A4 Dominator - Pre-Order Group Buy - 280mh, roughly 1000w, $1800 + shipping

[flowless]

Hi! Guys. Please need your help. Today i have start A4  block (138M) and after connect and config it. (software 1.0.3) i recieve message "Error getting version for 127.0.0.1:4028 ERR: socket connect(127.0.0.1:4028) failed!" What that mean?

[Longsnowsm]

Hm. How about when you turn on full diagnostics in CGMiner. Before the board resets, do you ever see anything odd like got Nonce for invalid hash, or stuff like that which might indicate chip cores are yammering on top of each other?

When the dies come back do you once again get invalid nonces coming out of them (meaning the dies reported stale work) or do they just pick up and hash (indicating the dies lost power and reset their buffers)

Any links to close up pictures of a board? How do they have the power laid out between the DC-DC's and the chips?

Edit: I see the nonce error. Interesting. Pi's suck at SPI by the way, they should have used beaglebones. This points away from a power supply dc-dc issue at the moment. Hm.

Here is a picture of a board we were sent some time ago:

[Nowayz]

that means that cgminer did not start yet or bailed out with errors and the web interface cannot connect to the cgminer api.

Wait for it to come online if you see it running in the connect page.

Check your configuration if it will not keep running.

Good luck.

Hi! Guys. Please need your help. Today i have start A4  block (138M) and after connect and config it. (software 1.0.3) i recieve message "Error getting version for 127.0.0.1:4028 ERR: socket connect(127.0.0.1:4028) failed!" What that mean?

[lightfoot]

Hm. How about when you turn on full diagnostics in CGMiner. Before the board resets, do you ever see anything odd like got Nonce for invalid hash, or stuff like that which might indicate chip cores are yammering on top of each other?

When the dies come back do you once again get invalid nonces coming out of them (meaning the dies reported stale work) or do they just pick up and hash (indicating the dies lost power and reset their buffers)

Any links to close up pictures of a board? How do they have the power laid out between the DC-DC's and the chips?

Edit: I see the nonce error. Interesting. Pi's suck at SPI by the way, they should have used beaglebones. This points away from a power supply dc-dc issue at the moment. Hm.

Here is a picture of a board we were sent some time ago:

Well that's a weird way to do it. 1850 linear power controller, two high side/2 low side Fets (bad idea), and they're really hauling the power to the dies. I wonder how much interference that's causing.

What does the board look like with a thermal camera? Hot spots on the way to those hashing chips?

[Searing]

This is a dumb question but here goes

 Could this be a HEAT issue of the 2 boards crammed into that itty bitty case and getting too hot and resetting?

 Looks to me like you could easily mount these in a KNC Jupiter Case say and just put big ass fans on the works (like GPU rigs do) and see what happens

 and/or how stable.

 Would be hilarious if all this is ..is too much heat crammed into that little box with a fan....

 I suppose a 'heat temp gun' would also tell you much on this theory

 Anyway for what it is worth what I had rigged up in 2013 on my KNC Jupiter due to heat (ran it this way in the Winter too)

 Just a thought..it solved my problems with heat back in the day You could over kill on the fans...more so then you see on the pic below in that

 they don't have any 'coolers' per say....?

 

 

[usao]

I dont have an IR gun, but the web page reports temps of 50-51 on all my cubes.
Fans are 200 CFM...

[sqnkee]

Hi! Guys. Please need your help. Today i have start A4  block (138M) and after connect and config it. (software 1.0.3) i recieve message "Error getting version for 127.0.0.1:4028 ERR: socket connect(127.0.0.1:4028) failed!" What that mean?

1. check Your router IP (you have to fill default gateway same as router ip)
2. check Your DNS adress on router, also have to be added manualy in miner config.

PS. Order only miners with 2.0.1 firmware

[FryguyUK]

Had an electrician around to put a nice chunky cable in my mining room and 10 power ports.

Seems to be more stable however, much more stable... only one difference:

I'm now running each miner from a single power port...

where as before I had two miners into an extension lead, into the wall...

Miners are tipping just over 1000 watts usage - extension cables are usually rated at 2000 watts max...

Maybe this is a problem for other people?

[usao]

Im running my A4's off a single 220V 50A circuit through a switched PDU which allows for remote power cycle on a per-port basis.
Each miner has it's own Seasonic PSU.

Still dropping about 1-2 boards per day.

[Eyedol-X]

Had an electrician around to put a nice chunky cable in my mining room and 10 power ports.

Seems to be more stable however, much more stable... only one difference:

I'm now running each miner from a single power port...

where as before I had two miners into an extension lead, into the wall...

Miners are tipping just over 1000 watts usage - extension cables are usually rated at 2000 watts max...

Maybe this is a problem for other people?

Mine is running on a 208V - 2880W PSU and it has the restart issues. It's also in environment that the temperature reported by the miner is never higher than 50C

This is the longest its been running in days since my recent tests

[lightfoot]

I dont have an IR gun, but the web page reports temps of 50-51 on all my cubes.
Fans are 200 CFM...

I was thinking more hotspots on the board itself. That's a long distance to freight x amps at low voltage, the issue can pop up where voltage instabilities between dies can lead to virtual ground loops on the SPI signal interface (to its' ground assuming it's not isolated).

The power supplies themselves look to be the same concept as the old jalapenos right down to the 1850 running two channels of FETs feeding the same supply line.

Interesting.

[flowless]

Hmmm ... Device temp is about 55 C. No rejected shares for 24 hours at litecoinpool. But noise from cooler fan is so strong, Does anybody have change cooler or have some ideas about it?
 And if i was change core speed down to 52Mhs which voltage i can set for stable work?

[usao]

Hmmm ... Device temp is about 55 C. No rejected shares for 24 hours at litecoinpool. But noise from cooler fan is so strong, Does anybody have change cooler or have some ideas about it?
 And if i was change core speed down to 52Mhs which voltage i can set for stable work?

I had a bad fan on one of my cubes. Inno told me to replace with any fan CFM >= 200.
You could do a search on decibals per CFM and see if you can find a quieter fan.
Other options include duct-work to feed outside AC directly into cubes, similar to what they did for early AntMiners...

[lightfoot]

This is actually an interesting line of analysis: Can someone stick one of these in a snowbank or a freezer? I'm curious if design issues in the power supplies or the board layout is resulting in heat plus resistance knocking down the SPI lines.

C

[citronick]

my A4s are online now at my ISP, Batch 3 with v2.01 firmware....

Tried Nicehash but the MHs are all over the place .... then I pointed them to Prohashing.com and seems stable... but let's see how it goes after 24 hours.

4 out 6 units are online, reading poolside, 350MH/s, 319MH/s, 250MH/s and 200 MH/s

Voltage: 815
Diff: 8192
Speed: 69.5 / 1200mhz across the board
Temps: 32-44c range (sampled from 4th rig - 200MH/s)

I will update again stay tuned.

[Longsnowsm]

my A4s are online now at my ISP, Batch 3 with v2.01 firmware....

Tried Nicehash but the MHs are all over the place .... then I pointed them to Prohashing.com and seems stable... but let's see how it goes after 24 hours.

4 out 6 units are online, reading poolside, 350MH/s, 319MH/s, 250MH/s and 200 MH/s

Voltage: 815
Diff: 8192
Speed: 69.5 / 1200mhz across the board
Temps: 32-44c range (sampled from 4th rig - 200MH/s)

I will update again stay tuned.

Please keep us posted how your Batch 3's run.  I am surprised you took the risk given how badly the batch 1 and 2 miners are running.  Good to hear that they are working so far.

[citronick]

my A4s are online now at my ISP, Batch 3 with v2.01 firmware....

Tried Nicehash but the MHs are all over the place .... then I pointed them to Prohashing.com and seems stable... but let's see how it goes after 24 hours.

4 out 6 units are online, reading poolside, 350MH/s, 319MH/s, 250MH/s and 200 MH/s

Voltage: 815
Diff: 8192
Speed: 69.5 / 1200mhz across the board
Temps: 32-44c range (sampled from 4th rig - 200MH/s)

I will update again stay tuned.

Please keep us posted how your Batch 3's run.  I am surprised you took the risk given how badly the batch 1 and 2 miners are running.  Good to hear that they are working so far.

yes it was a big risk but calculated risk assuming that Innosilicon will eventually come up with a solution. My contacts in China shared with me that our rants in Bitcointalk is nothing compared to the "storm of fire and brimstone" from the A4 owners in China!

the rig setup are not ready or fully completed yet, because missing 1 more box from DHL which has not arrived. That box contained a controller, so to test the miners, we just use the available controllers we have and the MHs as spec should give this reading 400MHs, 400MHs, 280MHs and 400MHs for now. When the last controller arrives, the final setup with be 280MHs x 6. I will measure the actuals after we complete the setup.

[lightfoot]

Neat. Any chance someone can post pictures of the gen 1, 2 and 3 boards, along with the controllers. Curious if there are any board specific changes.

[vinylwasp]

Neat. Any chance someone can post pictures of the gen 1, 2 and 3 boards, along with the controllers. Curious if there are any board specific changes.

Lightfoot, I don't know what the root cause is, but I can tell everyone here that there's a fix coming from Inno.
Here's a slightly edited excerpt of an email I received from Chloe.

Hello Vinylwasp,

We have solved the restart and reboot problem in batch 3. No update in hardware but the firmware in STM32 MCU and SD card both have updates.
SD card firmware has been upgraded to v2.0.1. For ST MCU firmware, we will send you a testing jig (which is expensive) and user manual to update.
For smaller batch one and batch two buyers who bought less than 50 units, we will send them new STM32 MCU for local replacement, but will need them to find local expertise to execute that.
.

I replied suggesting that Chloe reach out to Longsnowsm, yourself and/or GenTarkin to discuss how to co-ordinate reflashing the group buy miners after sending you a jig.
I additionally suggested that yourself or GenTarkin could be utilized in your respective geographies to flash units belonging to small purchasers rather than sending them an updated STM32 MCU for local replacement, while offering my jig (once I receive it) and my services down under. I'm based in NZ.

I've been involved in the IT industry for the past 20 years and have seen numerous failures, so this is very familiar ground. Sales promise shipping date, orders are taken and paid for, development takes longer than anticipated (best case targets rarely come true), buyers start complaining about missed shipping dates, testing is shortened -> product has bugs.

So before everyone starts screaming about how terrible this situation is, remember the pressure applied to ship this product, the large investors who laid down $0.5-1M, and the fact that Inno have been working tirelessly to improve both the hardware and the software over the past 4-6 weeks with 3 versions of hardware and 6+ versions of software shipped in this period. Yes they can improve comms but they've got large enterprise customers who are screaming much closer to home in their native tongue and Chloe seems to be the only person in a comms role (btw: I checked with Chloe that it was ok to share the information above). This is the industry we've chosen to jump into for better or worse. I'm hurting too but I knew the risk before I laid down my money.

My personal experience is that the restarts are not the real problem, the problem is that some cards do not restart. To solve this, I've been monitoring each cards work and applying +2Mv to the miner and watching for 24 hours. It seems to be working. I now have miners which still restart all 4 cards most of the time. Not only that my B1's are hashing on Prohashing at around 250-260+ Mhs 2hr avg. and my B2's hash at 270+Mhs.

B1 = 822-824Mv at 1200Hz
B2 = 826-828Mv at 1224Hz

They're running between 45-52 C most of the time, but will drop into the 30's overnight. I do through a lot of cool air at them though so mileage may vary.

HTH

[Searing]

They need to send longsnowsm a jig. Surely 50 plus on the group buy is enough reason on this
Lame imho support!

Have they gone back on open source as well on a side note as well?

Anyway they seem to not have run away from commitments on the
small orders ..... but seem to be backing away briskly for now

Edit:
So I gather they waited on this till your 45 day warranty expired?