Avalon ASIC users thread

[ProfMac]

thankyou profmac

what are you getting GH/s wise now?

Three of the modules hash to http://eligius.st/~wizkid057/newstats/userstats.php/18bLcVkviErQi75zB8X39jZXxHNpSZggdC
So, it is about 110 GH/s at 357 MHz.  One of the modules has a damaged miner, that runs at about 80%.

[gamefixer]

for clarification - can whoever it was who has 4 modules running in b2 with 850w PsU link back to their post/s wrt max frequency and watts used at the wall, please?

Hmm...

That might have been me. (guess I'm not the only one that has had this problem)..

I have 4 2 module units but the controller was going nutty on one of them so I connected the modules from the nutty machine to one of the other controllers (effectively making a 4 module unit). But, I kept the nutty one's power supply connected to the modules so there would be no crazy load on the now 4 module units supply. So no noticeable change on the load from the wall I'm sure.

That said.... I flashed the nutty one with the latest firmware and its working again!

But for some reason while its mining the yellow LED flashes every 3 seconds or so. The others dont do that.

[aneutronic]

I woke up this morning to find my miner doing nothing , and showing a red LED. I restarted and it mines , but it's getting fewer Gh. I looked at the cgminer config page and it looks like one of the units is out (match_work_count14 ). What could cause the red light and sudden stopping of one of the units?

The red led indicates a power supply problem.
I would guess the most likely problem to be a capacitor failed on the one miner section and shutdown the psu.
There's several pictures and reports of cap failures throughout the thread.

Hard to predict if it will shutdown the psu again or not but if it did I would consider removing the power connections on the bad miner section.

[jddebug]

The newer firmwares flash the yellow LED whenever they find a share I believe. Its about once per second anyway.

for clarification - can whoever it was who has 4 modules running in b2 with 850w PsU link back to their post/s wrt max frequency and watts used at the wall, please?

Hmm...

That might have been me. (guess I'm not the only one that has had this problem)..

I have 4 2 module units but the controller was going nutty on one of them so I connected the modules from the nutty machine to one of the other controllers (effectively making a 4 module unit). But, I kept the nutty one's power supply connected to the modules so there would be no crazy load on the now 4 module units supply. So no noticeable change on the load from the wall I'm sure.

That said.... I flashed the nutty one with the latest firmware and its working again!

But for some reason while its mining the yellow LED flashes every 3 seconds or so. The others dont do that.

[edgar]

according to conman (ckolivas) the yellow light blinking is the rig receiving new work - my rigs started to do it on the last fw update and theyve never been better.

there is a 'NEW" fw but i havent touched it as im happy with my rigs

if possible i would ask for any small donations to be made to him - he did more for avalon than avalon did themsleves - and now he seems to be going about the same thing for KNC & others.

a true community hero member!

[Soros Shorts]

Has anyone recently bought hashing modules from the Avalon store? I remember a couple of months ago you needed to specify the batch # with your order because of the different placement of screw holes for the different batches. Now the selection box is gone. Does this mean that the hashing modules currently for sale fit all 3 batches?

[terrapinflyer]

Resetting involves powering it off and on and waiting till the blue light (at the back inside next to the network connector) starts flashing, then pushing in the tiny reset button next to the connector which will make it flash much faster. After that it's ready to connect to at 192.168.1.1. Set your laptop to 192.168.1.2 and plug the ethernet cable into it.

Then do the following:
ssh 192.168.1.1 -l root
mount_root
mtd -r erase rootfs_data

After it reboots it should be back in failsafe settings and you can log in via ethernet again on 192.168.0.100 and flash it with a good firmware.

[gamefixer]

The newer firmwares flash the yellow LED whenever they find a share I believe. Its about once per second anyway.

Ah, thanks for that info.

[gamefixer]

if possible i would ask for any small donations to be made to him - he did more for avalon than avalon did themsleves - and now he seems to be going about the same thing for KNC & others.

a true community hero member!

Good idea.

His latest firmware fixed one of my stupid Avalon's after several emails to them went unanswered.

[smoothrunnings]

Does anyone know if there is such a thing as running an Avalon in too cold conditions isn't good?

My mini's temp is 0, 39, 28. I have see the first temp drop below -1.

Thanks

[smoothrunnings]

for clarification - can whoever it was who has 4 modules running in b2 with 850w PsU link back to their post/s wrt max frequency and watts used at the wall, please?

I am 1 of those people.  But I don't have a link to those posts.

I ran for several weeks with 4 modules and a stock 850 W power supply.  A kill-a-watt said it pulled 1,000 to 1,030 W from the wall, depending on how hard the fans were spinning.  I did not have trouble with the unit under those conditions.  I had --avalon-auto and it stayed about 350-355 MHz.

I have now installed a OCZ 1250 W power supply into the same unit.  Now it runs from about 980 to about 1,010 W from the wall.  It runs slightly faster, at about 357 MHz.

As long as you have good clean power there shouldn't be any problems with running the Avalon 4 modules on their stock PSU (Evermax 850w GOLD) at 340Mhz. I have had mind running for two months without any problems, of course I keep them as cool as possible which I am sure helps.

[MrTeal]

Well, my Minis are still giving me issues. They still freeze up a couple times a day even with the newest firmware. The orange light stays lit, and I can't access the web interface once it stops submitting shares. Interestingly it still pulls 600-650W, even if it hasn't submitted a share in hours. Does anyone else see a similar issue?

I'm planning on opening them up and just hooking the controller board into my mining rig. Other than removing the 5V power jumper, is there anything else that needs to be done to run the Avalon controller on a standard cgminer binary?

[gamefixer]

Well, my Minis are still giving me issues. They still freeze up a couple times a day even with the newest firmware. The orange light stays lit, and I can't access the web interface once it stops submitting shares. Interestingly it still pulls 600-650W, even if it hasn't submitted a share in hours. Does anyone else see a similar issue?

I'm planning on opening them up and just hooking the controller board into my mining rig. Other than removing the 5V power jumper, is there anything else that needs to be done to run the Avalon controller on a standard cgminer binary?

FWIW, I had zero luck hooking up my Avalon's to a PC in my office. I too was getting tired of the constant lockups and the full power drag upon that lockup.

Some one here advised that I set them to restart cgminer every few hours and reboot every 10-12 hours.

If you do get it working please post here. I'd rather the Avalons be connected to a PC anyway.

[-ck]

I've been running mine off USB cable to my PC for months. Even tried it on windows just to be sure and it works fine, but linux is always better for this.

Plug the usb cable from you pc into the printer type connector on the board, unplugging the usb cable that's going from the little tp-link router to it. You can pull out the pin next to it that gives power to the tplink router but even that step's not essential. If you're on windows, wait for windows to try and install a driver for it - it will be the wrong thing for cgminer. After it's finished proudly telling you it has installed a driver, run zadig as an administrator and look for the ftdi device and switch it to WinUSB. Then you can run cgminer as per any other device (make sure to use 3.8.3 to get the stable avalon code). If you give cgminer no command line options it should still work with the avalon, but of course you'll have to start adding commands to make the most of it.

It should look something like this:

Code:

 AVA 0: 25C/ 48C 2400R | 86.99G/83.45Gh/s | A:70143 R:695 HW:1281 WU:1165.8/m

I only have this in my configuration file for a batch 2 3 module unit:

Code:

"avalon-options" : "115200:24:10:d:353"

[Distribution]

I woke up this morning to find my miner doing nothing , and showing a red LED. I restarted and it mines , but it's getting fewer Gh. I looked at the cgminer config page and it looks like one of the units is out (match_work_count14 ). What could cause the red light and sudden stopping of one of the units?

The red led indicates a power supply problem.
I would guess the most likely problem to be a capacitor failed on the one miner section and shutdown the psu.
There's several pictures and reports of cap failures throughout the thread.

Hard to predict if it will shutdown the psu again or not but if it did I would consider removing the power connections on the bad miner section.

Thanks. That's what I figured. I looked at the modules to see if I could see a failed capacitor, but I was unable to find any noticeable signs of failure.

I assume that the numbers on the top correspond with the numbers of modules. So I figured the problem was at P14. I don't know how accurate that is. If that is the case, here's an album of that section. Maybe someone else can pick out an anomaly. I also took off that metal plate and looked to see if I could spot a burnt up ASIC chip.

EDIT: Also, sometimes [match_work_count14] => 0 will not be zero, implying that maybe it works sometimes. But the number is always magnitudes lower than the others.

Finally, it's been running for a couple days now on --avalon-auto without problem. So I haven't seen the red LED or any shutdowns.

[gamefixer]

I've been running mine off USB cable to my PC for months.

AWESOME! I'm totally going to try this when I get my miners moved! Thanks for posting this information.

[MrTeal]

I've been running mine off USB cable to my PC for months. Even tried it on windows just to be sure and it works fine, but linux is always better for this.

Plug the usb cable from you pc into the printer type connector on the board, unplugging the usb cable that's going from the little tp-link router to it. You can pull out the pin next to it that gives power to the tplink router but even that step's not essential. If you're on windows, wait for windows to try and install a driver for it - it will be the wrong thing for cgminer. After it's finished proudly telling you it has installed a driver, run zadig as an administrator and look for the ftdi device and switch it to WinUSB. Then you can run cgminer as per any other device (make sure to use 3.8.3 to get the stable avalon code). If you give cgminer no command line options it should still work with the avalon, but of course you'll have to start adding commands to make the most of it.

It should look something like this:

Code:

 AVA 0: 25C/ 48C 2400R | 86.99G/83.45Gh/s | A:70143 R:695 HW:1281 WU:1165.8/m

I only have this in my configuration file for a batch 2 3 module unit:

Code:

"avalon-options" : "115200:24:10:d:353"

I'm running similar,

Code:

cgminer.exe --avalon-options 115200:16:10:45:400 --avalon-fan 80

I am getting about 3:1 duplicate work though

Code:

 AVA 0: 25C/ 43C 0000R | 57.72G/57.52Gh/s | A:13083 R:4310 HW:1691 WU: 803.9/m

Code:

 [2013-11-24 18:03:27] Accepted 04509db4 Diff 59/32 AVA 0 pool 1
 [2013-11-24 18:03:28] Accepted 0316daa9 Diff 83/32 AVA 0 pool 1
 [2013-11-24 18:03:29] Rejected 0316daa9 Diff 83/32 AVA 0 pool 1 (Duplicate work)

I also get a lot of "Avalon: Discarding XX Bytes from buffer" errors.
For the 57GH/s on the miner, I am seeing ~45GH/s at the pool end.

[MrTeal]

Changing the timeout to d seems to have fixed the issue, plus it increased the hashrate. Thanks Con.

[MrTeal]

Since I have this thing sitting on my desk attempting to deafen me, I quickly noticed an interesting error a few minutes ago. The 80% died down, so I switched to the cgminer window and the Mini had stopped responding and dropped out. 3.8.2 popped it back up as AVA 1 instead of 0, and it started mining again without issue.
Pure speculation on my part, but I wonder if this could be a similar issue to what causes the hang with the TP-Link. I will enable logging so that I can actually capture the message the next time it happens.

[-ck]

Catastrophic usb communication failure will make the operating system reset the device and put it on another usb minor number. When this happens, cgminer will hotplug it as a new device - i.e. AVA1 and AVA0 will remain as a zombie device. The web GUI and Avalon operating system environment is not smart enough and may not know that it's still mining at a new location and would just kill off the cgminer whereas mining via USB you'll see that in all its glory.