Hello everyone,
I wanted to take a moment and provide some information on a recent order I did through Bittawm's
https://bittawmart.com/ storefront. It's rare that you find an online store that gives excellent customer service like you would expect. Pleasing the customer (or rather just providing lip-service to the idea) has been a lost art in today's business world.
On Jan 1st, I purchased two Baikal A2000 ASICs from bittawmart.com, in two separate orders. One of the orders I had sent too low of a BTC fee, and had to scramble to find someone to fast-track the transaction. Once done, the two orders were sent immediately, and I received them a couple of days later.
I promptly set them up and out of the box everything worked fine... until something strange started to happen. It started with my Awesome Miner telling me that the ASICs were down. I couldn't access the web interface of the ASICs and there was no response to pings. I rebooted them, and everything seemed fine again. Then about 30 minutes later, the same thing would happen. I started some basic troubleshooting, all the typical stuff. Re-seating all the cables, trying new ethernet cables, LAN ports etc... but anywhere from 15-45 minutes... usually averaging around 30 minutes the ASICs would go offline.
Now, this is a perplexing situation, and my fears were that maybe something happened to the devices in shipping. I reached out to Bittawm via email, who was very prompt to respond and quickly helped me go through some other troubleshooting steps. I have an old Baikal A900, so I was familiar with their devices. We tried linking the two units together, using one Orange Pi Zero then the other, re-flashing both SD cards, and trying them in all the possible configurations. Still the same thing kept happening... they would go offline around 30 minutes after booting.
I tried reaching out the Baikal support through email and skype, but they are hard to catch online. The strange thing was that both Orange PI Zeros seemed to have the exact same problem. You could expect that one might go bad, but two?
Bittawm was very attentive to this situation, and apologized for the inconvenience. He offered to send me two new Orange Pi Zeros free of charge from his USA contact. I'll leave the USA contact nameless unless he wants to be known.
The two new Orange PI Zeros came in a couple of days and I tried them again... only to find the exact same problem. Now it was getting frustrating. The USA contact figured out that it was me who was having the problem and reached out to me via PM here. We then hooked up on WhatsApp to delve a little more into the problem.
The USA contact wanted me to try different configurations again, some new... I cycled through all four Orange PI Zeros, running in single board configurations, dual, quadruple... you name it. Tried reflashing all 4 SD cards, new power supplies, you name it. We spent a whole day troubleshooting. The USA contact was patient and just as engaged as Bittawm. If nothing else, I was pleased at the outstanding customer service that was happening.
Bittawm was great during all this troubleshooting as well and offered to send me back a refund equivalent to the revenue I was losing for all the days the miners were not working. That's classy, but I really just wanted to get the ASICs working.
At this point, we had nothing else to try, and suspected maybe all four ASIC boards may have some problem. The USA contact offered to send me two replacement A2000 units. Even further, as it was a weekend and they wouldn't ship until Monday... he setup two A2000s from his personal collection and mine to my account for a couple of days to prove that they would work. I monitored my pool account, and they worked as advertised.
The USA contact shipped these new A2000's out and I got them a couple of days later. The USA contact also sent me a pre-paid mailer to send the old units back and the spare Orange PI Zeros he had sent.
When the new units arrived, I set them up and again... the same issue. None of this made any sense at this point. The PI would just stop responding after about 30 minutes. This was kind of dismaying... thinking I had made a $4200 mistake.
On a whim, I logged into the pool, and saw that the hashrate had not dropped to zero. This was confusing, because the PI does not respond to pings, the web interface was inaccessible... but there it was. The hashrate was going just expected otherwise. I let it run overnight, and in the morning checked the pool again. Still no issue, but of course I couldn't ping the PI or access the web interface.
I reached out to the USA contact to give them the news, and to let them know I'm fine with the results of the tremendous effort in troubleshooting, all the anxiety that the potential bad ASICs had caused. There must be something in my network that is causing the issue. No other device has any problem, so it was easy to overlook the basics. I still don't have a solution to my networking issue. I'm looking through some Orange PI Zero forums to see if there is some configuration change I can do on the OS to resolve the problem.
I want to again thank Bittawm and the USA contact for their incredible attention to this strange situation. The stupendous customer service is not one that I will easily forget. When I do interviews in my day job, one of the questions I ask potential candidates is "Give me an example where someone has given you incredible customer service and how did that affect how you do it?" If I ever get asked that question in an interview myself, I will point to this experience as the best possible answer.
Thank you for reading if you made it this far.
;TLDR
I would have no hesitation in ordering from or recommending that others order from
https://bittawmart.com/ in the future. The customer service is what sets them apart.
Thanks Bittawm and the USA contact!
