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

[suchmoon]

images to follow later.

I really hope these images include pool stats confirming your hashrate. A lot of people in this forum have been running their Gridseeds without fans at all, so it would be really surprising to learn that repositioning the fan can gain 20%+ performance.

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[XScrypt]

images to follow later.

I really hope these images include pool stats confirming your hashrate. A lot of people in this forum have been running their Gridseeds without fans at all, so it would be really surprising to learn that repositioning the fan can gain 20%+ performance.

It doesn't. Cooling is not the the problem in scrypt only mode. You can remove the fan completely and in scrypt mode the heat sink will barely warm up. In fact, you can run scrypt without a heat sink at all. The power draw is so low in scrypt mode (approximately 7 watts without the fan) the chips don't even get toasty. Use the heatsink and fan to keep your beer cool.

The heat sink and fan are for bitcoin only/dual mode. That will heat things up (I haven't tested it myself, but others have reported a 60 watt draw).

Considering the number of people who have tried pushing these things to their limits, I seriously doubt claims that these things can be run at anything above 900 with any sort of efficiency. The people on this board aren't stupid. I'm waiting to see what this guy posts. I'm betting he'll have a hashrate of 450 kh/s but almost no submitted shares due to rejections and errors.

[amix]

at eork on smart phone so cant confirm hashrate on pc but just checkef.in on my pool hssh rste 463 accepted dhsres 63  - it set up uding hsdhcows. i can swap it over to my other pool at scrypt guild which hss a more detailed stat on it. i noticed bfgminer didnt seem to be reporting the shsres etc but i was getting an accepted hsdhrate and shares at the pool. but we will see in more detail later

[Andareed]

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.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=519112

[digitorum]

total newbie question: can you use the grid seed 5 chip miners on a PC already mining with GPUs ?
if yes, is it hard to set up ?

[scryptographer]

total newbie question: can you use the grid seed 5 chip miners on a PC already mining with GPUs ?
if yes, is it hard to set up ?

yes
no

Personally I have sgminer running my GPUs, and cpuminer-gc3355 running my gridseeds

[pedrosoft]

Hi all,

with last wiibox firmware upgrade, what'is the max freq possible ?

[darkfriend77]

UPDATE:

OVERCLOCKING:

• HARDWARE OVERCLOCKING

HARDWARE OVERCLOCKING

DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK! I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE IF YOU BREAK YOUR MINER! THIS WILL VOID YOUR WARRANTY!

If you are feeling brave, there's a small modification you can make to your miner to increase the voltage a bit, which will let you run at a higher voltage. First, you will need to perform a bridge solder (soldering a jumper might also be doable, though I did not yet try that). Second, you need to use my modified cgminer (https://github.com/dtbartle/cgminer-gc3355) and set voltage=1 in the gridseed-options part of your config. I've been able to run at 950 MHz without hardware errors. This will cause the miner to use an additional 1.6 W of power.

[XScrypt]

at eork on smart phone so cant confirm hashrate on pc but just checkef.in on my pool hssh rste 463 accepted dhsres 63  - it set up uding hsdhcows. i can swap it over to my other pool at scrypt guild which hss a more detailed stat on it. i noticed bfgminer didnt seem to be reporting the shsres etc but i was getting an accepted hsdhrate and shares at the pool. but we will see in more detail later

Using your post times to define the length of time that your miner has been running, that's about 3 hours. Getting 63 accepted shares over a 3 hour period means your basically generating junk (unless you've fixed your difficulty to be ridiculously high).Most of your shares are either not validating or are encountering hardware errors.

If you're connected to a multipool, you should be seeing at least 120-180 accepted shares per hour. Over 3 hours you should see 360-540 accepted shares.

[amix]

at eork on smart phone so cant confirm hashrate on pc but just checkef.in on my pool hssh rste 463 accepted dhsres 63  - it set up uding hsdhcows. i can swap it over to my other pool at scrypt guild which hss a more detailed stat on it. i noticed bfgminer didnt seem to be reporting the shsres etc but i was getting an accepted hsdhrate and shares at the pool. but we will see in more detail later

Using your post times to define the length of time that your miner has been running, that's about 3 hours. Getting 63 accepted shares over a 3 hour period means your basically generating junk (unless you've fixed your difficulty to be ridiculously high).Most of your shares are either not validating or are encountering hardware errors.

If you're connected to a multipool, you should be seeing at least 120-180 accepted shares per hour. Over 3 hours you should see 360-540 accepted shares.

i was using hashcow and they switch quite a lot sometimes they only mine a coin for a few minutes. Also they only show your stats for the current round of coin that been mined.
To combat that as it doesnt show me or anyone else the total progress, ive set up a new worker JUST for my gridseed miner - should have done it to start with to reduce possible interference, but my other mines was on another pool with hascows as set as failover. Anyway gridseed now has its own worker in scryptguild which shows the total amount of shares accepted and rejected. ill leave this running till tomorrow approx 24 hrs and then we will see.

but anyway screen shots from yesterday when i set it up

and one from about an hour ago with current round stats for pool - again dont know as i didnt look how long the round had been mined for.

and actually if you look closely at the image you will see current round stats is a MOO coin - just a coin they hide the name of as its new trying to prevent pool jumping etc - and the current lenght is 0 minutes.
And you can also see that the hardware error are 16 which is about 1 an hour

and if anyone intrested in my fan setup i can upload images too. I also removed the thermal pad that was there and added some alpha cool mx4 paste to each chip top and bottom and then applied new quailty thermal mat - the paste helps the mat stay in place before its tighened.  Plus my gridseed is on a powered USB3 port but that shouldnt make any difference as it has its own 12 volt supply


HARDWARE MOD

Darkfriend77 - whats the Vin when shorting the contacts? i came across a diagram which had three jumpers in it, i assume it can be applied to the gridseed as its based on the same chip


here the download link for the files its coontains the scymatic for a 1 chip and an eight chip ive not yet had chance to compare either of them to the gridseed which is only 5 chips and reverse engineer the layout. think ill wait till my next one arrives - maybe.
https://codeload.github.com/gridseed/gc3355-doc/zip/master

[amix]

12,624 accepted shares in an hour on scrypt guild before bfgminer frooze - CPU overload i think.(4 instances of bfgminer plus cpu miner, photbucket auto backup - now cancelled, antivirus scanning and approx 20+ tabs on firfox oops overload! - it had above 400 hash rate last submission 8 mins ago so scrypt was showing current hash rate as zero.

current stats :

GSD 0:       | 446.4/443.3/222.3kh/s | A:108 R:2+0(none) HW:0/none

scryptguild pool confirm 2317kh/s 2000 accepted shares.
uptime 10 mins

[XScrypt]

12,624 accepted shares in an hour on scrypt guild before bfgminer frooze - CPU overload i think.(4 instances of bfgminer plus cpu miner, photbucket auto backup - now cancelled, antivirus scanning and approx 20+ tabs on firfox oops overload! - it had above 400 hash rate last submission 8 mins ago so scrypt was showing current hash rate as zero.

current stats :

GSD 0:       | 446.4/443.3/222.3kh/s | A:108 R:2+0(none) HW:0/none

scryptguild pool confirm 2317kh/s 2000 accepted shares.
uptime 10 mins

So far your results don't indicate you're getting the hashrate you think you are. In one screenshot it shows about 26 minutes of runtime with an accept of 259 and a reject of 19. In the next it shows about 17 hours of run time with an accept of 11935, a reject of 808 with 16 HW errors.

Here's a snapshot of mine running at 850 for approximately 3 hours:

 cgminer version 3.7.2 - Started: [2014-03-17 09:38:22]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 (5s):361.6K (avg):361.6Kh/s | A:54912  R:768  HW:0  WU:2.5/m
 ST: 2  SS: 0  NB: 332  LW: 1771  GF: 0  RF: 0
 Connected to mine.coinshift.com diff 128 with stratum as user ...
 Block: ea422ecc...  Diff:235  Started: [12:28:20]  Best share: 15.2K
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Pool management Settings Display options Quit
 GSD 0: 6D8B468C5650  850 MHz | 361.6K/361.7Kh/s | A:54912 R:768 HW:0 WU:2.5/m
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[2014-03-17 12:29:05] Submitting share 23aa84b0 to pool 0

[amix]

12,624 accepted shares in an hour on scrypt guild before bfgminer frooze - CPU overload i think.(4 instances of bfgminer plus cpu miner, photbucket auto backup - now cancelled, antivirus scanning and approx 20+ tabs on firfox oops overload! - it had above 400 hash rate last submission 8 mins ago so scrypt was showing current hash rate as zero.

current stats :

GSD 0:       | 446.4/443.3/222.3kh/s | A:108 R:2+0(none) HW:0/none

scryptguild pool confirm 2317kh/s 2000 accepted shares.
uptime 10 mins

So far your results don't indicate you're getting the hashrate you think you are. In one screenshot it shows about 26 minutes of runtime with an accept of 259 and a reject of 19. In the next it shows about 17 hours of run time with an accept of 11935, a reject of 808 with 16 HW errors.

Here's a snapshot of mine running at 850 for approximately 3 hours:

 cgminer version 3.7.2 - Started: [2014-03-17 09:38:22]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 (5s):361.6K (avg):361.6Kh/s | A:54912  R:768  HW:0  WU:2.5/m
 ST: 2  SS: 0  NB: 332  LW: 1771  GF: 0  RF: 0
 Connected to mine.coinshift.com diff 128 with stratum as user ...
 Block: ea422ecc...  Diff:235  Started: [12:28:20]  Best share: 15.2K
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Pool management Settings Display options Quit
 GSD 0: 6D8B468C5650  850 MHz | 361.6K/361.7Kh/s | A:54912 R:768 HW:0 WU:2.5/m
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[2014-03-17 12:29:05] Submitting share 23aa84b0 to pool 0

yep something not right somewhere. maybe still a bug in bfgminer??. its still in alpha develp mode. hopefully bfgminer 4 will be roled out soon and everythign will be smoothed out. could aslo have been the pool had some issues wiht hashcow previosly but its seems a bit more stable now. im now on scryptguild

bfgminer shows currently :

 GSD 0:       | 446.7/446.5/246.5kh/s | A:1452 R:64+0(none) HW:0/none

meanwhile scyptguild mining pool -dedicated gridseed worker shows :

 (estimated hash rate    accepted    rejected(stale/duplicate/low/unknown) )
   249.91 KH/s   35,472   1,744 / 0 / 0 / 0 

so my overall average in bfgminer aligns with my pool but my accepted and rejected DONT match. 35 472 to 1452 is a bit of a difference.

any idea suggestions - rather fond of bfgminer so i rather stick with it if possible

[suchmoon]

any idea suggestions - rather fond of bfgminer so i rather stick with it if possible

Clock it down to 850 and check the pool numbers again. I'm sure you'll see pool's hashrate more aligned with bfgminer. Then you can start increasing the overclocking until the pool hashrate doesn't go up anymore.

[rsd20014]

My Gridseed is hashing along with the shipping firmware, but I'm stuck on the firmware upgrade process.

I've tried to follow the instructions for upgrading the firmware from the shipping version (1.3) to the newer version (1.4) but can't get the flashing process to work under windows 7 x64 or Windows 8.1 x64.  

I've installed the usb driver and the bridge driver, which creates a COM port 5 under Device Manager.  As I understand the instructions, the usb cable is connected only (and not the power supply cable) for the flashing process.  When I connect the usb cable, the green LED flashes and the firmware updating program (GD MCU ISP Programmer.exe) recognizes the device.  When I depress and hold the white firmware upgrade button, the green LED goes out and firmware updating program no longer recognizes the device.

If I try to do the firmware upgrade with the green LED flashing, I get "serial port open failed" error.  The port settings are 115200 baud, data bits 8, parity even, boot switch manual, timeout 1.  I've tried varying these settings and setting a different COM port.  If anyone can point out what I'm missing in the upgrade process, I'd appreciate it.

[wolfey2014]

My Gridseed is hashing along with the shipping firmware, but I'm stuck on the firmware upgrade process.

I've tried to follow the instructions for upgrading the firmware from the shipping version (1.3) to the newer version (1.4) but can't get the flashing process to work under windows 7 x64 or Windows 8.1 x64.  

I've installed the usb driver and the bridge driver, which creates a COM port 5 under Device Manager.  As I understand the instructions, the usb cable is connected only (and not the power supply cable) for the flashing process.  When I connect the usb cable, the green LED flashes and the firmware updating program (GD MCU ISP Programmer.exe) recognizes the device.  When I depress and hold the white firmware upgrade button, the green LED goes out and firmware updating program no longer recognizes the device.

If I try to do the firmware upgrade with the green LED flashing, I get "serial port open failed" error.  The port settings are 115200 baud, data bits 8, parity even, boot switch manual, timeout 1.  I've tried varying these settings and setting a different COM port.  If anyone can point out what I'm missing in the upgrade process, I'd appreciate it.

Please quote/include the text you are referring to in your posts so the rest of us can follow along easily.
Thanks
Wolfey2014

[flounderella]

By the way, the modified cpuminer download link listed in OP fails the VirusTotal scan. That's a known issue with these scans mislabeling bitcoin miner as malware, right?

https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/6a065446aa764ca9d4748cc88418eaf586b6cdf80a4b45effe8c121403822dab/analysis/1395086073/

[digitorum]

total newbie question: can you use the grid seed 5 chip miners on a PC already mining with GPUs ?
if yes, is it hard to set up ?

yes
no

Personally I have sgminer running my GPUs, and cpuminer-gc3355 running my gridseeds

ok, thanks

[jgm_coin]

I'm selling 4 pin molex power connectors for gridseeds.  Multiple types available, see here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=511770.msg5650838#msg5650838

I now have PSU adapter cables that run three gridseeds.  Only two available now, first come first serve!

[Dryleaf]

Here is a pic of the pool speeds on 30 individual gridseeds all running at 850 for over 12 hours straight. As you can see there is a huge difference in average speeds.

http://imgur.com/vURuZRD