[GUIDE] GridSeed 5-Chip USB, Blade & Black Miner Support/Tuning

[josg21]

So stepped things up dual mining SHA and Scypt to 800Mhz, and I am getting 6.4GH/s and 340Mh/s avg per gridseed, they get mildly warm but nothing that i would be concerned about.
Anyone try dual mining under windows at 850Mhz yet, I dont want to push them too far when mining sha alongside scrypt as the sha asics can get fairly warm.

850 is about the safe limit for these in dual mode, anything above that might be too hot for the chip.

should get about 340 on scrypt at 850. What do you get at 850 in dual mode?

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[wolfey2014]

anyone have any problems with the miner not hashing any shares. It did for a few days but now, just shows new blocks. No change to my bat file and I've tried all the miner software (cpuminer/cgminer/bfgminer). They all produce no shares, but also, no errors...

Any suggestions would be great.

Thanks!

Screams of comm port FIFO overflow errors, to me.
First, turn off your miners. Reset time!

Fire up the 12V first - wait 1 minute at least.
Fire up the USB 5V power - wait for green and red lights to start flashing.
Reset each comm port either by menu (right click - reset) or manually by unplugging and re-plugging in each USB port one at a time waiting for an ack' from the PC that it's been recognized and loaded.
IF you can't soft-reset each port, unplug all ports manually, then start plugging them in one at a time waiting for an ack' as above.

Try resetting your STM comm port/s (or what ever driver) FIFO's to the following settings.
Transmit buffer to (14)
Try that first, see if shares start being submitted again.

If you are submitting shares but they keep losing comm every few to several hours,
try resetting the Receive buffer to (
This worked for me and my pods have been in comm with the pool over a day now ...no issues X-my fingers. Ran all night and through the day without any comm / completed work 'yay' submissions.

One other thing to try is make sure your USB ports are not set by WindBlow$ power saver to shut down at any time.
Cut off this feature so it never causes a disconnect. I believe the option you want is 'never'.
Make sure the PC runs stably and never tries to sleep or go idle - unless you're using an external controller in which case none of this may apply. This is primary for USB but, buffers are buffers. All comm ports use them from one degree to another.

Try this stuff and see what happens.
Good luck!
As always, try this stuff at your own risk!
Wolfey2014

Pea Ess, I presume you are not attempting to overclock higher than 850.
If so, you may want to try a lower speed (600 default) until you square away the other issues.
Do not exceed 850MHz - it's become known as the best average overclock performance the miners can do.

Gewed luck!

[crackfoo]

anyone have any problems with the miner not hashing any shares. It did for a few days but now, just shows new blocks. No change to my bat file and I've tried all the miner software (cpuminer/cgminer/bfgminer). They all produce no shares, but also, no errors...

Any suggestions would be great.

Thanks!

Screams of comm port FIFO overflow errors, to me.
First, turn off your miners. Reset time!

Fire up the 12V first - wait 1 minute at least.
Fire up the USB 5V power - wait for green and red lights to start flashing.
Reset each comm port either by menu (right click - reset) or manually by unplugging and re-plugging in each USB port one at a time waiting for an ack' from the PC that it's been recognized and loaded.
IF you can't soft-reset each port, unplug all ports manually, then start plugging them in one at a time waiting for an ack' as above.

Try resetting your STM comm port/s (or what ever driver) FIFO's to the following settings.
Transmit buffer to (14)
Try that first, see if shares start being submitted again.

If you are submitting shares but they keep losing comm every few to several hours,
try resetting the Receive buffer to (
This worked for me and my pods have been in comm with the pool over a day now ...no issues X-my fingers. Ran all night and through the day without any comm / completed work 'yay' submissions.

One other thing to try is make sure your USB ports are not set by WindBlow$ power saver to shut down at any time.
Cut off this feature so it never causes a disconnect. I believe the option you want is 'never'.
Make sure the PC runs stably and never tries to sleep or go idle - unless you're using an external controller in which case none of this may apply. This is primary for USB but, buffers are buffers. All comm ports use them from one degree to another.

Try this stuff and see what happens.
Good luck!
As always, try this stuff at your own risk!
Wolfey2014

Pea Ess, I presume you are not attempting to overclock higher than 850.
If so, you may want to try a lower speed (600 default) until you square away the other issues.
Do not exceed 850MHz - it's become known as the best average overclock performance the miners can do.

Gewed luck!

Thanks for these things to check. I'll let you know if one of them works for me. I'm not at the location so can try everything but unplugging them for now.

[yeahright]

i`ve managed to compile & run BFGMiner on my minepeon and I didn`t experience any lockups for 10 hours with 10 miners

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=168174.msg5689374#msg5689374

there may be a bug still... always the pool dif is set/reported to 0

Thanks!!! I've used your compiled bfgminer and got minepeon running with the dualminers and gridseeds.  Not a lot of hashing power but hopefully will get more gridseeds now.

[darkfriend77]

... I'm suffering also from the SCRIPTA Rasp bug ... that somehow crashes it all 5 hours or so ... had it running for more then 24 hours flawless ...
and now it crashes ... :-(

[misc2012-de]

... I'm suffering also from the SCRIPTA Rasp bug ... that somehow crashes it all 5 hours or so ... had it running for more then 24 hours flawless ...
and now it crashes ... :-(

Please check syslog in /var/log/ and post it here. I am curious what kind of errors you get.

[darkfriend77]

... I'm suffering also from the SCRIPTA Rasp bug ... that somehow crashes it all 5 hours or so ... had it running for more then 24 hours flawless ...
and now it crashes ... :-(

Please check syslog in /var/log/ and post it here. I am curious what kind of errors you get.

http://pastie.org/8935302

[gigica viteazu`]

i

... I'm suffering also from the SCRIPTA Rasp bug ... that somehow crashes it all 5 hours or so ... had it running for more then 24 hours flawless ...
and now it crashes ... :-(

I had the same problems with Scripta/Minepeon.

Right now I`m using without any lockups for 3 days, a clean wheezy-raspbian + cgminer-cg3355 (build be myself from git).

[wolfey2014]

My 6 GS5's ran for 30+ hours this time before they stopped mining.

After chasing up this problem and trying to solve it over the last few weeks, I've tried virtually everything short of re-programing the firmware on my miners, which I cannot do - obviously.

Darn it!!!! Right after I went to sleep, it takes a piss! AAarrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh!

I wonder if GridSeed engineers left this but in their miners' firmware?

Has anyone been running their GridSeed Farm 24/7 stably WITHOUT ANY INTERVENTION WHATSOEVER?

IF so, please tell me what your configuration is so WE can all set these things and not have to worry about this elusive little bug!!!?

Has anyone come up with a macro to take care of detecting the hault then restarting each miner in cpuminer?
All I need is for it to monitor the window of each miner and when it stops producing yay's for say, 3 or so minutes, it stops the program without closing the window, resets the port, then restarts each miner 5 seconds apart.

Thanks
Wolfey2014

[darkfriend77]

i

... I'm suffering also from the SCRIPTA Rasp bug ... that somehow crashes it all 5 hours or so ... had it running for more then 24 hours flawless ...
and now it crashes ... :-(

I had the same problems with Scripta/Minepeon.

Right now I`m using without any lockups for 3 days, a clean wheezy-raspbian + cgminer-cg3355 (build be myself from git).

yep ... did that now ... let's see ...
thx

[SummersideGuy]

So stepped things up dual mining SHA and Scypt to 800Mhz, and I am getting 6.4GH/s and 340Mh/s avg per gridseed, they get mildly warm but nothing that i would be concerned about.
Anyone try dual mining under windows at 850Mhz yet, I dont want to push them too far when mining sha alongside scrypt as the sha asics can get fairly warm.

850 is about the safe limit for these in dual mode, anything above that might be too hot for the chip.

OK so I tried dual mining at 850mhz on both sha and scrypt and I start to get a ton of red noonce on the scrypt, If I keep scrypt at 850 and reduce Sha to 800 or less the red noonce go away. So I currently have Sha at 750 ant scrypt at 850. I am getting 6GH/s sha and 360kh/s Scrypt. I feel this works best for me.

[sandor111]

Good news everyone! Stable firmware for LightningAsic controllers is underway, it should be ready for public in the coming week and it will be possible to upgrade (from v1, v2, v2.1..) by uploading it to the upload page. The firmware .bin will be released for public, but it is compatible only with LightningAsic controllers. Upgrading from factory Tp-link 703N will not work and it might brick your Tp-link, so don't even try!

It has some awesome features:

• Stripped, custom compiled OpenWrt (controller's OS) image optimized for size and speed
• Stability is heavily emphasized and guaranteed! No more random reboots or crashes
• Custom compiled cpuminer OC, frequency selectable up to 1200 MHz. We have tested it for 48 hours straight at 950 MHz (405 Kh/s) and without hardware errors! (see #1)
• Advanced miner monitoring and management
• Option to auto power cycle miners when one of the miners is stuck, this is done software wise and it has the same effect as unplugging, and plugging in the USB cable! (see #2)
• Up to 10 miners per controller, replacing the 32MB RAM chip with 64MB will double that figure
• 

note #1: depends on miner hardware
note #2: this will only work if the USB/hub is powered by the controller, you must not supply power to the USB hub.

BTC or dual mining is removed in the firmware for a multitude of reasons, BTC mining on GC3355 is unstable and wasteful.

If this doesn't want to make you pull out the LA controller out of the trash, I don't know what will...
For questions or feature requests, please PM me, not Jack.   Donations (1AMsjqzXQpRunxUmtn3xzQ5cMdhV7fmet2) are gladly accepted, and will be put towards improving the firmware even more.

[rammy2k2]

Good news everyone! Stable firmware for LightningAsic controllers is underway, it should be ready for public in the coming week and it will be possible to upgrade (from v1, v2, v2.1..) by uploading it to the upload page. The firmware .bin will be released for public, but it is compatible only with LightningAsic controllers. Upgrading from factory Tp-link 703N will not work and it might brick your Tp-link, so don't even try!

It has some awesome features:

• Stripped, custom compiled OpenWrt (controller's OS) image optimized for size and speed
• Stability is heavily emphasized and guaranteed! No more random reboots or crashes
• Custom compiled cpuminer OC, frequency selectable up to 1200 MHz. We have tested it for 48 hours straight at 950 MHz (405 Kh/s) and without hardware errors! (see #1)
• Advanced miner monitoring and management
• Option to auto power cycle miners when one of the miners is stuck, this is done software wise and it has the same effect as unplugging, and plugging in the USB cable! (see #2)
• Up to 10 miners per controller, replacing the 32MB RAM chip with 64MB will double that figure
• 

note #1: depends on miner hardware
note #2: this will only work if the USB/hub is powered by the controller, you must not supply power to the USB hub.

BTC or dual mining is removed in the firmware for a multitude of reasons, BTC mining on GC3355 is unstable and wasteful.

If this doesn't want to make you pull out the LA controller out of the trash, I don't know what will...
For questions or feature requests, please PM me, not Jack.   Donations (1AMsjqzXQpRunxUmtn3xzQ5cMdhV7fmet2) are gladly accepted, and will be put towards improving the firmware even more.

good news !

[amix]

neewbie here - been on this darn gridseed all weekend scouring the forums. but got it running. did a small mod. Flipped the fan - extended the cables and attached a shelf around the fan. It now removes the heat instead of blowing air onit to cool it down. also by lefting the fan 5 cm you improve the effiency of the fan by removing the dead center spot - which is exactly where the chips are located. anyway its running on scrypt only on bfgminer with clock - in the .bat file at least - of 1050! Early days only been running 25 mins but its at 446.8 avg 5s hash rate! and no hardware errors. gonna let it run over night see how stable it is. and ill post back plus upload some shots of the fan mod. tried to get it higher at 1150 bfgminer started but not the gridseed at 1250 bfgminer didnt start. thers maybe room for a bit more overclocking yet but not much its gonna be a resistor swap job. just got to track down the right one.

p.s got tonight screen shot just got to upload it and lost photobucket account details. tomorrow itll be - about 14:00 gmt

1BTC Bounty for the first person that can overclock gridseed 5-chip devices in cgminer or bfgminer without additional HW errors and rejects!

Also

2BTC Bounty for the first person that can do it over the weekend! This means by 11:59 EST Sunday 3/16/14

Ready set go.

[suchmoon]

446.8 avg 5s hash rate

Just a quick note - some software, cgminer in particular, report high hashrates but there are very few accepted shares at clock speeds higher than 900 MHz, most top out at 850 MHz. Not sure if bfgminer has the same issue, but please make sure that your hashrate is real, i.e. there are accepted shares going out to the pool at roughly the same rate.

[XScrypt]

neewbie here - been on this darn gridseed all weekend scouring the forums. but got it running. did a small mod. Flipped the fan - extended the cables and attached a shelf around the fan. It now removes the heat instead of blowing air onit to cool it down. also by lefting the fan 5 cm you improve the effiency of the fan by removing the dead center spot - which is exactly where the chips are located. anyway its running on scrypt only on bfgminer with clock - in the .bat file at least - of 1050! Early days only been running 25 mins but its at 446.8 avg 5s hash rate! and no hardware errors. gonna let it run over night see how stable it is. and ill post back plus upload some shots of the fan mod. tried to get it higher at 1150 bfgminer started but not the gridseed at 1250 bfgminer didnt start. thers maybe room for a bit more overclocking yet but not much its gonna be a resistor swap job. just got to track down the right one.

p.s got tonight screen shot just got to upload it and lost photobucket account details. tomorrow itll be - about 14:00 gmt

1BTC Bounty for the first person that can overclock gridseed 5-chip devices in cgminer or bfgminer without additional HW errors and rejects!

Also

2BTC Bounty for the first person that can do it over the weekend! This means by 11:59 EST Sunday 3/16/14

Ready set go.

Hashrate doesn't mean jack if all you get is HW errors and rejects.

I've verified with my own experiments that 850 is about the best operating speed for the gridseed. Occasionally 900 can beat it. Anything above that and you get worse performance due to the large increase in HW errors.

1. Set clock to 850 and point to a relatively stable coin pool for 24 hours.
2. Set clock to 900 and point to the same pool.
3. Set clock to 950 and point to the same pool.

Verify your recorded hashrate with the submited shares of the pool. At 850 you get an effective hashrate of around 360 kh/s. At 900, you can sometimes get around 370 kh/s effective but usually it ends up about on par with 850. At 950 your effective hashrate drops below 300 as the greatly increased HW errors start wrecking havoc on your accepted shares rate. At 1000 all you're doing is destroying your gridseed (you're effective hashrate is basically 0).

This is with the gold gridseed using cgminer. Unless cgminer is doing something incorrectly with it's overclocking, I don't see how bfgminer is letting you clock to 1050 without any HW errors.

[bearsworth]

I can't get this wiibox to work for me. Can someone point me to a step by step guide? Thanks.

[sandor111]

neewbie here - been on this darn gridseed all weekend scouring the forums. but got it running. did a small mod. Flipped the fan - extended the cables and attached a shelf around the fan. It now removes the heat instead of blowing air onit to cool it down. also by lefting the fan 5 cm you improve the effiency of the fan by removing the dead center spot - which is exactly where the chips are located. anyway its running on scrypt only on bfgminer with clock - in the .bat file at least - of 1050! Early days only been running 25 mins but its at 446.8 avg 5s hash rate! and no hardware errors. gonna let it run over night see how stable it is. and ill post back plus upload some shots of the fan mod. tried to get it higher at 1150 bfgminer started but not the gridseed at 1250 bfgminer didnt start. thers maybe room for a bit more overclocking yet but not much its gonna be a resistor swap job. just got to track down the right one.

p.s got tonight screen shot just got to upload it and lost photobucket account details. tomorrow itll be - about 14:00 gmt

1BTC Bounty for the first person that can overclock gridseed 5-chip devices in cgminer or bfgminer without additional HW errors and rejects!

Also

2BTC Bounty for the first person that can do it over the weekend! This means by 11:59 EST Sunday 3/16/14

Ready set go.

Seems to me that BFGMiner isn't properly reporting HW errors then, what you are saying isn't possible without hardware mods.
Btw, did you check what hashrate the pool reported?

[CartmanSPC]

i

... I'm suffering also from the SCRIPTA Rasp bug ... that somehow crashes it all 5 hours or so ... had it running for more then 24 hours flawless ...
and now it crashes ... :-(

I had the same problems with Scripta/Minepeon.

Right now I`m using without any lockups for 3 days, a clean wheezy-raspbian + cgminer-cg3355 (build be myself from git).

yep ... did that now ... let's see ...
thx

Giving up on the Pi...it uses up too much of the Pi's CPU and hashes slower with more HW errors.

Pi:
https://i.imgur.com/QUidnj7.png

Pi CPU (20-90%):
https://i.imgur.com/EEB4H9e.png

Ubuntu server on a Thinkpad:
https://i.imgur.com/PVTDLis.png

[amix]

neewbie here - been on this darn gridseed all weekend scouring the forums. but got it running. did a small mod. Flipped the fan - extended the cables and attached a shelf around the fan. It now removes the heat instead of blowing air onit to cool it down. also by lefting the fan 5 cm you improve the effiency of the fan by removing the dead center spot - which is exactly where the chips are located. anyway its running on scrypt only on bfgminer with clock - in the .bat file at least - of 1050! Early days only been running 25 mins but its at 446.8 avg 5s hash rate! and no hardware errors. gonna let it run over night see how stable it is. and ill post back plus upload some shots of the fan mod. tried to get it higher at 1150 bfgminer started but not the gridseed at 1250 bfgminer didnt start. thers maybe room for a bit more overclocking yet but not much its gonna be a resistor swap job. just got to track down the right one.

p.s got tonight screen shot just got to upload it and lost photobucket account details. tomorrow itll be - about 14:00 gmt

1BTC Bounty for the first person that can overclock gridseed 5-chip devices in cgminer or bfgminer without additional HW errors and rejects!

Also

2BTC Bounty for the first person that can do it over the weekend! This means by 11:59 EST Sunday 3/16/14

Ready set go.

Hashrate doesn't mean jack if all you get is HW errors and rejects.

I've verified with my own experiments that 850 is about the best operating speed for the gridseed. Occasionally 900 can beat it. Anything above that and you get worse performance due to the large increase in HW errors.

1. Set clock to 850 and point to a relatively stable coin pool for 24 hours.
2. Set clock to 900 and point to the same pool.
3. Set clock to 950 and point to the same pool.

Verify your recorded hashrate with the submited shares of the pool. At 850 you get an effective hashrate of around 360 kh/s. At 900, you can sometimes get around 370 kh/s effective but usually it ends up about on par with 850. At 950 your effective hashrate drops below 300 as the greatly increased HW errors start wrecking havoc on your accepted shares rate. At 1000 all you're doing is destroying your gridseed (you're effective hashrate is basically 0).

This is with the gold gridseed using cgminer. Unless cgminer is doing something incorrectly with it's overclocking, I don't see how bfgminer is letting you clock to 1050 without any HW errors.

sorry when i said newbie i shouldve really said first time poster. think i said no hardware errors after 25 mins. quick update - gotta go to work and its -12 outside - after running 6hrs:24 mins there is ONLY 8 hardware errors! still going strong at 446.8.

Not possiböe not possible hardware mods Well in its current set up maybe not cos the way they come put together is very in effiecent. especailly the fan. i not surpised everyone becomes unstable having the fan so close and blowing air into that huge heat sink. its so ineffective. the dead point on the fan the ineffiect air flow. The fan is a waste of time flip it over move it away create a negative air space so that fresh room temp air flows in nicely cooling it and it quickly expelled. it works -to a point 1050 -1100 then its serious hardware mod resistor SMD swapping - yes i know what im talking about. forgotten my physics years ago, but managed to self custom build a complete water coold pc which still runs and temp inside my case never goes above 34,  and my water doesnot go above 38. thats having the graphics card memory cpu and hard disk coolded pc running 24/7 mining scrypt plus max on cpu plus my forex EAS running as well. so yeah i understand how to keep it cool.
and if you dont want to accept it or even belief it then dont. just though for a change i could throw something back to the community. but hey some things are really appracited.

jump in at deep end sink or swim set bfgminer to 1200 - no start.
restart set to 1150 - bfgminer start GSD init goes red.
restart set to 1050 bfgminer starts inits and runs. cool
images to follow later.