, im afraid it is not so easy (anymore), since pascal, but on kepler it works

http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/hacking-nvidia-cards-into-their-professional-counterparts/1250/

[lightfoot]

Interesting thought, I'll have to find some broken AMD cards somewhere. :-)

In the meantime I have found something interesting: Was looking at one of my sacrificial boards, pin 6 was dead shorted and I had drilled holes trying to clear the short. So I pulled the die to see where the short was on the chip.

The board was still shorted. Hm. Then I pulled the chip from the board where I pulled the dies out. Board still shorted.

I think I'm going to sit down and remove every component on my third board. If anyone has any shorted Titans they want me to destroy to figure this out let me know. (note: This is the pin 6 shorted issue, not the pin 4 shorted issue.)

C

[lightfoot]

Also I'm going to be out in Vegas later this week, if anyone there wants to grab a beer let me know.

C

[forzendiablo]

i have to check if my neptune is still working

[lightfoot]

Neptunes have never done this. I have a bunch of boards and have tried to replicate this failure, no luck so far...

[mmfiore]

Still having an interesting problem with 2 of my cubes. They run for a couple minutes and then shut down. Temperatures are low according to KNC advanced page but I recall Gen Tarkin saying these temps are not really the die temps. So I am thinking maybe the dies are over heating. Both of these cubes started acting up after I reapplied some Gelid heat sync compound from a new jar. Both cubes had the compound from the new jar of paste. I noticed that the consistency of the new paste seemed much more fluid than normal. Other than that it looked the same. Since I applied this compound these cubes will not run for more than a couple of minutes. I tried lowering the frequency to 50 MHz and now the cube runs flawlessly. Can anyone recommend a good heat sync compound for the titans as I now don't trust this brand. I will continue my experiments to confirm it is the heat sync compound.  

[TXSteve]

sounds like your heat sink isn't seated properly. redo the repaste, this time double check the alignment pins stay in the holes as you tighten it down

[mmfiore]

I reapplied paste 3 times, twice with Gelid and then I used another brand. It is not the paste. Still not hashing right anymore. The heat sync is down tight. It runs for a minute or so then the power to the dies cuts off drops to zero. If I run it at real low frequency the cube seems to hash okay. I don't see any indication of over heating. I am not sure what is wrong at this point.

Epilog:

Good news I believe I have found the problem. I switched out the power supply and the cube started hashing at full power. The Tekamake power supply could no longer supply power to the cube. Good thing I have some power supplies being shipped. This is good news as the cube is still good!
This will most likely fix the other cube as well as they were on the same power supply at one time. Hurray! Thanks for the input.

[TXSteve]

good job, I hate those thermaltake psu's (seasonics too)