I purchased three of these units after speaking with BitGTR owner (name omitted) for the last few months.
He approached us in D7 pool chat for ppc mining.
He made the claims he was intrinsically involved with this device and its R&D.
In chat it comes out he is merely the financer of the project that was started by someone else (I've forgotten his name as I've never spoken to him nor seen the threads about the development of this project before it was taken over by BitGTR).
Upon receipt of these units, I promptly followed the directions on the website (bitgtr & hashratestore) ie plug-and-play with automatic detection in either popular mining program.
Nothing identified - nothing hashing.
I contacted Bitgtr & then tried to troubleshoot. Replacing bfg with cg, installing into a different OS (windows v linux/rpi) and tried again.
This time they did recognize after a bit of tinkering with settings in windows to acknowledge the correct driver for HiD as specified (also not plug and play for me).
I saw them hashing at 1.7-1.8 and walked away. 10 minutes later they were running great 3 yellowjackets on a dlink 7 port hub.
I'm watching my hashrate on the pool server and notice all of a sudden it drops by 1gh/s after 15 minutes.
Then slowly it starts dropping by .1 GH/s at first, then .2, then all of a sudden they just stop.
One thing I noticed (I'll post screens later) is they say CLOCK frequency dropping by %50 reinitializing. This doesn't happen for at least 5 minutes, then it starts happening at increasing intervals until it finally fails.
After they were tested twice to perform in the exact same way, I thought to try it in the USB port on my laptop. Same deal. It starts a bit higher at 2.1, then has the same exact issue. Slowly resets the clock/reinitializes until it no longer is recognized.
After this I think, if the power requirements somehow were 'unhinged' and keep doubling, or halfing, or shorting, perhaps my hub had issues? I tried 5 block erupters and after the 3rd one plugged into this hub would disconnect the last one plugged in, Plug the fourth in, only three show up, plug a fifth in, that one recognizes and the first one is removed from the system devices listing.
The hub had fried.
I bought another DLINK hub as this hub has served me with 6 BE's plugged in hashing at 334 continuously for 3 months. I had purchased it used. Maybe it was just its time.
I plugged only one YJ into the new hub and the same issue resulted. I unplugged it before THIS hub fried. I tested the hub after and 6 BE's work in it fine. The old hub still has the disconnect issue AFTER the yellow jackets were used on it.
I had been in contact with BITGTR and was asking for a refund including shipping. He did acknowledge that he would accept returns but at a different address than the shipped address, and he would only reimburse me after he received.
He did not want to push this return through paypal, as I would be protected in the case he did not wish to refund my money and I had shipped the item back.
He never entered tracking information into PAYPAL to corroborate the shipment, therefor no claim for RETURN could be made. After I had been mentioning my issues with hardware, and asking cordially to find an answer he told me:
" I do not wish for you to be a reseller of my item "
This is fine, but it only comes after he dismissed any claims his item could have damaged my equipment, or that oversight in Shenzen manufacturing could somehow be flawed.
Upon closer inspection I found this (picture). His dismissal of my re-selller status came only after I mentioned this shorted pin, and that my boyfriend could fix them and help troubleshoot.
I mean, what are initial buyers/testers for, right? Well I was sold an item that was proposed to have decent R&D/QC/Troubleshooting support, yet the seller is hesitant at best to make these work on very popular mining gear. It was also noted that initially BitGTR made the claim that although dozens of units had shipped, I was the only one to have issues.
I was order 0012 in his invoicing system. Out of 3000 units if 3 are defective (at least), what percentage is that? I would be hard pressed to believe this figure was the maximum defect allowed from QC.
After mentioning the shorted pin to BiTGTR he not only dismissed the claim that it COULD be the fault of his miners, he mentioned that the device was DELIBERATELY manufactured this way. Anyone with soldering experience can see this is an arbitrary pin short and if two pins were indeed to be soldered together, they would have a joint pad on the board, not soldered above the pins. The corner in which the two pins are crossed does seem suspiciously close to other components.
Perhaps the manufacturing process is slightly off, perhaps my hub just wanted to die and take out three yellow jackets.
My bf's electronics mentor is coming by today to check it out, tinker with one unit, and help us get this working - with opposition and no help from the seller.
Buyer Beware.
http://imgur.com/MlFRLyG,ufVx42u,NLybMob <yellow jacket ic closeups with shorted pins.
