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

[supersonic]

Got my unit this evening and have been working to get it setup.  I am using a LEPA 1600 watt PSU, but the 2 units won't start up with it.  I can get the red lights blinking, but when I start the units up, everything just shuts off.  I can start each unit individually, but not sure whats going on when trying to run both.  Any ideas?

Interesting.
When I first set up my miners, I had one running on a lepa g1600 without any issues except the ones we have all been discusing. Right now im using the 2880W IBM power supplies, each powering 2 rigs.
Are you saying that the power to the miners shuts off when you turn the Lepa on? If so, it could be a short.
I would try one board at a time and see if you can get it going that way.
The PI seems to be powered through the ribbon cable, so only a single board is needed to get the PI online.
If the miner lights go out, do the lights on the PI stay on or does everything go off?

So i plug in all 4 6 pin connectors, and both units will start up, it takes about 20 seconds or so before they start to mine, but before they start mining, the PSU just shuts off, including the pi.  I have tried each unit separately, and they run without any issues.  I also remembered I had an extra 600 watt PSU upstairs and got that plugged in to one, with the LEPA in the other, the first time it started up and I was able to see both of them on the live stats, but I don't think they were both hashing as nicehash didn't show more than 140 MH/s.  Now, I can't get both of them to show up again.

EDIT:  I realized my little 600 watt PSU really is at the end of its life and can no longer sustain output.  Just laid the ol guy to rest in the trash can.  Plugged it in with a different PSU and they are both hashing away.  But, again, its on 2 different PSU's.  Not sure what is going on.

I have Lepa 1600 and i was running 4cubes of titan on it. So it was pulling like 1250W on those cubes, BUT - those psu's act strange sometime, they suddenly turn off - and You cant get them up untill You disconnect them from power and unit for couple mins, some fragile protection i guess. Same thing happens to my friend with same Lepa psu. Happened to me once or twice even with GPU's and it wasnt pulling that much. Tho never had such issues with Platimax 1500W. Best to use serwer psu's imo. Im running all my Titans and GPU's on 2kW IBM/Delta's right now - cheaper and better

[usao]

Got my unit this evening and have been working to get it setup.  I am using a LEPA 1600 watt PSU, but the 2 units won't start up with it.  I can get the red lights blinking, but when I start the units up, everything just shuts off.  I can start each unit individually, but not sure whats going on when trying to run both.  Any ideas?

Interesting.
When I first set up my miners, I had one running on a lepa g1600 without any issues except the ones we have all been discusing. Right now im using the 2880W IBM power supplies, each powering 2 rigs.
Are you saying that the power to the miners shuts off when you turn the Lepa on? If so, it could be a short.
I would try one board at a time and see if you can get it going that way.
The PI seems to be powered through the ribbon cable, so only a single board is needed to get the PI online.
If the miner lights go out, do the lights on the PI stay on or does everything go off?

So i plug in all 4 6 pin connectors, and both units will start up, it takes about 20 seconds or so before they start to mine, but before they start mining, the PSU just shuts off, including the pi.  I have tried each unit separately, and they run without any issues.  I also remembered I had an extra 600 watt PSU upstairs and got that plugged in to one, with the LEPA in the other, the first time it started up and I was able to see both of them on the live stats, but I don't think they were both hashing as nicehash didn't show more than 140 MH/s.  Now, I can't get both of them to show up again.

EDIT:  I realized my little 600 watt PSU really is at the end of its life and can no longer sustain output.  Just laid the ol guy to rest in the trash can.  Plugged it in with a different PSU and they are both hashing away.  But, again, its on 2 different PSU's.  Not sure what is going on.

I have Lepa 1600 and i was running 4cubes of titan on it. So it was pulling like 1250W on those cubes, BUT - those psu's act strange sometime, they suddenly turn off - and You cant get them up untill You disconnect them from power and unit for couple mins, some fragile protection i guess. Same thing happens to my friend with same Lepa psu. Happened to me once or twice even with GPU's and it wasnt pulling that much. Tho never had such issues with Platimax 1500W. Best to use serwer psu's imo. Im running all my Titans and GPU's on 2kW IBM/Delta's right now - cheaper and better

Yea, I switched to the 2880W IBM PSU's and they work great. No issues there.

[FryguyUK]

whats the latest version to be running on batch 1 & 3 guys? is there a page where they're announced?

[Longsnowsm]

I believe the current B1 is 0.0.3, and the Batch 3 is v2.0.2 I think.  I don't know that it is posted anywhere.

[Longsnowsm]

I just sent email out to customers who bought directly from Innosilicon explaining the situation.  So you may see an email from me. 

I know we have several people here that bought miners through other channels, but unfortunately there is no way for me to get in touch with people that did not buy miners from Innosilicon.  So for those people I can only hope that they are forum members or stumble upon what we are doing here to resolve these issues with batch 1 and batch 2 miners.

[kurbeks]

Anybody knows if the A4 supports #xnsub ?

Attempted several times ... but seems not supported.

didn't work me too for some time ago

[usao]

Any news on:
1) Are the Batch-3 miners still dropping boards and do the still require a power cycle to get back online?
2) Timing/scheduling for the Jig in the US?

[Longsnowsm]

Any news on:
1) Ate the Batch-3 miners still dropping boards and do the still require a power cycle to get back online?
2) Timing/scheduling for the Jig in the US?

I don't know on the Batch 3 miners.  I have to assume that no news is good news.

On the jig scheduling we are still open to ideas.  It has been mentioned that Prohashing would be willing to flash miners as a service for the community in exchange for a small fee to just cover their time.  We would only have to pay the shipping.  If everyone is open to that idea I can talk to Chris at Prohashing and we can begin to work out the details.  The jig still hasn't arrived yet at my location.

The concern is how fragile the jig is and the shipping it all over the place.  After looking at the pictures that were posted of one of the jigs I have to agree this thing looks to be very fragile.  So the idea of possibly having this done at one location has some merit.

On a side note I had a scare this morning with the A4's.  I woke up at 3am and went and checked on the miners.  The A4's were completely down!  So I power cycled the miners then I couldn't get 1 of the hashing boards in either of my 2 A4's to come up.  I power cycled them more times than I care to count and nothing was working.  Finally on one restart one of the miners picked up 4 boards, but one of them was limping pretty bad and only showing 1608 cores.  I restarted it a few more times and no improvement.  The other miner would not bring up the 4th board no matter what I tried.  So after a couple of hours of battling with it I sent an email to Inno about my problem and gave them some screen shots...

I SWEAR, I no more than hit the send button on that email and went back out and power cycled the miners and BOOM the 4 boards started hashing again on both miners! 

So the moral of this story is that the A4's are scared of Inno, and all you have to do is send an email to them and the A4's straighten right up!  LOL  I have no idea what the problem is, but I hope that the firmware update fixes this mess!  That was the worst I have seen it so far where the miners were down and the hashing boards refused to come up.  Hopefully it was a "one off" situation.

[dogjunior]

Yes, LTC now at 3.63 and falling I won't be buying any more A4's at this price.  The price needs to come down.  Diff increase and lower LTC price is just too much for me to justify this price point and it does not appear to be improving any time soon.

Kinda what I said a few days ago -- However, this is a double edge sword. Part of me is now worried that if LTC doesn't recover and people stop buying the A4 that Inno might be in danger of not having the funding needed to provide us the support and things we need to fix our B1/B2 miners.

Inno does not care if people buy the A4 or not. It is pure profit now. They have built their data hall and loaded it with A4's. All of the unknown hash coming from China is from their mine. They will dump more LTC on the market and further depress prices. Eventually when they have made a boat load of cash and LTC price is sub $1.00 USD, they will drop prices on the A4 and dump them on people who will buy used machines in the hope of ROI in two to three years.

[Searing]

Yes, LTC now at 3.63 and falling I won't be buying any more A4's at this price.  The price needs to come down.  Diff increase and lower LTC price is just too much for me to justify this price point and it does not appear to be improving any time soon.

Kinda what I said a few days ago -- However, this is a double edge sword. Part of me is now worried that if LTC doesn't recover and people stop buying the A4 that Inno might be in danger of not having the funding needed to provide us the support and things we need to fix our B1/B2 miners.

Inno does not care if people buy the A4 or not. It is pure profit now. They have built their data hall and loaded it with A4's. All of the unknown hash coming from China is from their mine. They will dump more LTC on the market and further depress prices. Eventually when they have made a boat load of cash and LTC price is sub $1.00 USD, they will drop prices on the A4 and dump them on people who will buy used machines in the hope of ROI in two to three years.

As a Titan owner (watching this thread) and equiv equip more or less...that COULD be a good thing for you guys...who already have an A4 and assuming you can get them
fixed/flashed

in 2014 KNC d/c making the Titans..thus difficulty was more or less stagnant then dropped as lower speed miners 1mh/10mh/40mh dropped off scrypt network at these prices
eventually scrypt price came back up and thus I'm still mining Titans with ROI at a profit over electric (2 years 1 month) and a period of NO big miners being made. You guys
could get lucky and it could be deja vu all over again

Thus...IF Innsilicon really does have a data hall and HAS decided at these scrypt prices they don't want to buy any more for their data hall if they have one (or if no Data hall by them the IPO guys who got data halls follow the same logic)
AND with all the consumer hassle on the A4 units....also probably not willing to drop price....they could walk away from the whole works like KNC did and you guys could mine
these for more than awhile...not like I see a lot of companies lately  wanting to make pow scrypt miners at these scrypt coin prices...also remember innsilcon announced these miners
and got IPO funding WHEN LTC price was at 5-8 bucks if I remember right..thus them even making any miners for scrypt may be a fluke

So they could walk from the consumer end of this ..stay with the data hall IPO stuff they have now (makes sense why piss in your own pool and raise difficulty thru others)
and wash their hands of it all like knc did.

If that is the case....as of right now imho the ONLY thing left that mines LTC or other scrypt pow now imho is KNC Titans (reworked with gen tarkins firmware and other mods
good for another 2 years) at 300mh more or less and the A4's that maybe you can firmware hash up to say 280mh again and stable. Only these 2 units are majority of the
network now imho.

THUS...if say it ever gets to the point that an A4 can't make electric over mining...and the KNC Titan is close enough...likely the same time...then there are NO lower end
machines to drop out of pow scrypt mining and NO new big ass scrypt miner devices coming out imho.....that means when the Titans/and A4's can't cut it anymore
then scrypt pow is dead.

So IF say LTC was to get back more to its traditional 0.006 and above ratio to BTC say and other scrypt coins in that price ballpark...Then my friends it could be (if lucky) 2015
all over again...and we have just enough difficulty to continue to float the boat and just enough LTC and/or scrypt pow coin prices to keep the boat moving..and hell
this could go on another 2 years w/o new equipment coming into play for scrypt pow

Just saying..if the Data Hall IPO investors have shot their wad and happy..and wish no more..and Innsilcon is discouraged and gonna eventually stop the tap on A4 units
well...because the consumer end of this is a pain for them....again in this (probably) unlikely scenario that could happen with the KNC Titans back in the day ..you too with
the A4's could repeat this trend...so maybe a repeat as I said 'deja vu'

But man we need some life in LTC ratio of 0.00455 or whatever to BTC and/or LTC price and a few more scrypt coins at also a mineable and agreeable price to fill the 'pond' for scrypt pow..right now its kinda light for just LTC gamecredit coin etc
and a couple others Not a lot of confidence in price and not a lot of depth on what an A4/KNC Titan can mine that makes sense in pow/scrypt.

Anyway just a small chance of sunshine in all this...the assumption that the data hall guys have shot their wad at these scrypt pow coin prices and need no more A4's
and that Innsilcon may find the crummy consumer problems on the A4 to the masses are NOT worth the effort anymore...and fold the works like KNC did in 2015 after
a few months.

Anyway what happened in my KNC Titan world that has got me to this point of 2 years and 1 month of mining at still double in payout after electric then I could get with
the newest S9 BTC unit (at my data hall guys who are buying this equip no rent for them/and 6c kwh electric) So go figure.

(trying to instill some hope here from the bleachers...I don't have an A4 but can run my KNC revamped Titan 300mh units yet with your A4 units in such a scenario...a nice
daydream..but hey...we could get lucky

[wheelz1200]

Scrypt will not be dead though, as profitability drops for some it will raise for others that stay on the network.  Eventually no or low power costs will be the only ones running them but it will never be dead so long as there is exchage value for scrypt coins. Right?

[dogjunior]

Scrypt will not be dead though, as profitability drops for some it will raise for others that stay on the network.  Eventually no or low power costs will be the only ones running them but it will never be dead so long as there is exchage value for scrypt coins. Right?

Eventually Inno will stop building the A4 because the more hash they add, the less coin they will be able to mine. Right now 280 Mhs gets you about $7 USD a day. $210 a month. If the diff doubles then you are only getting $105. So your ROI on a 2K machine is 2 years. GL with that.  This is all assuming coin prices remain stable. If they go south then you are looking at 3 plus years to ROI. I don't know about you but I have yet to run a miner more than 2 years before it began to die.  If you under volt the A4 you might get it to live for a few more years but at the cost of extending your ROI. Oh and don't forget that LTC reward halving is in 974 days.  People buying A4's now are taking a huge gamble. Even more than the ones who purchased KNC Titans.  The KNC Titans were crap but KNC didn't keep selling them for months on end. They built two batches and then filled a data hall for themselves and called it a day.  Inno seems to want to keep building until LTC prices go sub $1 and difficulty quadruples. If they have truly fixed the problems with the A4 then you will see huge jumps in diff in the coming months. Kiss your 1 year ROI away and start thinking about 2 or 3 year ROI.

[Inno_ASIC]

Hi All,

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 update is easy, but the MCU update will need a special equipment.
 
For the customers who bought the Batch 1&2 A4 LTC miners from us, we have a jig for you to do a simple upgrade. If you need this service, please contact us at zhangq@innosilicon.com.cn and cc luojm@innosilicon.com.cn, we will arrange the delivery of jig to you one by one.
 
If you are not in our customer list, i.e. you purchased your miner from an agent, please go to your agent and let your agent contact us.

Thanks,
Innosilicon

[Longsnowsm]

Ok, so I received an email from Inno.  If you are on the mailing list for Inno having bought miners directly from them it appears they are going to send you a jig directly. 

I replied back just to get clarification, but that appears to be what they are doing now.  It was a mass mailing and not directed at me specifically since I have already received a jig.  So if you received that email from Inno please reply back to it with the info they requested so that you can get a jig sent to you.  Plus it looks like they will offer a small discount on your next order.

The process with the jig isn't complicated and I think anyone can do it.  It is more time consuming to disconnect everything, pull apart the miners, and reassemble everything and connect it back up than the flashing is.  So this is good news if it is correct.   

[usao]

Ok, so I received an email from Inno.  If you are on the mailing list for Inno having bought miners directly from them it appears they are going to send you a jig directly.  

I replied back just to get clarification, but that appears to be what they are doing now.  It was a mass mailing and not directed at me specifically since I have already received a jig.  So if you received that email from Inno please reply back to it with the info they requested so that you can get a jig sent to you.  Plus it looks like they will offer a small discount on your next order.

The process with the jig isn't complicated and I think anyone can do it.  It is more time consuming to disconnect everything, pull apart the miners, and reassemble everything and connect it back up than the flashing is.  So this is good news if it is correct.    

Good news. Now all we need is confirmation that the flashed units run properly.
BTW, does this mean we need a V2.x.x software version? Anyone have that for DL?

[Longsnowsm]

You will need v2.0.2 for the flashed miners.

Here is the link of v2.0.2. If you have batch 3 miners please update.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9umhsbtky6t1c6j/2.0.2beta.rar?dl=0

So far my miners are staying up and stable.  The reported hash rate on the miner is higher than before at around 275, but I am not seeing that on the pool at all. 

So I question the output on the miner side.  But it appears to be staying up, and not restarting.  Now if they can just improve the hashing rate to something close to the advertised 280mhs that would be good.

[wheelz1200]

Has inno indicated a cap of what will be built or is it just going to keep pouring miners into the wild?  Its a tough call at this point on what to do with scrypt mining....

[Longsnowsm]

Unfortunately nothing has been said about a cap on the number of miners.  The situation at this point is not looking good.  The price to performance ratio has fallen behind that of the S9.  So I think unless the price falls substantially on the A4 and is more in line with the price on the S9 I won't be able to justify buying more A4's.  The S9 has it's share of problems for sure, but the numbers are clearly slanted in the S9's favor at this time. 

Hopefully we will see a price correction soon.  I would prefer to buy from Inno.  They are coming through with the fixes for the A4 and have the makings of a solid miner here.  The large diff increases and prices dropping are just killing this miner.  My A4's even after the fix still don't come close to the advertised hash rate.  This works against the current pricing of the A4's. 

So if the price stays where it is and the trends continue in the current direction sales will vanish soon enough if they haven't already.  Maybe that will stabilize the diff and prices.  But it may mean the end of the A4 production.    Not a pretty picture at the moment.

[dogjunior]

Unfortunately nothing has been said about a cap on the number of miners.  The situation at this point is not looking good.  The price to performance ratio has fallen behind that of the S9.  So I think unless the price falls substantially on the A4 and is more in line with the price on the S9 I won't be able to justify buying more A4's.  The S9 has it's share of problems for sure, but the numbers are clearly slanted in the S9's favor at this time. 

Hopefully we will see a price correction soon.  I would prefer to buy from Inno.  They are coming through with the fixes for the A4 and have the makings of a solid miner here.  The large diff increases and prices dropping are just killing this miner.  My A4's even after the fix still don't come close to the advertised hash rate.  This works against the current pricing of the A4's. 

So if the price stays where it is and the trends continue in the current direction sales will vanish soon enough if they haven't already.  Maybe that will stabilize the diff and prices.  But it may mean the end of the A4 production.    Not a pretty picture at the moment.

A4's have a lot going against them now. Diff going up a lot as more A4's flood the market.  Who knows how many Inno has made or plans to build. Could be in the hundreds or thousands. No telling how greedy they will be. Right now for almost the cost of one A4 you can buy two Antiminer R4's. The 16TH at current diff will get you about .50 BTC per month.  Depending on your electric cost your could ROI in 6 months or less. Also BTC is on the rise and could hit $1000 soon. So your ROI would even be sooner.  No brainer here. ROI in 6 months with the R4 or ROI with the A4 in two years.

[Longsnowsm]

I just received a Christmas email offer from Inno of $1760 for returning customers on the A4.  So no significant price drop.  I know they are offering B1 and B2 owners an additional discount which I think is 4%, but still puts the price at $1690+shipping.  So still not competitive with Antminer at the moment.