[GUIDE] BitFury Miner Support/Tuning

[klondike_bar]

Had to hard reset.

These things require so much babysitting it aint funny anymore/

I thought that, but then i backed off a bit on the tickering and let it do its thing. After about 6hrs to fully warm up and reach peak voltage, Ive been stable for 48hrs at 39.9GH/s average (+/- 2GH on the hourly reading)

[juhakall]

I've been running the bitfury branch of BFGMiner for about a week now, with no major problems. Performance is identical to chainminer (30G + 30G + 35G accepted hashrate from 3 boards), but sometimes the hashrate (and power consumption) randomly drops 1%. This is fixed by restarting. I have no reason to use chainminer anymore, except to maybe fine-tune new boards as they come in.

[eneloop]

is there a way to get longer sampls than 5 minutes? would be fine for tuning.

[darkfriend77]

[Micky25]

poser! 

[-Redacted-]

Nice Spotts version 1 case there....  Thanks for the photo!

Might try turning down the humidity some - there's stuff that looks kind of like like mold growing out of the tops of all your chips....  

Here's one of my plain-jane Bitfury rigs.  No heatsinks, nothing much but a little USB fan blowing on the h-boards.  Been running for weeks now, like a Duracell Bunny.

[GandalfG]

Nice Spotts version 1 case there....  Thanks for the photo!

Might try turning down the humidity some - there's stuff that looks kind of like like mold growing out of the tops of all your chips....  

Here's one of my plain-jane Bitfury rigs.  No heatsinks, nothing much but a little USB fan blowing on the h-boards.  Been running for weeks now, like a Duracell Bunny.

The KNC Jupiter under serves only as a stand right? 

[-Redacted-]

Nothing to see there - it's a, umm, like you said - a fancy stand - just a case with some fans on it.  Yeah.  Nothing important to see there - just ignore that part....

[jlsminingcorp]

Nothing to see there - it's a, umm, like you said - a fancy stand - just a case with some fans on it.  Yeah.  Nothing important to see there - just ignore that part....

It does look smart though, this unimportant table-top ornament, very shiny. Has yours caught fire yet ?

[-Redacted-]

No, and it's put out a solid 580-600 Gh/s over the last 12 hours.  Guess mine wasn't one of the .001% that had bad caps.  At least it hasn't burned up any Rasperry PI's like one of my m-boards did.  That DID go up in smoke and burn...  

But - ignore that thing on the bottom, it's just an, umm, 800 watt ceramic space heater I use to keep my apartment warm....

[GandalfG]

No, and it's put out a solid 580-600 Gh/s over the last 12 hours.  Guess mine wasn't one of the .001% that had bad caps.  At least it hasn't burned any Rasperry PI's like one of my m-boards did.  That DID go up in smoke and burn.... 

But - ignore that thing on the bottom, it's just a, umm, ceramic heater I use to keep my apartment warm....

Nice, low noise  ceramic heater lol
About burned ceramic caps. I'm not sure, but I think they burn only those that are not in the air stream.
I need good quality pictures, but it seems to me that the corner capacitors are not the best soldered. What also may be the cause.   

[jlsminingcorp]

No, and it's put out a solid 580-600 Gh/s over the last 12 hours.  Guess mine wasn't one of the .001% that had bad caps.  At least it hasn't burned up any Rasperry PI's like one of my m-boards did.  That DID go up in smoke and burn...  

But - ignore that thing on the bottom, it's just an, umm, 800 watt ceramic space heater I use to keep my apartment warm....

Sorry -Redacted-, just a joke, no offence meant. It looks like good kit, whatever it is.

[GandalfG]

I imagined Redacted post with a photo of Jupiter from which smoke rises and signature "Something went terribly wrong"

[-Redacted-]

No offence taken.   The thing on the bottom is just a space heater   This IS a Bitfury thread after all.....

Been in the business long enough to know that a few of anything new are going to have problems.  Once got back 100 boards from an assembly house and discovered - the hard way - that they'd installed all the tantulum caps with the wrong polarity.  Luckily we tested the boards for long enough to catch the problem - it took 3 or 4 minutes before they blew, and it sounded like a string of big firecrackers going off when they did.

Talk about magic smoke - it was so thick you could hardly see in the shop - and it sounded like a running gun battle was taking place - when the first batch of 20 boards on the test beds blew almost all the caps on all the boards, all within seconds of each other.  There were bits of the epoxy coatings flying everywhere...

Then there's always the trick of installing a voltage regulator backwards so that the top of the chip blows clean off when you apply power....

[darkfriend77]

- added

...
Mining Software Repositories: (use with caution, work in progress!)
...
- CGMiner by KNK

Anyone willing to help testing a cgminer fork changes with a full kit or at least one board in each bus (A-D)?

In sync with the latest Legkodymov's miner. For BFSB master boards you should leave BITFURY_MUX_OE undefined in bitfury-config.h and change:

Code:

#define BITFURY_MAXCHIPS 100
#define BITFURY_MAXBANKS 1
#define BITFURY_BANKCHIPS 100

to

Code:

#define BITFURY_MAXCHIPS 256
#define BITFURY_MAXBANKS 4
#define BITFURY_BANKCHIPS 16

By default the GPIO pins are defined (in tm_i2c.c) for BFSB boards, so no need to change anything there

[KNK]

Mining Software Repositories: (use with caution, work in progress!)

Also note, that I don't have a BSFB board, so it may not work at all!
I am aiming at having a single version to support all/most hardware mutations - for now it should support Metabank (MUX_OE) and NeedBMW (undefined MUX_OE and single bank) boards

[zurg]

well, looks like my mining is dead with  ext4-fs errors again
will be down for another 7 hours until i can get to work and reload the sd card.. again.
ugh!

[KNK]

Mining should not need to access the SD card at all. I don't have the image, but is the swap disabled? There is no need of swap with revision 2 available memory.
Another reason could be that chainminer is storing data to often in it's logs on the file system. Not sure which logs are important and how big they get, but turning some of them off or storing all on a small ramdisk, may solve the dead SD problems.

[zurg]

Mining should not need to access the SD card at all. I don't have the image, but is the swap disabled? There is no need of swap with revision 2 available memory.
Another reason could be that chainminer is storing data to often in it's logs on the file system. Not sure which logs are important and how big they get, but turning some of them off or storing all on a small ramdisk, may solve the dead SD problems.

If you can tell me what and how to check it I can. I am just a Linux n00b a bit.
Came to work.., rebooted Pi, it came up with no errors.
I do have a power switch that I can make Pi power cycle remotely by pinging it periodically.
Help@!, lol.

[jlsminingcorp]

Mining should not need to access the SD card at all. I don't have the image, but is the swap disabled? There is no need of swap with revision 2 available memory.
Another reason could be that chainminer is storing data to often in it's logs on the file system. Not sure which logs are important and how big they get, but turning some of them off or storing all on a small ramdisk, may solve the dead SD problems.

If you can tell me what and how to check it I can. I am just a Linux n00b a bit.
Came to work.., rebooted Pi, it came up with no errors.
I do have a power switch that I can make Pi power cycle remotely by pinging it periodically.
Help@!, lol.

Anybody got any tips for network accessible power switches (EU available) for remotely power cycling the pi, as this sounds like it's worth while?