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

[lightfoot]

hy, i can not try because the controler display only the titan 2.0 spimux.

I change the raspery pi , i use the same flash card 8GB Class 10 , and now it is ok. only one cube 300Mhz , hash 80-83Mhs.
How to test the 3cube left?
whare is the pin 1 to measuring from pin 9 ?
pls a picture.
whiht regards, florin c.

Ok, so with no titans connected it displays spimux and never the IP address, correct?

If so the controller has a problem. Send it in and I'll look at it.

Are you comfortable with taking a cube apart and removing a board, or if you're in the US you can send over a whole cube and cable and I'll check it out.

[1715036526]

1715036526

[jcoin]

Is there a way to specify cubes or dies to use with BFGMiner so a Titan can run multiple instances without them stepping on each other reconfiguring dies?

I've been looking for controllers to split it up but it's like finding a unicorn.

[Searing]

Anyone off the top of their head has the instructions on HOW to install Lightfoot's IMG file again?

I remember a long complicated process with KNC back in the day. But damned if I can remember how.

can't find a link

It used to entail using 7-zip to unzip and a program specific to copy IMG files on Windows to the SD card ..maybe some other hoops

Back in the day, I made about 7 KNC 2.00 versions of this...and just used the Gen Tarkin upgrade on top of such....on already made SD's. (When I knew how 3 years ago

plus) (now not so much)

However, there is/was a KNC Titan version 2.02 with an updated BFG Miner too match such released. Also can't seem to find that anymore either

again link?

Anyway, if someone has done this enough, could you whip out the process on here...I promise this time to print it out and save it hard copy

(not sure why the bother FJC works just dandy with the KNC 2.00 controller on the Titan Bridge and regular unit...I just wanted to finally get around to

trying Lightfoot's Beagle Bone Miner version...in that, I know that I have (since the downsizing) plenty of regular KNC Neptune/Jupiter Cards with bridge boards shot

or given to me. To see if this may work better. Also, FJC mines better with 2-3 cubes, error rate wise.

Dubious reasons indeed. These better be pretty good space heaters for this winter, in that FJC prices are also 'dubious' but hey..stuff to do...

Thanks in advance

brad

[lightfoot]

You got to read the whole thread :-) In a nutshell you download the .7z file from my dropbox link, then decompress it with 7zip to an iso file. Then you use a program like w32diskimager to write the ISO file onto an 8gb or bigger memory card, plug it into a bbb, and you are off to the races.

The BB is faster than the Pi, and yes does fix the annoying amount of stale shares submitted. If you like it send me some litecoin.

Meantime I still have to fix your board.....

[Searing]

You got to read the whole thread :-) In a nutshell you download the .7z file from my dropbox link, then decompress it with 7zip to an iso file. Then you use a program like w32diskimager to write the ISO file onto an 8gb or bigger memory card, plug it into a bbb, and you are off to the races.

The BB is faster than the Pi, and yes does fix the annoying amount of stale shares submitted. If you like it send me some litecoin.

Meantime I still have to fix your board.....

Thanks, it is a start. I have the programs above someplace and a list on how to do this (hard copy) damned if I can find it though.

thanks

brad

[emilio932]

Hey guys! so i have a problem with the neptune-controller im using and the BBB-card. Im trying to get my 2 titan-cubes running but cant seem to boot the SD-card properly, am i missing something crucial?
Kind regards Emilio932

[lightfoot]

Well, hm. So you copied the lightfoot code (not the KNC code for a Titan) onto an 8gb or better SD card, popped it in the BBB, and powered up, and it doesn't boot?

One flaw in my code is that the button reset will screw everything up because I never put that in. Need more donations to make something like that happen :-)

[Searing]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=170332.msg3365686#msg3365686

Just found my 1st post on here about when my KNC Jupiter (arrived full of water from DHL) on 10/18/2013.

Sheesh I was such a 'newbie'

brad

[lightfoot]

I can't believe this, but I have been mining DOGE with a pair of Titan cubes and the things are.....

profitable.

It's like dragons have been sleeping in my attic, now I'm going upstairs, dusting them off and thinking "Really?"

[adaseb]

I can't believe this, but I have been mining DOGE with a pair of Titan cubes and the things are.....

profitable.

It's like dragons have been sleeping in my attic, now I'm going upstairs, dusting them off and thinking "Really?"

Man I saw this topic and assumed I was taken back in time. I remember reading this topic alot back in the day and haven't seen it in years. Sure brings back memories.

I remember these ASICs. They weren't the best quality however they sure were profitable ASICs if you bought at the right time. I remember the KnC Neptunes on how they were pulling something like 500 Watts or so from a single PCIe cable. I had some of them and remember questioning if I should leave the house when the cables were hot to the touch.

Then there are those that got their shipment delayed by like a year or 2. Got the ASICs and basically just ebay'd it because it wasn't profitable at all for most home setups. Crazy that its profitable again.

[Searing]

I can't believe this, but I have been mining DOGE with a pair of Titan cubes and the things are.....

profitable.

It's like dragons have been sleeping in my attic, now I'm going upstairs, dusting them off and thinking "Really?"

Man I saw this topic and assumed I was taken back in time. I remember reading this topic alot back in the day and haven't seen it in years. Sure brings back memories.

I remember these ASICs. They weren't the best quality however they sure were profitable ASICs if you bought at the right time. I remember the KnC Neptunes on how they were pulling something like 500 Watts or so from a single PCIe cable. I had some of them and remember questioning if I should leave the house when the cables were hot to the touch.

Then there are those that got their shipment delayed by like a year or 2. Got the ASICs and basically just ebay'd it because it wasn't profitable at all for most home setups. Crazy that its profitable again.

www.litecoinpool.org is at 195% now for merge mining in addition to LTC....at 8c kWh ...IF I remember right WITH tarky titan firmware I THINK I used to get

275 watts per 80mh per full working cube...that is now $2 a day or $60 a month using the above pool.

So, for 4c kWh folk in the west coast or down south hell $4 a day or $120 is nothing to sneeze at for giggles

gonna go up on eBay Stuff to try and remember (flashing SD etc, etc it is All so murky now)

brad

[lightfoot]

I remember these ASICs. They weren't the best quality however they sure were profitable ASICs if you bought at the right time. I remember the KnC Neptunes on how they were pulling something like 500 Watts or so from a single PCIe cable. I had some of them and remember questioning if I should leave the house when the cables were hot to the touch.

Then there are those that got their shipment delayed by like a year or 2. Got the ASICs and basically just ebay'd it because it wasn't profitable at all for most home setups. Crazy that its profitable again.

Oddly enough they were even profitable then: Litecoin was stuck at $2 a coin and was pretty much dead, then it ripped up to 50 or so and for a year or so mining was very profitable. Then the L3 series came out and they're about twice as efficient so there you go. Last I mined with them was in 2019, then I stuck em in the closet.

The design was... not great: The stamped metal cases were junk, and yes they pulled way too much power through that plug which caused it to overheat, lift the ground then it happily blew up because it tried to pull ground from the 10 pin ribbon cable. That would blow a die out at least. I put better quality plugs (nickel instead of that crap brass) and they could handle 300watts/80mh per cube.

The other problem was the controller: For 50 cents they could have put optoisolators between the board chip and the cubes. But no, they didn't and in addition to that damn ground loop a cube that wasn't plugged in right would blow out the controller *and* the cube and sometimes other cubes as well. Then you had to swap the FPGA to get it going again, did a lot of those :-)

But the thing was made in like 2014 or so, and it's 2021 and now profitable again. That's just the outside of insane. :-)

(PS: The current reward is 280% PPS. That's nuts)

[lightfoot]

Well, since I'm fixing them again (well, mine) I figured I would update.

First, yeah the plugs still melt. I melted a pair of PCIe plug and sockets on a pair of 4 die hashing cubes so I brought them in, took the boards apart, read this thread to refresh my memory, and swapped the plugs for true nickel ones (had some in the bottom of the drawer)

Still: You will not get the plugs off with an iron unless you pre-heat the board. Try to do it without a pre-heater and you will just ruin the vias. Oddly enough I also burned the plugs on a Dragonmint T1 board and those are easier to remove but still need pre-heat. The Titan has a massive amount of copper in those layers. It wicks heat away too fast for an iron.

Likewise you can tell a board is power deprived because the cube will show, but not hash. As a verifier you can try using 50mhz clock rates, the cube will probably hash. But as soon as the voltage drops due to burned pins it will fall like a rock.

After replacing the plugs, things came right back up, both for the DragonMint and the Titans. I'm currently running 5 cubes, 300mh, 1100 watts at the wall. Of course it's only half the efficiency of an L3+, but to be honest it's still profitable with this insane 410% PPS on litecoinpool.....

I'll probably hook up a final cube and pull the display, this board is a Tarkin coded one and that code is really worth it. Slows down the DC-DC's when it gets hot, and if a fan fails it will save the cube before it burns. I may just code up my own DC-DC current limiter on the Lightfoot code, mainly because the Raspberry Pi's were so slow compared to the Beaglebones. But it's a good solution and if you're running one of your Titans it's probably worth it to send a few bucks to GeneralTarkin for a license.

Anyway with 6 cubes (3 4 die, 3 3 die) I should be able to hash at around 370mh or so. Then I'll think about bringing up another board with the 2 die cubes and run those flat out.....

8 years and the miners are still profitable. That's gotta be some sort of a record.

[Searing]

Lightfoot.

I can't believe I'm asking this ...but seeings how everyone has lost their minds and getting 340% merge mining dodge on top of Litecoin on www.litecoinpool.org

I am gonna move more than a few cubes out the door (contact me on here or eventually eBay.....if you believe dogecoin is going to hit $1 and want in on these

titan cubes/units. I may cut you a deal for you  to repaste/clean and otherwise get these up in some manner anyone here still wanting or following this thread.

Or else eBay they go as is/broken and repairable and need work repaste/etc no refunds..I mean they have been sitting in my attic since when 2017?

Sheesh....use the calculator on the above link ..it is frigging shocking and worth running these again..but I think I'm just gonna move them out the door to

someone who has less than 16c kWh Summer rates, etc, etc.

Anyway, the point is I need the following:

1) a link that works to your beagle bone mod (w/o bridge) direct to a knc titan 4 ribbon board? Or in other words, using a KNC Jupiter/Saturn/Mercury to

run some/titan cubes on. As long as I have to remember/learn again how to flash SD chips for KNC/github 2.002 firmware..I may as well take the extra

step and do some with your firmware beagle bone mod as well.

by the by the github for KNC 2.02 still exists here: https://github.com/KnCMiner/titan/releases.

Also, does anyone have the link again from KNC for the  'step by step' process of how to FLASH these SanDisk SD 8gb cards as such?

Anyway, contact me if you want these....just to know they are going spendy on eBay....like $175 cube a ways back w/shipping

use the calculator on litecoinpool above

and this is probably NOT the stuff for 'newbs' if you found this thread...these knc titans are a breed of treacherous wenches....When home mining in the basement

and doing laundry I carefully 'averted' my eyes not to make contact ....as to that alone would piss them off and they would 'brick' themselves.

I've never seen any 'device' so 'eager' to turn itself into a paperweight...so newbies avoid the heartache pay extra for bitmain L3+..more $$$ but less

heartache.

anyway....get me those links I'll let you know my progress on both firmware hacks above

brad

[lightfoot]

The very fact that people may need these things repaired again blows my mind. But... well, odder things have happened.

The Lightfoot BB firmware is over here on Dropbox. https://www.dropbox.com/s/iz0z2bpzpcetpil/knc-lightfoot%204gb%20version.7z?dl=0

Damn, it even works. Fast too. Oddly enough I don't think anyone ever donated LTC, even though a bunch of people used it. Note to self: Tarkin's license thing was a good idea. Go figure. Tarkin should start selling his code again too.

You can figure out how to uncompress it with 7z then burn it onto a 4gb or larger SD card, it's a simple ISO image.

Currently the five titans are happily hashing at 300mh and I'll be adding some more from the pile this weekend. That should get me a solid 500-600mh, which is plenty.

And if anyone blows up their Titan and needs repairs, drop me a line and I'll give it a go. Oddly enough my repairs turned out to be a hell of a deal in the day for all concerned.

I'm also fixing this pile of Dragonmint T1 boards I accumulated, they are profitable too. Will wonders ever cease?

[lightfoot]

Well, crap. I really should follow my own advice....

So I was starting work on a second controller for the "B" condition cubes. These are the 2-3 die cubes that I will run on one of my beaglebone controllers instead of the Rpi that has Tarkin's firmware. Since Tarkin's code does some pretty nifty monitoring of power supplies and cube temps and does restart of failed dies I figured I would load the best cubes on that controller and put the lesser ones on a dumber one.

I swapped in a sixth cube last week which was a 4 die unit. Worked well at 250mh and since I found another one marked "4 die" I figured I would replace one of my 3 die units and bring that controller to 4 4-die and 2 3 die. So I plugged it in, hooked it up to the same ps that the 4 die cube was using and powered up.

A quick flash of the light on the controller told me I fucked up. Quick flash followed by quick flash means a short on the spi bus and since that is shared with all cubes one fucked cube can damage others. I SHOULD have checked the resistance of all 10 pins with respect to pin 10 (ground) but I was in a hurry.

In this case it cost me the cube that was on the same power supply, the 4 die one. Both now cause the controller to beacon, but on a positive note the other 4 cubes appear ok. So I put the old cube back (3 die) on and put another 3 die cube in. Oddly enough the ribbon cable also does not work anymore, although I can't see damage I'm guessing it blew open in the failure.

Moral: Always check a cube before putting it on a controller with other cubes. Drat.

[Xeon_Xeon]

So some old KNC miners are still chugging along. LOL

I still have my Jupiter miner sitting on a shelf, I pulled the beagle-bone out of it a couple of years ago just to play around with it using it as a small Linux server. LOL

Can I mine anything with it if I put it all back together?

EDIT: Looks like the only use would to mine a new sha256 coin and only after it launches and hope the coin does something, so i'll get it working again and may give a go or just stick it back on the shelf.

[adaseb]

So some old KNC miners are still chugging along. LOL

I still have my Jupiter miner sitting on a shelf, I pulled the beagle-bone out of it a couple of years ago just to play around with it using it as a small Linux server. LOL

Can I mine anything with it if I put it all back together?

EDIT: Looks like the only use would to mine a new sha256 coin and only after it launches and hope the coin does something, so i'll get it working again and may give a go or just stick it back on the shelf.

Yes I had many of those KnC Jupiters. These ASICs actually made a killing for the first owners because they took orders in mid 2013 and they delivered them right before BTC went to like $1100 from $100 or so.

From what I recall they cost like $5000. However if you mined all the way thru middle of 2014 when mining got unprofitable you would of net yourself maybe $20K per ASIC if I recall correctly.

But you are correct, its only for SHA256D which is Bitcoin pretty much. And even with free power you won't make anything. Keep those KnC Jupiters in your museum. Maybe one day they will be worth something.

[Xeon_Xeon]

Yes I had many of those KnC Jupiters. These ASICs actually made a killing for the first owners because they took orders in mid 2013 and they delivered them right before BTC went to like $1100 from $100 or so.

From what I recall they cost like $5000. However if you mined all the way thru middle of 2014 when mining got unprofitable you would of net yourself maybe $20K per ASIC if I recall correctly.

But you are correct, its only for SHA256D which is Bitcoin pretty much. And even with free power you won't make anything. Keep those KnC Jupiters in your museum. Maybe one day they will be worth something.

I got it for $50.00 about three or four years ago with a good 1300 watt power supply, actually got it for the aluminum case and the power supply.

It was not working when I first tried it and I was able to fix it and get it to mine.

I enjoyed tinkering with it.

Never really mined more than an hour so so just to see if it would work, then I put it on a shelf.

[spydr622]

I know how wild it is even being here this late into this things life cycle but I actually just came across a single neptune for free, and I was trying to figure out a few things.
I'm new to asic's and this is intended as a project, not something to be profitable, I know how much of a loss it runs at. I currently have 1x Neptune cube, and a PI thats flashed as a control board for a different asic (avalon series). Do the neptunes REQUIRE a BBB or can a pi be used in replacement of the bbb/ factory controller.

Also, For just running a single cube, what kind of power supply would it need? since its only one, would something like a 600w psu from a pc be enough for just a single? And then there is the issue of the 10 pin connector and i dont have a convertor for it, is that needed? does the convertor from an Avalon 741 work as well?

sorry if its hard to follow, its hard to follow for myself.