Bitmain AntMiner U1 Tips & Tricks

[iluvpcs]

I have a PI, let me fire it up and see what's going on...

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[fasmax]

Finally got this running on my RasPi.
The driver needs to be modified as reported by fellow user fractalbc a few posts back.
Thanks! fractalbc.

[brush242]

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/36/vp5a.JPG/

okay I have been playing around with them and got 15 to work on 1 pc but 2 went zombie.

I prefer Mindy to the zombies.

[brush242]

May I make a suggestion? I haven't messed around with *nix in 4 or 5 years, so this may not apply, but if you get them going, would you mind too terribly posting the complete contents of your .bat file (minus anything incriminating, of course)? Mine should be arriving any day, but my experience has been that one (1) complete .bat would have saved me a LOT of time, more than once.

No pressure, of course. 8^]

[philipma1957]

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/36/vp5a.JPG/

okay I have been playing around with them and got 15 to work on 1 pc but 2 went zombie.

I prefer Mindy to the zombies.

THAT is funny.

 Well back to the sticks.

 When running six of them on 1 hub it  gets me an avg hash at 8.3 on the cg miner screen  that is around 1.4gh a stick and bitminter is reporting them at about 6.9 - 9.1 which comes to 8.0  .

 I can live with small unreporting  like 8 instead of 8.3  but at  the larger stick counts of 8 or more the numbers are much worse.

It would be nice if someone else  gets 8-10 on 1 hub running windows 7.  and gets the big drop in hash rate.

I am going to run the 6 for the whole day and check back on and off.

[Spagabob]

I've tried since I got the things to get more than one to work. I've noticed there's little to no support for these things.
SPECS Win7 SP1 FX8350 1200Wpsu 6 gigs of ram running 4 hdds and 2 7970's undervolted. 1 case fan in the front. My cooling is done by external fans to the case.
I was running with out sp1, but I tried an upgrade to see if they will work on it. No go. Yes I've reset the computer a million damn times.

I can get one to work for about 20 minutes. I can get multiple ones for a short time, but they zombie out after a few minutes.
I have three 7 port 5V3A usb hubs. All of these hubs are powered from the wall, not usb ports. They are all on a separate 120V line than the pc is on. These hubs have powered 16 block erupters for months and never had an issue.  
Tried a few diff versions of cgminer (including both from antgen1 repo). I found out the hard way that not every version will accept the -bmcs options.
They will hash for about 2 minutes, than all of them stop flashing entirely. Eventually a couple will start back up. One or two will keep running, but the rest zombie out.
I used zadig to install each driver individually one by one while plugging them in.
The hubs are on their own usb ports on the back of my box. IE 1 usb hub on mobo to 7 port hub. I've tried running only one hub with only one miner. It will work for 5 minutes. If I add another, than it'll work for a bit, but after I get to the third it just zombies out regardless of hub/port. NOTE it's not the same port, hub, or stick that zombies out. They change.
I have disabled all the power saving options in windows 7 and bios. I checked via device manager, and through the power options in the control panel.
Tried switching from USB2.0 to USB3.0 (the hubs are 3.0 capable but work with block erupters on the 3.0 or 2.0 ports) Tried a 10 port 2.0 2A hub with 1 miner, and a 7port 4A 2.0. All powered, and on different circuits in the house. Literally I had a fat orange extension cord running from the kitchen to my room to make sure it wasn't putting too much strain on the breaker. Although none of them have ever flipped.
Every time all but 1-2 will zombie out.
No fans, no daisy chains, no other usb devices besides Razer naga mouse and an x6 keyboard. Well there is one wifi stick, but it's disabled and I've tried removing it. Same results.

I've checked the wiring in the house after this with my multimeter and kill-a-watt, and even ran this bedroom with its own personal 120 circuit, then added another 120 line to the other side of the room.
Computer on one circuit, usb hub on the other. The still zombie out.

I thought maybe it's a driver/windows issue, so I installed a fresh copy to a thumb drive and booted from it. Same results.
I'm not overclocking them. They are set for 0781.
Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

[Cheshyr]

Non sequitor...  I've had mine running for about 36 hours straight now at stock settings.  Averaging 1.54GHs, roughly 1.6% HW error rate.  Pretty happy with the device.

[SpaceCadet]

I've tried since I got the things to get more than one to work. I've noticed there's little to no support for these things.
SPECS Win7 SP1 FX8350 1200Wpsu 6 gigs of ram running 4 hdds and 2 7970's undervolted. 1 case fan in the front. My cooling is done by external fans to the case.
I was running with out sp1, but I tried an upgrade to see if they will work on it. No go. Yes I've reset the computer a million damn times.

I can get one to work for about 20 minutes. I can get multiple ones for a short time, but they zombie out after a few minutes.
I have three 7 port 5V3A usb hubs. All of these hubs are powered from the wall, not usb ports. They are all on a separate 120V line than the pc is on. These hubs have powered 16 block erupters for months and never had an issue.  
Tried a few diff versions of cgminer (including both from antgen1 repo). I found out the hard way that not every version will accept the -bmcs options.
...

I thought maybe it's a driver/windows issue, so I installed a fresh copy to a thumb drive and booted from it. Same results.
I'm not overclocking them. They are set for 0781.
Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

Minimize the amount of background processing your cpu is doing.  I was having problems keeping my BEs running until I stopped CPU mining on the same machine (even with the cpu miner on lowest priority and cgminer on above average -- win7 I3 box).  Now they all run with very little issue.  I have 4 U1s running on a win8 box with (so far) no issues - had to plug them in one at a time though.  The 4 U1s are as fast as my 22 BEs!

[fractalbc]

I think BEs and The U1s don't coexist well on same machine yet with the custom build of cgminer for the u1s. Anyone have them both running together ok?

I have two U1's running with my 22 BEs on cgminer 3.9.0, though they are only running about 20% faster than the BEs.  Running a U1 by itself with the bitmain version of cgminer 3.8.5, it runs at close to 2 Gh/s, but the bitmain version does not recognize the BEs.  (I'm running on Win7 and Win8).  I noticed that cgminer lists the U1s as AMU.  Using -n finds all of the usb devices, but fails to distinguish which is which.  Is there any chance that a version of cgminer can be compiled to properly run both BEs and U1s at their 'native' speed?

It is more than just compiling cgminer to support both.  New code must be written.  I spent a little time fiddling with it and came to the conclusion that it is going to be more than a couple hour job.  Getting it to compile with both is a pretty easy task.  Getting it to properly assign an erupter to the erupter driver and a u1 to the bmsc driver is a bit trickier.

The basic problem that both the erupter and the u1 use the Cygnal CP210x controller with the same 10c4:ea60 usb signature.  The current device identification logic looks for that signature and assigns the device to a driver based on who gets there first.  I was not able to spot a way to say that 10c4:ea60 could be either a erupter or an antminer and to do a secondary check to find out.

Oh, and I posted the driver fix to https://github.com/fractalbc/cgminer for those who don't want to edit the file themselves.

[stevenf]

I'm having no luck getting these to run on my Windows 7 PC.

When I stick them into my USB port, in the device manager I see: "Silicon Labs CP210 USB to UART Bridge (COM3)" appear.

I've downloaded cgminer version 3.9.0 and tried some of the examples shown in this thread, but no luck.

Am I using the correct cgminer version?

What is the command line I should use to start cgminer?

I only have these have these AntMinter U1 stick in my USB hub.

Thanks for any help!!

[Spagabob]

Minimize the amount of background processing your cpu is doing.  I was having problems keeping my BEs running until I stopped CPU mining on the same machine (even with the cpu miner on lowest priority and cgminer on above average -- win7 I3 box).  Now they all run with very little issue.  I have 4 U1s running on a win8 box with (so far) no issues - had to plug them in one at a time though.  The 4 U1s are as fast as my 22 BEs!

Uhm, nothing else is running on my cpu, and it has 8 cores @3.5ghz. I don't think anything is bogging it down. First thing I did when I installed the sticks was stop all mining/programs on a new profile /users/ant without than with admin rights.
It reports that <2% of total cpu is being used. Even mining.
Also, wouldn't my install to a usb drive of limited the processes? I formatted a 14 gig thumb drive and ran my box off of it, they still zombie out.

I'll head back home and try again, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
Thank you very much for the quick reply.

[Jay_Pal]

Oh, and I posted the driver fix to https://github.com/fractalbc/cgminer for those who don't want to edit the file themselves.

Sorry to ask, but what is this fix?
As I've understood, it is trickier to have BE's and Ant's correctly identified.
Would one instance of old cgminer (BE support enabled) on one terminal specifying the USB ports of the BE's and another instance of the forked cgminer (ANT support) on another terminal specifying the USB ports of the ANTs allow them to run at the same time?

Thank you and great job!

[fractalbc]

Oh, and I posted the driver fix to https://github.com/fractalbc/cgminer for those who don't want to edit the file themselves.

Sorry to ask, but what is this fix?
As I've understood, it is trickier to have BE's and Ant's correctly identified.
Would one instance of old cgminer (BE support enabled) on one terminal specifying the USB ports of the BE's and another instance of the forked cgminer (ANT support) on another terminal specifying the USB ports of the ANTs allow them to run at the same time?

Thank you and great job!

The fix from https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=390929.msg4250179#msg4250179 to prevent it from crashing on 64 bit ubuntu and possibly other distributions.

And yes, I suspect that running one instance of the ANT specific version of cgminer manually specifying the usb ports as well as a second instance of cgminer to run BE's would work

[fasmax]

I'm having no luck getting these to run on my Windows 7 PC.

When I stick them into my USB port, in the device manager I see: "Silicon Labs CP210 USB to UART Bridge (COM3)" appear.

I've downloaded cgminer version 3.9.0 and tried some of the examples shown in this thread, but no luck.

Am I using the correct cgminer version?

What is the command line I should use to start cgminer?

I only have these have these AntMinter U1 stick in my USB hub.

Thanks for any help!!

cgminer 3.9.0 does not directly support the U1.
You need to download the prebuilt  windows version from here and unzip.
https://github.com/AntMiner/AntGen1/tree/master/cgminer
Follow instructions in the AntMiner-U1 user guide.
https://github.com/AntMiner/AntGen1

[Jay_Pal]

Oh, and I posted the driver fix to https://github.com/fractalbc/cgminer for those who don't want to edit the file themselves.

Sorry to ask, but what is this fix?
As I've understood, it is trickier to have BE's and Ant's correctly identified.
Would one instance of old cgminer (BE support enabled) on one terminal specifying the USB ports of the BE's and another instance of the forked cgminer (ANT support) on another terminal specifying the USB ports of the ANTs allow them to run at the same time?

Thank you and great job!

The fix from https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=390929.msg4250179#msg4250179 to prevent it from crashing on 64 bit ubuntu and possibly other distributions.

And yes, I suspect that running one instance of the ANT specific version of cgminer manually specifying the usb ports as well as a second instance of cgminer to run BE's would work

Great news!!
Thank you, once again!!!

[stevenf]

cgminer 3.9.0 does not directly support the U1.
You need to download the prebuilt  windows version from here and unzip.
https://github.com/AntMiner/AntGen1/tree/master/cgminer
Follow instructions in the AntMiner-U1 user guide.
https://github.com/AntMiner/AntGen1

Thanks!!

Got 3 working on my USB hub (49 ports), but the others aren't detected by cgminer. At the moment I can only get a maximum of 3 running. 

PSU is 750Watts, plenty!

Any ideas?

[kfactor]

Ok, I finally got my whole batch of 14 working and they are running at ~1.7GH each.



Using cgminer 3.8.5 (ant version) with the following command line -> C:\my_file_location\cgminer.exe -o stratum.bitcoin.cz:3333 -u my.worker -p my_password --bmsc-options 115200:20 --bmsc-freq 0881


The process of getting them all online is a PITA. This is what worked for me:

1) Start cgminer with one stick already in a hub, the zadig winusb already installed for that port. Cgminer recognizes the stick and loads AMU0.
2) Mount next stick in hub
3) Choose next device (com port) in zadig and install winusb for that device



4) Wait for driver to finish install
5) Remove the new device, wait 2 seconds and re-mount, cgminer recognizes the stick and loads next AMU

Rinse and repeat.

A tedious process for sure, but that's what worked for me - if anyone has a better way to get these mounted please let me know


Q: Does anyone know if one can run cgminer in a separate instance on a pi running minepeon?


Cheers

[philipma1957]

Ok, I finally got my whole batch of 14 working and they are running at ~1.7GH each.



Using cgminer 3.8.5 (ant version) with the following command line -> C:\my_file_location\cgminer.exe -o stratum.bitcoin.cz:3333 -u my.worker -p my_password --bmsc-options 115200:20 --bmsc-freq 0881


The process of getting them all online is a PITA. This is what worked for me:

1) Start cgminer with one stick already in a hub, the zadig winusb already installed for that port. Cgminer recognizes the stick and loads AMU0.
2) Mount next stick in hub
3) Choose next device (com port) in zadig and install winusb for that device



4) Wait for driver to finish install
5) Remove the new device, wait 2 seconds and re-mount, cgminer recognizes the stick and loads next AMU

Rinse and repeat.

A tedious process for sure, but that's what worked for me - if anyone has a better way to get these mounted please let me know


Q: Does anyone know if one can run cgminer in a separate instance on a pi running minepeon?


Cheers

 good can you check your  mining site hashrate against your  cgminer hashrate    for a  few times over the next day.

 I seem to get  a big mis-match  with a lot of sticks  and correct numbers with 1 hub and 8 sticks.  also what hubs do you use to get that many sticks?


I am running bfg miner with ice furies and the custom cg miner with the ant miners.  Maybe I should only run the custom cg miner.

 BTW your method is how I got 15 sticks on two hubs mining. but 21gh on cgmining and 11-13 gh on the mining sites.

[brush242]

A tedious process for sure, but that's what worked for me - if anyone has a better way to get these mounted please let me know

Brilliant post, thank you!

Let's see what happens when I begin the journey tomorrow. Heh.

[brush242]

So, I realized that I had an old aluminum heatsink from some old desktop. Hacksawing that thing into pieces is a LOT more work than I thought, but I started, so I have to finish.

What is the best way to secure a piece to an U1? Is there a thermal paste/glue? Gorilla Glue? Elmer's? A thin slice of ham? Stagnant Hellman's Mayonnaise?

Thoughts anyone?

(I'm going to go have a sandwich. I feel like one for some reason now.)