Gridseed boards help with power (no barrel plugs there?)

[GeneralKurt]

Hi guys I'm new to crypto and hoping for some help. Here's the story..

I picked up 2 boards on a heatsink pretty cheap. The listing said they were Gridseed Gblade boards, and said power cables included. I did some research on Gridseed blades and watched the videos on wiring up to a psu, and using a 12v 5-7amp adapter with barrel plug. I noticed the color of the boards were not the same as the ones I've been seeing online, and the pics I couldn't zoom in enough to really see everything but I just assumed it was from a larger/smaller model like the 25MH one or the 2board 5mH little tubes.

Anyways I get them yesterday and there are No barrel plugs on them lol. In addition to that I have no idea what sort of plug it is that it does have. And in addition to that the wires seem awfully small gauge for them.

They are 8 pin, flat connectors with 4black 4 red smallish gauge wires.

I've read posts about the polarity being backwards on some of these boards which also scares me.

It doesn't actually say Gridseed on it anywhere. Googling the writing hasn't helped me so far but I'm still looking. Again the listing said Gridseed Gblade 1 blade - 2boards - 5MH/s, 40 chips per board. It does have 40 chips per board.

They are red and the writing says D25419h 1418 and then under that LTC VERA 2014-0423

I'm thinking my options are going to be to try and find an adapter or cut it and put the wires into a PCIe plug? Can anyone tell me what type of plug this is? Was very sad to see no barrel plugs on it as far as ease of buying power block on amazon.

Thank you for the help.
Ok I don't see a way to upload pics so  http://imgur.com/a/qE89t

[leowonderful]

Like I suspected the blades are indeed Gridseed blades but it appears the sold you G-Black blades, which are different from the normal Gridseed blades you will find. Will keep you informed on power, could possibly be some weird proprietary shit.

Couldn't find much info on these weird wires, going to guess Gridseed made some proprietary connector or bought some weird one and they made it fit on their own PSU. Low gauge is somewhat understandable as these things don't draw that much power. I would personally try to wire this up to a PCIE 6 or 8 pin connector and see if it works if nobody else chimes in.

[JaredKaragen]

Those boards have the power connector on them, 4 black, 4 red wires.

+12V.  Be sure to supply enough current.  Just hook it up and power it on.  a PCIE plug from a PC power supply should do you nicely.

I assume they have a USB port on them.

Now;  if the regular gridseed driver methods don't work (zadig method I think?) you will need the G-black Pi image and a Pi to control them....  But I think this isn't that crazy model like the one ive been working on trying to get running again.

[philipma1957]

be careful with it

the  blue oval is your power  neg and positive  but I do not know  what volts  you need to hit it with

the black and red wires have another end please show it.


the usb is under the power the silver socket i think

[JaredKaragen]

yeah, the USB is the silver socket.  Its a USB type mini A.

Just looking at the power filter components on the top, on top of handling these before;  it is for sure a 12V board.

Just power it up and plug it in.    As long as you have a compatible version of ccminer for its chips/interface (some have a strange USB interface chip that doesn't give you a VCP to work from) it should work like a charm.

I always used ccminer 3.7.2 for gridseed devices.   Its known to have some bugs, but;  its a lot more user friendly and easier to get going correctly than the newer version 4.2 or something like that people were using.

[GeneralKurt]

Thank you for the replies.

I did notice late that the chips on it are GC3355 same as the Gridseed orbs via pics online so leowonderful is right I think for sure. Trying to google G-black blades has been proving not very helpful as they are pretty much all in the 25MH case or mistaken for the tube-gblade with the barrels.

Everyone is saying just wire it up to PCIe, which makes total sense, I've watched guides and have a bit of experience with wiring, I'm not afraid to do it overall BUT this scares the shit out of me here where he claims the red and black were reversed? As well as a couple of other posts I ran across too. Maybe they are full of it and just made mistakes?

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/45760/why-are-my-gridseed-blades-exploding-what-components-are-exploding

philipma1957 the other end of the cable is the other pic on imgur that is the closeup. is showing the plug itself, they are the same on both ends, both female. Which points me back up to ^ last paragraph of concern and not knowing wtf this plug is. I spent an hour looking at images of power connectors haha.

Ok so obviously I will only do 1 board to start and see if it fries it from reverse polarity lol. I'm hoping seller will respond to me and will wait a bit but not holding my breath.

That being said which is the best way for me to go as far as doing the wiring? Do I strip the wires on both the asic plug And the PSU pcie and barrel them? Do I cut off the flat 8pin that came with it and stick it into a pcie plug? Strip them and solder them together and wrap with tape (sort of the same as option 1)? Other options?

I suppose if I cut them off and try to stick them into a plug is the Worst possible way to do it obviously, just seeing that on videos and wondering why.

Yea the silver USB mini he sent me cables for as well.

Thanks again for the help, I wasn't expecting a response so quickly, you guys rock.

[not.you]

Yes definitely g-black boards.  I have two of these machines and on one of them the PSU fried some of the components so I had to jury rig it exactly as you need to now do.  I used PCIe extension plugs.  Basically I bought something like these:

and cut off one end so I can connect them from the PSU PCIe plugs and then run them out to bare wires.  Then I used something like these: http://www.newark.com/productimages/standard/en_US/4929973.jpg?01AD=3c47BJfkw23sA7hS_ubIpAIjl8f7kW8DnCAyvI5pUYtyDZ_EOOnoNCA&01RI=E5C75660FF6E8AF&01NA=
to wire them together.  Those are called barrier terminal blocks.

Just make sure you get the right wires connected on the barrier terminal blocks.  Black to black, yellow to red (assuming the PCIe power cable extenders are color coded correctly). Make sure and use all 4 of those low gauge wires to connect to the board and use at least 3 wires coming off of the PSU side for each 4 wire bunch from the miner boards.  I did have some wires melt on me with this setup from too much power draw.  I also ended up frying one of the ten devices (basically half of one board because there are two devices per board).

I was using bfg miner, newer version of bfg miner will recognize these devices.  You do need the STMicroelectronics virtual COM port drivers for windows machines.

EDIT:  I see your most recent post about the polarity reversal.  If that was the case with mine it was the case with exactly one device since only one of them fried.  I wired all ten devices (5 boards) at the same time, turned on the juice and heard a tiny pop and saw some smoke.  When I started bfg miner it only recognized 9 devices.  Through trial and error unplugging the mini USB cables from the devices I identified which one it was and just left it off after that.  So I think for mine the polarity on the wires was correct.

I still have these miners.  I am not running them currently mostly because of the summer heat and low profitability but with LTC up compared to what it was they are probably barely profitable again so come the fall I may turn them back on.

I should also mention, these things are a bit flaky.  I had batch files setup to kill bfg miner and restart it every hour because sometimes some of the devices just stop submitting shares.  Sometimes you have to power cycle them as well for the same reason. 

[JaredKaragen]

To confirm polarity:


Find a capacitor;  one that's polarized.

Ohm from its negative (or + if you get desperate) terminal to the main power connector.  Be sure which one is ground....

You can also try ohming from the negative USB port (or USB port housing should be fine) to the black or red wire to confirm its actually - or +

[llacert]

General Kurt.

Check your EBAY message.
I still have the power adapter and have sold all of my other blades.
If you want it let me know. Just pay $1 plus shipping.

Sorry if I broke any rules posting this. Posting this was not the reason for me joining.

[JaredKaragen]

General Kurt.

Check your EBAY message.
I still have the power adapter and have sold all of my other blades.
If you want it let me know. Just pay $1 plus shipping.

Sorry if I broke any rules posting this. Posting this was not the reason for me joining.

send him a PM;  and you can arrange for a private listing to post and he can buy right away.....

Good luck

[GeneralKurt]

I got it thanks! Super awesome thing to do man.

Also this community has surprised me too, very cool of all you guys thanks again.

I've been reading up / watching videos on flashing pi SD and stuff so I guess if I get stuck I'll bump this.
I wonder if I could hook it up to my GPU mining rig that I'm slowly building since it would already be running and using power, or if that would cost me hashrate anywhere. I would think that since the blade is doing the work it shouldn't make a difference on the GPU miners right?

[JaredKaragen]

I got it thanks! Super awesome thing to do man.

Also this community has surprised me too, very cool of all you guys thanks again.

I've been reading up / watching videos on flashing pi SD and stuff so I guess if I get stuck I'll bump this.
I wonder if I could hook it up to my GPU mining rig that I'm slowly building since it would already be running and using power, or if that would cost me hashrate anywhere. I would think that since the blade is doing the work it shouldn't make a difference on the GPU miners right?

hook into a spare available PCIE line.  should be enough wattage for sure to power that board.

Then just hook a USB link to that pc and set up the driver/miner app.

Ive run gridseeds off of pi's.

Using MinerA, It would auto restart on dead miner, etc... lots of monitoring dashboard stuff.

Or just a plain raspbian install with a compile of cgminer/bfgminer.

Pi's are awesome.  I use them for VPN endpoints a LOT.

[bitillionaire]

Um so what is that plug called? I bought one without a power cable at all

[JaredKaragen]

Um so what is that plug called? I bought one without a power cable at all

I dont know the specs or part number for that connector;  but reference online images for what the wire colors coming out are;  and you know what pins you can solder to, or add pigtails with PCIE plugs on them.

If you doubt which half of the pins is + and which half is -;  use an ohmmeter to check continuity to a board ground (use a capacitors polarity to find for instance).

[ramyon]

What I mean really does not understand the function of the board

[JaredKaragen]

What I mean really does not understand the function of the board

your post does not make sense as a new reply to this topic.

What are you trying to say?