ASICMINER: Erupter Blades. Review, comments, photos, and discussion!

[seleme]

Comparing annual BTC roi with usual investment knowing everything about it's volatility is ultimate nonsense.

[Batteryfire]

Got mine this morning! What's the difference between "clock: high" and "clock: low"?

[alexuk]

Got mine this morning! What's the difference between "clock: high" and "clock: low"?

Clock high wont work unless you overvolt the powerlines (as per Friedcat's documentation) - youll gain approx 10% hashing rate. If you do switch the clock to high, and you have not overvolted, the blade will start spitting out errors

Clock low works as per normal, youll get 10gh/s approx

[JimiQ84]

good thing is that difficulty seems to be stagnating (current estimated rise is 5% and we are some 850 blocks from change). So doomsayers prediction of sustained 16% rise didn't come true :-)

[friedcat]

Friedcat

The wording on the document is a bit off -

""4. To change the output voltage of each power lane, attach the red stick of the multimeter onto the joint space between the lane’s 2R2 inductor and the two capacitors nearby, and the black stick onto the negative input of the 4 pole connector, then use a small screwdriver to adjust the trimmer.
""

see video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0i4Z_nPtZE&feature=youtu.be

wording should be changed to:

"
4. To change the output voltage of each power lane, attach the red stick of the multimeter onto the lane’s 2R2 inductor metal connector, and the black stick onto the negative input of the 4 pole connector, then use a small screwdriver to adjust the trimmer.
"

What I really meant was to insert the red stick (deeper) to the space between the 2R2 inductor and the capacitors to make the stick more stable to handle by hand. The metal pins on the 2R2 inductor is also OK.

[friedcat]

Initial thoughts:

* Blade can take up to 10-15mins to get to 10Ghash/s
* After and hour, acceptance rate is around 97%
* drawing about 70-80watts power.

* Yes. But sometimes some of them will be quicker.

* 97%-100% is the normal range

* With downvoltaging to 1.03-1.05V the power consumption might be even under 70watts. But of course this excludes the power loss on the PSU.

Issues / problems found so far:

* Stratum worker isnt supported? i cant seem to get it to connect to btcguild's stratum server
* DONT wire up with just molex 12v power - use a video card power connector 12V lines - 2x 12V cables. (should be added to a guide)
* You cant tell which wires should go in where for the power adapter - but quickly solved once you flip over the PCB - and you can see +'s and -'s
* Hard to mount / stand up the blade vertically, would be nice for some drill holes along an edge of the PCB so you can fix struts to mount the blade onto something

* Stratum worker is not supported. But the boards could be connected to a stratum mining proxy.

* The one-cable-two-layer output of some 12V power sources are indeed hard to wire up. We also suggest using a PSU with two output cables.

* Yes. The back side of the PCB has a mark of polarity. And you only need to power (any) one + and (any) one -. The additional ones are for nesting.

* Yes. This is what in our mind in our improvement design.

[alexuk]

Initial thoughts:

* Blade can take up to 10-15mins to get to 10Ghash/s
* After and hour, acceptance rate is around 97%
* drawing about 70-80watts power.

* Yes. But sometimes some of them will be quicker.

* 97%-100% is the normal range

* With downvoltaging to 1.03-1.05V the power consumption might be even under 70watts. But of course this excludes the power loss on the PSU.

Issues / problems found so far:

* Stratum worker isnt supported? i cant seem to get it to connect to btcguild's stratum server
* DONT wire up with just molex 12v power - use a video card power connector 12V lines - 2x 12V cables. (should be added to a guide)
* You cant tell which wires should go in where for the power adapter - but quickly solved once you flip over the PCB - and you can see +'s and -'s
* Hard to mount / stand up the blade vertically, would be nice for some drill holes along an edge of the PCB so you can fix struts to mount the blade onto something

* Stratum worker is not supported. But the boards could be connected to a stratum mining proxy.

* The one-cable-two-layer output of some 12V power sources are indeed hard to wire up. We also suggest using a PSU with two output cables.

* Yes. The back side of the PCB has a mark of polarity. And you only need to power (any) one + and (any) one -. The additional ones are for nesting.

* Yes. This is what in our mind in our improvement design.

Thanks for the feedback

im going to be setting up a getwork / stratum proxy tonight

https://github.com/slush0/stratum-mining-proxy



Some other observations:

* ive seen / heard the blade randomly restart (upon restart you can heard a quiet audible clicking sound - which must be the voltage relays), im assuming this is a auto/feature of the blade if a ASIC chip locks up / has issues / or overheat? (solved - see new thread for possible issue)


Feature suggestions

* the MH/s counter seems to be the average since bootup to now().  Would a 1, 5, 15min mh/s counter be possible? (is there a onboard clock the "microchip" uses at all)?
* how do you perform upgrades of firmware / software?

Thanks!

[mrb]

good thing is that difficulty seems to be stagnating (current estimated rise is 5% and we are some 850 blocks from change). So doomsayers prediction of sustained 16% rise didn't come true :-)

You are wrong: current estimated increase is 11% and there is *no* sign of stagnating in sipa's graphs.

[friedcat]

Thanks for the feedback

im going to be setting up a getwork / stratum proxy tonight

https://github.com/slush0/stratum-mining-proxy



Some other observations:

* ive seen / heard the blade randomly restart (upon restart you can heard a quiet audible clicking sound - which must be the voltage relays), im assuming this is a auto/feature of the blade if a ASIC chip locks up / has issues / or overheat?

Feature suggestions

* the MH/s counter seems to be the average since bootup to now().  Would a 1, 5, 15min mh/s counter be possible? (is there a onboard clock the "microchip" uses at all)?
* how do you perform upgrades of firmware / software?

Thanks!

* The ethernet controller restarts when the network connection times out or it experiences a long time of no accepted shares.

* It is possible, and we will include it into the TODO list of our later versions of firmware.

* You need a Microchip PICKit 2 to program the new firmware in.

[organofcorti]

good thing is that difficulty seems to be stagnating (current estimated rise is 5% and we are some 850 blocks from change). So doomsayers prediction of sustained 16% rise didn't come true :-)

You are wrong: current estimated increase is 11% and there is *no* sign of stagnating in sipa's graphs.

In fairness, the average weekly hashrate did not increase last week (ending 21st April). ASICMiner is now certainly fixing that now.

[alexuk]

Friedcat - Thanks again for coming back

Some more observations / issues

* ive seem to of melted a black neutral cable coming from the ATX power supply (this caused the erupter to restart every 2-3 mins) - a fix is to bond two neutrals together and plus into one green negative adapter port - this should be added to the setup / install docs.

Below shows the issue + fix

ASICMINER erupter blade - after 36 hours use - minor power issue

http://youtu.be/cvAFBWHGw58

[eb3full]

http://youtu.be/cvAFBWHGw58

There should be no problem running 10 amps through a wire like that... the problem is probably a short or you had a loose connection.

[JimiQ84]

How will it work with stratum proxy? You'll point erupter blade to your server (some 192.168.x.x:Y) and on that server you have running program which intercepts everything on port Y and forwards it to btcguild stratum server and vice versa?

[punin]

How will it work with stratum proxy? You'll point erupter blade to your server (some 192.168.x.x:Y) and on that server you have running program which intercepts everything on port Y and forwards it to btcguild stratum server and vice versa?

LMGTFY

[JimiQ84]

How will it work with stratum proxy? You'll point erupter blade to your server (some 192.168.x.x:Y) and on that server you have running program which intercepts everything on port Y and forwards it to btcguild stratum server and vice versa?

LMGTFY

You could have just written my hypothesis was right ;-) I would be much faster for you, me and everyone.

Anyway, new auction is up: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=189248.msg1960912

[alexuk]

http://youtu.be/cvAFBWHGw58

There should be no problem running 10 amps through a wire like that... the problem is probably a short or you had a loose connection.

Nope, the wires were overheating, possibly poor quality copper?

right now, upon touch, they are still warmish... but nothing serious

[alexuk]

How will it work with stratum proxy? You'll point erupter blade to your server (some 192.168.x.x:Y) and on that server you have running program which intercepts everything on port Y and forwards it to btcguild stratum server and vice versa?

yeap i got Sloshs stratum proxy up and running, acceptance went from 95-97% to 99.975%

[alexuk]

adjusted the power to 1.2 volts, bumped the clock up, getting 12 G/hash with a 98.8% acceptance rate

[JimiQ84]

adjusted the power to 1.2 volts, bumped the clock up, getting 12 G/hash with a 98.8% acceptance rate

great news!

[kokojie]

Sorry if this has been asked before, so if I have a standard PC PSU (for example from a GPU mining rig). I would be able to power these BE blades, without buying anything extra? is the "adapter" in the videos included in the package?