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

[lightfoot]

The Neptune requires the KNC controller board to operate. Reason being all of the polling logic and such was done by a FPGA that was located on this board, along with a Beaglebone Black to run stuff like general housekeeping and the BFG mining softeware.

If you have one of these boards, you should be good to try. If you just have the cube you need a controller board (which supports up to 5 or 6 cubes depending if you want the little display on the board).

A Neptune and controller can run fine on a 600 watt supply. But the Neptune is not going to be efficient by any stretch of the imagination.

[lightfoot]

December 2021 and I'm still mining LTC with a string of 5 titan cubes. One of the cubes blew out and I haven't fixed it yet so I am down to 300mh of hashing. And given the silliness of Dogecoin, I'm still mining at a profit.

Insane little things.

[EnriGu]

Hello everyone, I still have a complete set of kncminer neptune and some electricity for free, so I wanted to connect them again. Everything went well at first, but now the miner status says "stopped" and the display lights up but show nothing. I reboot, reset and reflashed the system = nothing. Before I read the entire post my question: Can I find the solution here? Or does anyone have a quick tip? Thank you and excuse my English.

[lightfoot]

Hello everyone, I still have a complete set of kncminer neptune and some electricity for free, so I wanted to connect them again. Everything went well at first, but now the miner status says "stopped" and the display lights up but show nothing. I reboot, reset and reflashed the system = nothing. Before I read the entire post my question: Can I find the solution here? Or does anyone have a quick tip? Thank you and excuse my English.

Yeah. First you want to find out if the controller light goes green (or is it blue) with no cubes but display. Then see if the display updates. Then try one cube not plugged into power but connected with the cable PROPERLY. See if it shows up with a temperature in the web display. Then try plugging it into 12v (shut down before every plug or unplug or power change). One step at a time.

If you know how to use an ohm meter read the thread for how to figure out if a cube is shorted. Note one bad cube can take out the controller.....

[lightfoot]

Thought I'd update: I have about 8-10 cubes still up and hashing litecoin, the power plugs continue to burn out every year or so, I tried soldering wires directly to the pins but gave up when I realized that without supports I'd probably break the connections in the board. But they still run and as of a month ago were still making ROI. Pretty good for an 8 year old miner.

[EnriGu]

Thank you for your prompt reply. first i connected the board to power and lan = the light in the display goes on (no numbers) and the light in the corner flashes blue 3 times and stays off. I think the lamp should have turned green for the next steps.

It's nice to hear that there are still some neptune miners online. They are great for my purposes, i always have some unused electricity that i can use for mining.

[lightfoot]

Hm. Try again without the display. The light should flash white, then again maybe, then go green or blue. If it doesn't then the FPGA chip on the board was damaged, possibly by a cube's ribbon cable being plugged in upside down or not properly on the cube itself (ie: plugged in on only half of the pins)

[EnriGu]

Thank you, but it did not work. The board lights up white 3 times (The only thing flashing green and blue are the lights at the BB ). Do you think it´s possible to fix the FPGA chip or must I find a new borad?

[lightfoot]

It's not too hard if you have hot air rework tools. The chip costs around $50 or so I think, and you take the old chip off, remove all the old solder, then put the new one on the flat pads, line it up carefully, and flow it into place. I use a bit of flux on the board, helps the solder melt cleanly.

This is the second time in a week or so someone has been asking about these boards. I'll check to see what I have here.

[EnriGu]

Thank you again. Let me know what i "owe" you for your help. If you find something that might help me, let me know. I'm willing to invest some money in my miners. At the same time I look for a new chip online.

[lightfoot]

Oh help here on the forums is free of course. I only charge for my personal efforts to do stuff. That's why I published all my findings.

[adaseb]

I had to this this hot air removal job on a Jupiter before. Basically I had a few boards which had 1 or 2 dead components so i figured I would remove from a dead board and add to a board with 1 dead die and get all 4 working instead of having a Jupiter with 4 modules and each modules had 1 dead die.

So I tried heating up that part which I think was a large VRM but I had to keep adding heat. And after 30 mins i finally got it off and it still didn’t work. Most likely added too much heat and fried the VRM.

Soldering it back on was the easy part but getting it off was a pain.

[lightfoot]

Ah yes adaseb: The secret to removing components from the Titan boards is to use a pre-heater. Warm the board to about 150-200c and the components will come off easily with a small amount of localized hot air. Just be sure to keep the airflow level low; otherwise you could blow off small components.

This is how I replace the power plugs: There is way too much copper in the board to remove them with a soldering iron at room temperature, but taking the board to 200c allows you to use an iron to remove them. Then wick out the solder from the holes and put a new one in.

[teslaman]

Thank you for the quick informative responses.
Best place to download the 1.06 upgrade?
TY

http://4thamd.com/KnC/
...

Hi Blake!

PM me an email address and I'll send you a link. I need to find a hosting site that will not just roll over so I can put this up, anyone got any ideas?

C

I'm just now noticing this, since I haven't been on here for a long while, but I've added your Titan Firmware image to my page.