BFL Product Failures / Underperformance.

[Photon939]

Here's an interesting failure for you: I went downstairs to check on the miners and saw one of my Jalapenos was dark. Connected it to my bench supply and found it hitting the 5A current limit at only ~2vdc input.

Used my thermal imaging camera to quickly identify the short. Found this:




Will report back once I remove the cracked cap

Edit: Yup, that was it

once again a jappy jalapeno

[Bicknellski]

What typically causes that sort of failure?

Glad you got it going with the self-RMA. Nice work.

[dropt]

What typically causes that sort of failure?

Glad you got it going with the self-RMA. Nice work.

Thermal expansion and compression can cause cracks like that.  Internal stresses caused from certain methods of soldering can also make SMDs crack in this fashion.

Edit: I'd think it unlikely that this was the fault of BFL or their design.  Probably just one of the few failures that 'happen'.

[Bicknellski]

Nothing near a screw I hope some noted that in some of the units screws were touching components. Yes no doubt a failure without any additional "aid" might be the reason, but given what passes for QC and testing at BFL you have to ask don't you?

[bcp19]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=443759.msg4873580#msg4873580

Yesterday my 25GH/s Miner from Butterfly that mined at about 26,5 GH/s went down to about 21 GH/s, now i saw with bfgminer that 2 chips aren't working anymore. Any Hints on that?

Solution? Put in a fridge or outside in the cold... really... quality engineering is that.

You know something Bickski?  Your problem is that you don't know anything about engineering or you wouldn't be saying this.  Engineering has nothing to do with it, as this is a chip issue.  

no, its a BFL issue.

what other mining hardeware out there need to do this?

It is a chip issue? Chips are designed and engineered are they not? That was engineered by whom? Keep following the logic to the natural conclusion. You got a crappy chip or crappy unit designed and engineered by BFL. Ya it isn't an engineering issue at all. As noted what other miner do you need to use a fridge to get it working better? Laughable.

Yet again, you respond without knowing the fulll facts.  As I have stated, but you have me on ignore so you don't read fully, this is NOT an ASIC problem, it's a different component on the board.  You and the rest of the trolls can't think other than "BFL sucks", or you'd see that having to depend on other companies to populate your boards it not something you can directly control.  The chip in question is the 1850/1877 ADP chip, or power regulator, which appears to have come from a bad batch, as all of my units have the 1850 and run fine while a friend has one that slows down when power is cycled.  Lightfoot has one of these units and figured out it was a heat issue and installed heat sinks onto this chip and the underside of the MOSFETs and now the power problem is gone.  Your blaming of BFL for this would be like me blaming you for a bad design if someone 'licensed' your wasps and then got a bad set of 'support chips' to power the board and I blamed you for the poor design.

[Bicknellski]

15 pages and 100's of notes... certainly the tip of the iceberg.

[Bicknellski]

Thread: Jalapeno and Single SC 50GH/s USB not working after few days 02-01-2014, 05:01 PM #1


 

Jalapeno and Single SC 50GH/s USB not working after few days
Did anyone of you experience the miner not to be detected by your PC after a few hours/days?
I bought a Jalapeno and a Single 50GH/s which were not detectable by the PC in no time.
It never happened to me that any of the thousands of USB devices have failed in this was... but both BFL did.
Is this caused by the poor engineering of the products?

Ug. Where are you located and what kind of power do you have?

Does your computer recognized other devices and are you using a hub of any kind?

I'm in Switzerland Andi have a Corsair cx600. I used different Macs and they recognize whatever I stick in...

Jalapeno and Single SC 50GH/s USB not working after few days
Ah, I'm not using a hub. My suspect is that they sold me a refurbished Single as a new one.

Look at the soldering of the ft232hq chip:

I'm not sure, but to be honest I have never seen a blown FTDI chip on the bigger single boards. It's far away from the heat causing chips, and the single's power supply is actually grounded so it should not blow up the board if caps short.

I did have a unit I bought on Ebay come in and I *thought* it was going to be a FTDI chip. But looking in the USB port with a loupe showed me that the little wires inside of it were bent all over the place, which is odd. Took a port off a dead jalapeno board here, swapped it onto the single, and now it's hashing at 32gh.

So the problem could be a bad cable, or the port going bad.

C

[vayvanne]

Another one PSU failed. One of LS is constantly overheating/throttling.

[Photon939]

Another Jalapeno was dark today. Same failure as the one I posted about a few weeks back but this cap was in a different location. Check it out:

[Photon939]

Remember how I was having problems with cracking capacitors? Looks like it happened again. This time with a more violent result....

[Bicknellski]

Remember how I was having problems with cracking capacitors? Looks like it happened again. This time with a more violent result....

Ouch... Time to get rid of the BFL products and upgrade right?

[sid7039]

BFL:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bfl

[Photon939]

Remember how I was having problems with cracking capacitors? Looks like it happened again. This time with a more violent result....

Ouch... Time to get rid of the BFL products and upgrade right?

I already have a bunch of Antminer S1s (best investment since GPU mining in 2011), but I think now is the time to hock the rest of my BFL gear on ebay and buy another S1 with the funds

[Bicknellski]

Posted this here to refute the false and paid trust rating by Pokokohua posted against me. There are 100s of posts here by others stipulating any number of BFL product failures. If anyone has other evidence of non-performance and product failures please keep posting here and make sure to counter negative trust ratings with the truth right here all it takes is telling the truth. Unlike BFL, or their paid shill Pokokohua.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=90768 Trust for Pokokohua

Code:

User	Date	Risked BTC amount	Reference	Comments
Pokokohua! 0: -0 / +0(0)	2014-03-30	0.00000000		
Pathological liar. Cheats forum members repeatedly with false information over BFL, 
their employees and their products -all successful- while his business fails, has absolutely 
no technical knowledge, qualifies non working usb hubs as bfl product failures. 
Falsely rates people who are producing hardware and are an asset to the bitcoin 
community negative, and ridicules any forum member that confronts him on his lies. 
Too bad a lot of these types hang around on this forum, no orders but crying scam 
over legit companies, while they are never seen in the real scam topics.

[Zich]

Posted this here to refute the false and paid trust rating by Pokokohua posted against me. There are 100s of posts here by others stipulating any number of BFL product failures. If anyone has other evidence of non-performance and product failures please keep posting here and make sure to counter negative trust ratings with the truth right here all it takes is telling the truth. Unlike BFL, or their paid shill Pokokohua.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=90768 Trust for Pokokohua

Code:

User	Date	Risked BTC amount	Reference	Comments
Pokokohua! 0: -0 / +0(0)	2014-03-30	0.00000000		
Pathological liar. Cheats forum members repeatedly with false information over BFL, 
their employees and their products -all successful- while his business fails, has absolutely 
no technical knowledge, qualifies non working usb hubs as bfl product failures. 
Falsely rates people who are producing hardware and are an asset to the bitcoin 
community negative, and ridicules any forum member that confronts him on his lies. 
Too bad a lot of these types hang around on this forum, no orders but crying scam 
over legit companies, while they are never seen in the real scam topics.

LOL, so they got first participant already.
Ridicilous 

[Bicknellski]

We all our have our crosses to endure mine is accepting that slander is how BFL likes to engage with people who post the truth about their products.

[Bicknellski]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=545641.0

Code:

My BFL Jalapeno Experience So Far
March 29, 2014, 03:54:06
Reply with quote  #1
First I want say a quick 'hello' to everyone, it's been a long time since I posted, 
but I'm sure glad the forum is here when I need it.

So, getting down to business..

I received my little JillyJally back in late November, (mid-April order, sans upgrade) 
Sad and to my dismay, it would never reach 5gh/s, it averaged about 4.7. 
Things were going well with it and it was hashing along fine for about 2 months 
without major issue. Valentines Day I noticed that the hashrate started to drop down 
to 4.5 (I love you too BFL), but I didn't think much of it at the time. Given that 4.5 
is still within the 10% range of variance, I simply chalked it up to getting the bare 
minimum from my order. Yippee!!

For almost a month it had been running pretty smoothly at 4.5 and then over the 
past week I've noticed that it's dropped again and now sits around 4.25. All along
the temps have been around 44C and HW errors around 5%, which from my research 
is about normal. And oh yes, from day 1 I have had the outer casing removed, but 
top and bottom plates are still on and switched the fan to blow downward, as per 
the research I did before my unit was shipped.

Today I was a little frustrated knowing that I was supposed to get a Jally with a 10% 
variance from 5gh/s and my unit is now more than 10%. Grrr.. So I decided to shut 
her down and check her out, given that I haven't touched her in a few months.
Even before I had her unplugged I noticed that my heatsink was loose and was like 
"WTF?" So I popped the feet off, grabbed a torx and took it apart to tighten it up. 
And Ughhhhh!!!  Huh Angry Huh

[b]The screws holding the PCB to the heatsink were completely loose. The thing wobbled 
like my grandmother behind the wheel. So, being curious if the chip(s) were damaged, 
I pulled out the screws and wanted to check it out.[/b]

Stupid ZAIRA (292 or 274) or whomever put my unit together didn't use any thermal paste. 
SRSLY WTF? Is this normal? Two chips. No paste. WTF?

I had some thermal paste leftover from building my Hackintosh, so I put a dab of paste on 
each and put her back together. But I still don't get close to my original 4.7gh/s. 
I didn't see any damage to the chips or anything else during my inspection. I do 
however get close to the previous 4.5gh/s with 4.41gh/s

As with the consensus, I'm very unimpressed with BFL. Does anyone have 
experience with RMA their sub-par Jallies?

[vayvanne]

16'Celsius here today and 4 of 5 miners are overheating/throttling now.

[Bicknellski]

16'Celsius here today and 4 of 5 miners are overheating/throttling now.

Heat-sink pad issues?

[vayvanne]

16'Celsius here today and 4 of 5 miners are overheating/throttling now.

Heat-sink pad issues?

Though I have the tools and thermal paste did not checked them. Too scary after screw dropped out from miner from first shipment. I am not very hardware friendly as you also. But guess I have to disassemble them and check out.