AVALON 6 CURRENTLY

[lightfoot]

Stugot: I'll post thoughts here. Micro-summary:

Mess.

Summary:

Fucking mess :-)

Seriously, the miner has one of its' header pins literally ripped off the hashing board. As in traces were pulled up, if this was sold as anything close to working it never was. That would happen if someone was upset beyond normal parameters and yanked it.

The MCU appears to be in better shape than the one on your first unit, but it will not bring up either that board or the board on your first miner, loop errors. So either both boards have failed loops (quite possible) or the second MCU is screwed up in some way as well (not unbelievable)

In the meantime, your first MCU board has a blown U7 chip, that's the LPC11U1 chip. It's a 8-16 bit microcontroller with 32k of Flash RAM, my guess is this is the housekeeping module that deals with the power and such. It's way bad (gets hot=bad) my guess is the short in the power measuring circuits on board M1 faulted to ground through this chip.

No wonder it flunks diagnostics.

Anyway, if this latest unit was sold as anything other than scrap get your money back, it's toast. I won't do anything else with it until this is figured out. Meantime I'll look into replacing this chip on your first MCU to see if that brings it back to life.

C

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[stugots2]

Sadly it was sold as working!!!!!

Does Avalon just hate me??? LOL


I do have a spare MCU board here if you need?

[lightfoot]

Sadly it was sold as working!!!!!

Hm. This would never qualify as "working". Maybe they made a mistake and sold you a broken one. I would recommend sending them this picture, then saying it is broken and you would like a working one as agreed.



In the picture you can see where the pads were literally ripped off. Did you get the cable at least?

I do have a spare MCU board here if you need?

Does it work? If so drop it in the mail and I will confirm the board statuses.

C

[stugots2]

I believe the MCU works.

Nope no cable came with that one LOL

[lightfoot]

And in the meantime I've solved the mystery of your other unit's side 0. As mentioned it comes up with a Loop failure, which probably matches your description of "it would work sometimes then drop out". Taking the board apart and looking at it with the 15x loupes reveals the problem:



Anyway the issue is that one of the chips has a solder bridge along several of the connection points. Avalons do the same thing as the Antminers in that the power for the chip comes in on the top and bottom sides with signals coming in on the sides. In this case the chip overheated and melted the solder enough to make a nice little 3 wide bridge.

I'm guessing that is the problem. Now to see if I can fix it. Hm.....

C

[stugots2]

ohhhhhh wowwwwwwwwwww.

Since they never responded I guess I'll name the company that sold me that DOA one also, it came from oregon mines. (thats the first one)

[lightfoot]

ohhhhhh wowwwwwwwwwww.

Since they never responded I guess I'll name the company that sold me that DOA one also, it came from oregon mines. (thats the first one)

If you bought it from Ebay, then do a return request. I'm going to take off the second board, anyone know of a source for these chips?

C

[stugots2]

second one you mean? with the pins ripped?

[lightfoot]

Likewise you should see the other side of the first unit. At least 4 chips have either bridges or solder extrusions, my guess is these were run way too hot and eventually blew up. When blew up they were sold. This side shorted +12 over to the signal lines blowing the MCU.

Fix.... Hm. Have other things to do so will put this aside (I have not touched unit 2, but I'm expecting similar things). But anyway that's one way to blow a board.

C

[lightfoot]

second one you mean? with the pins ripped?

Right. That is what I am calling the second unit you sent over. I'm not fiddling with that at all in case you want to return it. The board work is being done on the first unit.

C

[stugots2]

gonna be filing a scam report if I don't hear back by monday since they are on these forums

[Steamtyme]

gonna be filing a scam report if I don't hear back by monday since they are on these forums

That's crazy I'm sorry to hear about that, no one wants to be sold bunk equipment. I'm kinda floored that they didn't get back to you through their company website. Also wondering how did you find their used equipment for sale?

How did you pay for the units? if it was credit card at least they will offer purchase protection. Hope so, but at least you found them on the forum. Best of luck.

[stugots2]

was on their amazon store

[lightfoot]

Meantime I took one chip off the bad board to try and get the good board to pass loop tests. Still not coming up, it's possible the problem is in the MCU; if you have a spare you would like to send over I can do a cross-check.

I'll post a few pictures from the second board; there are at least 5 chips on there that have solder balls or shorts on them, what is making me wonder is how a unit could operate long enough with a single short in order to burn up additional chips. I wonder if the unit only self tests the loops on startup, and not while running. If so there may be a flag or option I can set in cgminer to ignore bad chips and continue, then I could figure out which chips are good/bad.

Researching..... In the meantime didn't see them on Amazon, but Amazon may have a return policy for the second unit.

[stugots2]

second was ebay, I'm looking into that now.

I already printed a label for the MCU to be sent, will go out tomorrow am.

[stugots2]

looks like the art will arrive to you tomorrow

[lightfoot]

looks like the art will arrive to you tomorrow

Sounds good, will be able to work on it over T-Day. Also just bought another A6 to use as a test platform, gotta spend the money for the tools. :-)

C

[stugots2]

maybe some Turkey gravy will do the trick LOL

[lightfoot]

maybe some Turkey gravy will do the trick LOL

Burp. Just got it last night, along with a nice reference A6 that I need to test. Also pulled the microcontroller from the first MCU board that was on the first A6 (labelled "A") the chip was running super hot which indicates shorts. Will try a new chip once I verify location of pin 1.

[stugots2]

Sweet.

With BTC up, it will be nice to see those babies mining lol