Bitmain AntMiner U1 Tips & Tricks

[Cassey]

Hi - sorry for cross-posting this from another thread, but got zero responses there. 

---

Received (4) more Antminer U1s in today's mail.  Had a machine all ready and tested, running 2, with free slots and a nicely cooled powered USB hub just waiting for them.

Unpacked, allowed them to warm to room temp, shutdown bfgminer on the machine and plugged them in.  Restarted bfgminer and got a segmentation fault (and a hung ssh window).

Backed down to 2 and it works fine.  Added one more and it seg faulted.

Grabbed the hub, loaded it with 5 Antminers, and plugged it into machine #2, cranked up bfgminer there, and all was well (until the hub power supply gave up)

Tried 3 on machine #3 and it had no problem.

So...

#1 Any suggestion on what might be wrong on machine #1?

#2 USB power hub (solved after reading threads for a few hours)

BTW - all three machines were freshly reinstalled with Gentoo Linux within the past couple of weeks.  All are using bfgminer 3.10.0 pulled from Github.

Thanks all! 

Cassey
Hi ho, hi ho... its off to mine we go!

[Walking Glitch]

Hi - sorry for cross-posting this from another thread, but got zero responses there. 

---

Received (4) more Antminer U1s in today's mail.  Had a machine all ready and tested, running 2, with free slots and a nicely cooled powered USB hub just waiting for them.

Unpacked, allowed them to warm to room temp, shutdown bfgminer on the machine and plugged them in.  Restarted bfgminer and got a segmentation fault (and a hung ssh window).

Backed down to 2 and it works fine.  Added one more and it seg faulted.

Grabbed the hub, loaded it with 5 Antminers, and plugged it into machine #2, cranked up bfgminer there, and all was well (until the hub power supply gave up)

Tried 3 on machine #3 and it had no problem.

So...

#1 Any suggestion on what might be wrong on machine #1?

#2 USB power hub (solved after reading threads for a few hours)

BTW - all three machines were freshly reinstalled with Gentoo Linux within the past couple of weeks.  All are using bfgminer 3.10.0 pulled from Github.

Thanks all! 

Cassey
Hi ho, hi ho... its off to mine we go!

Sounds like an issue with one of the libraries in your USB stack. Cross-check the versions across your installations, and update them if they are behind.

[Cassey]

For those wanting to play, but not in a rush...

I just ordered 250 each of the (4) R1 resistors and 1000 of the 10kohm R2 resistors.  All 1% Panasonic.

Also should have 1000 of the 10kohm R2's coming in at 5% tolerance (got a bit trigger happy on ebay).

Some of the resistors are back-ordered, but expected "soon".

PM me if you would like a few.  They are all dirt cheap in quantities, I think my total order for all 3000 came in under $50, even with shipping, but I figured somebody might like a few to play with.  I have no idea what to charge for a "set", given that postage will likely be 10X the cost of the resistors (never thought I'd offer something where I would have to figure in the cost of an envelope!).  

Keeping in the spirit of things, I guess payment in small fractions of bitcoins or litecoins would be appropriate.

Your on your own for soldering them in.  Suggestions are most welcome!

I like the idea of adding a capacitor to help stabilize the voltage.  Off to see what I can find in those next...

Cassey

[twindragon6]

These help on the back of the chips. Also where did you solder the cap? It's hard to make out in the image.

http://www.frozencpu.com/products/14952/vid-178/ModMyToys_Solid_Copper_Passive_Micro-Heatsink_-_8mm_x_8mm_x_8mm_Pack_of_4_-_Nickel_Plated-MMT-HS-8X8-CU-NK.html

The capacitor is soldered between GND and +5V

Ahh, thanks! I was looking at the schematic for the aoz1021 and it looks like there are two 22µF caps on the board. One on the input side and another on the output. I'll have to see if I have some caps laying around. Putting one inline like that should stabilize the power from the usb. I'm getting a stable 2.0 Gh/s with the stock resistor. I grabbed an old P4 heatsink and a 12V 500mAh transformer and wired it up to the fan to setup active cooling, then mounted the Antminer to the CPU side with some thermal tape. I should be able to mount four of them onto the sink. I can run at 2.2Gh/s right now but the clock fluctuates wildly. No hardware errors in Bfgminer 3.10.0 though. The temp is good at 32.23°C/90°F (20°C/68°F ambient) measured at the hottest point which is the edge of Antminer sink where the thermal pad is. That's a 50Mhz overclock above the stock 200Mhz just buy adding cooling which isn't too shabby. At this point it needs more voltage and a capacitor. I'm going to just add the 10K resistor and cap first which should give 0.88V and see how hard I can push it then I'm going to swap out the 1K for a 2.49K and go for the full volt. I think less voltage is more in this case. Voltage=Heat and Heat=Bad. It looks like 4.0Gh/s will require some LN2. That's a 250% Overclock at 500Mhz and as such is unrealistic.

http://i1211.photobucket.com/albums/cc431/twindragon6/DSCF7357_zpsc964b66e.jpg

[twindragon6]

Wow!!! 4c81? Totally curious!!!
Anything soldered?
Where did you found those values?

What sort of black magic did you cast on these things to get it up that high?  I can barely run one of them at x0981 (2 GHS) with 0 HW errors and the other at x0881 because if I bump the lower one up, I get mad HW errors, and if I bump the other one up to x0A81, I get about a shit ton of hardware errors...  

Definetely not stock - I changed the resistors to 10kOhm & 3,9kOhm and stuck some heatsinks into it.
Only one Ant in use at the moment, but ordered second one just yesterday - plan to do the same mod...

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13366022/ant.png

Nice! How did you get there? Details?!?

[Cassey]

Sounds like an issue with one of the libraries in your USB stack. Cross-check the versions across your installations, and update them if they are behind.

Thanks!  That makes sense!  I'll check as soon as I get home tomorrow evening.

Still, can't be too far behind.  That system was only built about 2 weeks ago.  But at least its something to check. 

[mikejones]

Hi - sorry for cross-posting this from another thread, but got zero responses there. 

---

Received (4) more Antminer U1s in today's mail.  Had a machine all ready and tested, running 2, with free slots and a nicely cooled powered USB hub just waiting for them.

Unpacked, allowed them to warm to room temp, shutdown bfgminer on the machine and plugged them in.  Restarted bfgminer and got a segmentation fault (and a hung ssh window).

Backed down to 2 and it works fine.  Added one more and it seg faulted.

Grabbed the hub, loaded it with 5 Antminers, and plugged it into machine #2, cranked up bfgminer there, and all was well (until the hub power supply gave up)

Tried 3 on machine #3 and it had no problem.

So...

#1 Any suggestion on what might be wrong on machine #1?

#2 USB power hub (solved after reading threads for a few hours)

BTW - all three machines were freshly reinstalled with Gentoo Linux within the past couple of weeks.  All are using bfgminer 3.10.0 pulled from Github.

Thanks all! 

Cassey
Hi ho, hi ho... its off to mine we go!

What are some pointers on the USB powered hub?

[kabopar]

Have you been able to overclock with minepeon? If so can you provide instructions/command that is needed

I used bfgminer as the default miner in minepeopn latest 2.5.0 pr1 pre-release, with the same parameters as shown in this thread in the settings page and it seemed to be overclocking to similar rates as in Windows.  I don't have minepeon running now, so can't quote the exact command, however I basically copied it from my win settings.

Cheers

Ran minepeon again, using bfgminer as the default miner, and this is the entry in Settings (line added just before the bfgminer command line which was already there)

--set-device antminer:clock=x0981
/usr/bin/screen -dmS miner /opt/minepeon/bin/bfgminer -S all -c /opt/minepeon/etc/miner.conf

You'll need to change the x0981 to your desired clock value as posted elsewhere in this thread.

Cheers

[Cassey]

What are some pointers on the USB powered hub?

Don't buy a cheap one.  My first was a Inland for $17.95 from Microcenter.  Came with a 2000ma power supply.

A few things I didn't realize:

1)  If plugged into external power, the USB port power is disabled - makes sense or you could fry your motherboard port if the external power supply went zonkers.

2)  Basic math:  2W/5V = 0.4 amps, 400ma, so running 5 in the above hub would max it out - and that happens when running at stock speed

3)  Nobody wants to run at stock speed.  Not sure of the power draw running at 2Gh vs. 1.6Gh, but it is at least linear, so 400ma would become 500ma, and its probably not linear.  Thus (5) running on a 2000ma power supply would overload it.  Also 500ma is the spec limit for USB 2.0.  Doing this fried the cheap power supply that came with my Inland after an hour or so.  Have to give it credit that it lasted that long!

This unit, at $59.99 from Amazon, is recommended by many:  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005NGQWL2/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

My current thinking (pun intended) is to just use the USB hub for communication, and to rig external power to the ports, probably with a nice little capacitor soldered in near the connector for filtering and stabilization.  In fact, I just found some 9" USB extension cables on e-bay that look perfect - clear plastic jacket that should be removable exposing the wiring right at the connector...

http://www.ebay.com/itm/150660228896?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1439.l2649

BTW - I'm told the red wire is the +5V power one.  That said, its definitely the outer two pins, so just check it with a voltmeter before cutting!

[Cassey]

Quick electrical question... Looking at radial capacitors to use for filtering/stabilization and noticed the minimum working voltage on both 16V and 25V is 6.3V.  Since this is a 5V system I'm a bit concerned.  Should I be?  I was under the impression that the Voltage rating was just the limit... e.g. how good of an insulator they used.

I'm guessing that since the standard rule is to double the expected voltage on a capacitors rating, a 10V cap should be designed to work at 5V?

[Cheshyr]

Quick electrical question... Looking at radial capacitors to use for filtering/stabilization and noticed the minimum working voltage on both 16V and 25V is 6.3V.  Since this is a 5V system I'm a bit concerned.  Should I be?  I was under the impression that the Voltage rating was just the limit... e.g. how good of an insulator they used.

I'm guessing that since the standard rule is to double the expected voltage on a capacitors rating, a 10V cap should be designed to work at 5V?

Those are maximum ratings before they degrade, not minimum ratings.  Radial caps tend to have an higher inline resistance, but they're quite a bit cheaper than ceramic or tantalum at the same capacity, so it the parasitics don't matter, there's no reason to use the more expensive parts.

Short answer: 16V and 25V are no problem.  10V minimum for a 5V system, but 16-25 are standard.  

[Janezki]

Nice! How did you get there? Details?!?

Eeehh? Just did as the Antminer user guide adviced, replaced (manually with pretty small soldering iron) the stock 1kOhm SMD resistor with 10kOhm and added second 3.9kOhm resistor parallel to first.
Stuck a bigger heatsink into it with thermal epoxy, which was leftover from my GPU tuning project.
Started bfgminer and set the hash frequency to 2.6 (miner didn't start with higher freq.) with --set-device antminer:clock=x4c81 command.

Currently have total of 3 more Ants ordered and planning to make a small 4 Ant farm, aiming for total hashing power of 12Gh... 

[chromosoma]

Be careful.
Sometimes you can run  one miner at 2,5-2,6 GHS, but if you add another one to the same system (hub/USB CArd) they will not start up, or just run an  much lower hashrate.
Maybe  because of bad decoupling or too high  power consumption.


BTW

What are you mining right now?=)
I am solo mining  Opensaurcecoin with my humble 8 GHS=)

[Cassey]

Just a little status update:

Per the pools I use, my (6) Antminers are continuing to contribute at or near 2Gh each setup in a very substandard (e.g. not recommended) configuration:  They are all hanging out of various USB ports, mostly on the back of my motherboards.  I'm not happy about this, but am awaiting a new hub and couldn't bring myself to let them sit unused.

Also out-of-town, so can't see the displays.  Most frustrating!

I did put a little USB fan behind the machines so that there would at least be a bit of air flow.

Guess the good news is that they can run at 2 Gh, at least for days, without ideal cooling.  Don't recommend this though.  I'll be rigging a old PC power supply to the USB strip when I get home this evening and put it back into use.  

Longer term, I'm looking to find an old heatsink (like off the back of a some ancient electrical device) and rig something with it.  I threw away several cubic feet of them about 5 years ago after they sat unused in my basement for 10 years - naturally regretting that right now...

[Cassey]

What are you mining right now?=)
I am solo mining  Opensaurcecoin with my humble 8 GHS=)

Started on Eclipse, but have been adding miners to Eligius (its larger, so smoother, and apparent Luke-jr of bfgminer fame is associated with it), but have been seriously wondering about going to the other end of the spectrum and joining something like multipool.  Not sure I really want to be dealing with dozens of wallets though.  Thoughts?

[Sp00n1980]

I am now up to 6 antminers all running stock frequency

But I am having issues with 1, it starts off good gets upto 1.6gh/s for 5 hours, then starts slowing down, when it gets below 0.5gh/s it stops hashing  all the time it's running I get around 4% hardware errors
While the other 5 are all working fine, in fact 2 off them are over 2gh/s at stock frequency 

I have tried it on its own, in different positions in my hub, but nothing seems to work

Anyone have any idea's or is it just a dud 

[Cassey]

One hint I picked up earlier in this thread:  Check to make sure the screws are tight.  A small standard allen wrench is all that is needed.  Some have reported they are a bit lose and the heatsinks may not be working at 100%.

[miniasic]

Hi Sp00n1980,

I have an equal problem with my Ant. It hashed up to 2.1ghs/s then started to slow down. After restarting it, it never recovered and now I can get it only to 540mh/s but stable with no error. Before with 2.1ghs the error rate was below 1% until it slowed down (still not more HW errors). Between I tried a lot of stuff, frequency settings, CPU cooler directly attached, 2.5A PSU but still its slow...will try to figure out what went wrong if I find some time next week.

Greetings,

           miniasic.

[anw]

hey,

I have an antminer which is running anormaly slow.
In example with bfgminer known as AMU0 (5s avg/all time avg/effective avg):

AMU 0:       |  2.08/ 2.07/ 0.07Gh/s | A: 4 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none
AMU 1:       |  1.98/ 1.97/ 1.47Gh/s | A:50 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none

Another try:
 AMU 0:       |  2.10/ 2.07/ 0.10Gh/s | A:  0 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none
 AMU 1:       |  1.98/ 1.99/ 1.45Gh/s | A: 13 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none
 AMU 2:       |  1.98/ 1.98/ 1.48Gh/s | A: 10 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none

This antminer has been tested with different hubs (dlink, 49-ports...), alone, but it never reached more than 0,1Gh/s.

The 21 other units are working very well, so I guess the item is faulty 
Screws are tight... and it's not getting hot at all ... Any idea?

[chromosoma]

Measure different voltages on the testpoints.