AVALON 6 CURRENTLY

[lightfoot]

Yeah it should be interesting to get this set up. Should be here by next weekend.

The big problem with these A6 boards is that there are a lot of parts on the underside of the board, thus it is very difficult to pre-heat them enough to use hot air to reflow the chips without having components fall off. An oven will allow me to reflow far more evenly with the chips down and the various heavier components on the top.

We'll see how it works.

C

[1715150268]

1715150268

[1715150268]

1715150268

[1715150268]

1715150268

[lightfoot]

Reflow oven is a bitch on wheels. I have been reflowing old broken Titan and Neptune boards, problem is the soft components (caps and plugs) melt. Working on ways to fix that.

Meantime I have something equally cool, predator vision. I'll post a pic in a bit.

C

[AniceInovation]

Hey C,

Interested in a broken Avalon A6?
Control board and one hashing board definitely burned, the other hashing board i can't say.

I'll sell it to you for the cost of shipping if interested.

I like your repair attempts, i feel like eating popcorns waiting for updates

[lightfoot]

Sure, that would be great, I'll PM you with shipping details.

Been working on the A6 boards, they're weird: If the controller board in the box becomes unplugged from the boards they go into thermal overdrive, you can see at least one chip on each side going low resistance and heating up a *LOT*. The problem with the A6's at the core is that they built the boards without any sort of compensators. For example on the Antminers (with one exception) the boards have a set of FETs, a choke, and a programmed voltage of between 9.6 (Antminer S9) to 10.5 (Antminer S7) then they run the chips off that. Stable, and can handle chips that might go slightly off in terms of resistance.

On the weird S7's with lots of chips, and the Avalon A6's they run them straight off the power supply, 20 chips per string on the A6. Thus each chip normally gets .6 volts, but if a chip gets warmer than its neighbors, the resistance on that chip goes down and very bad things happen. Bad means the chip has a lower resistance meaning it gets more volts+current=more watts=more heat which means more current. Thus they can get hot enough to melt the solder, make balls, and short out/shut down. Bitch.

Moral: Ensure your chips are ballasted.