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

[bcajes]

Wolfey, thank you for the tip. My single grid is now hashing between 400-425.

[bcajes]

Having the same issue of not reporting shares no matter what i change. It shows it connected and it gets the block updates but doesnt send anything back.

I have updated the ST drivers and am using the latest cpuminer software so not sure what the issues is.  

What power supply are you using?  12 volts at 1mA is not the same as 12 volts at 1A.  In scrypt only I've been able to run these with 12V 1.5A power supply, but prior to the updated cpuminer the same power supply would not work cause the BTC cores were switched on as well.  Note that the miner will connect to windows and show up in device manager without the power supply connected at all.  All will look good until you fire up cpuminer and you will not find any shares.  The same happens with underpowered power supplies.  The fans on these suckers use a lot of power as well and if mining scrypt with proper cpuminer I don't think they are necessary but I am too chicken to test.

Ok got it working. It wasnt that I had the wrong power supply it was the adapter i used had the + and - backwards. Once I changed that to be correct I am mining away at around 330-355 on Windows 8.

If you have multiple grids, I say cut 1 wire that supplies the fan. Leave 1 or 2 or 3 intact gridseed and use them to cool off the gridseeds that have the fans disabled

[wolfey2014]

Wolfey, thank you for the tip. My single grid is now hashing between 400-425.

You are very welcome but, please tell me which post or posts you are quoting and, so others can see what you're talking about too.

What exactly did you change? What are your current comm port settings?
I didn't know that a single GS5 could mine that fast.
What clock speed are you running it at?

Peace
Wolfey2014

[Spotswood]

I thought about building a 20 Gridseed-miner tower

like this ...  with 200mm fans in between

...

would look like electronical art ...

My idea of laying these miners end-to-end would work nicely in a 4U case, but here's what I came up with for open-air cooling with 2x 200mm fans:



Of course, the depth of the "case" could be increased to make more room for all of the other **** that is required with these miners.

[bcajes]

Wolfey, thank you for the tip. My single grid is now hashing between 400-425.

You are very welcome but, please tell me which post or posts you are quoting and, so others can see what you're talking about too.

What exactly did you change? What are your current comm port settings?
I didn't know that a single GS5 could mine that fast.
What clock speed are you running it at?

Peace
Wolfey2014

I think I spoke too soon. Right after my post an hour ago, my hashrate ranged between 225-375 with an occasional 400.

My Settings:
WinXp32, Com5,
Receivebuffer8, Sendbuffer14,
baudrate 38400,
850Mhz.

I will continue to monitor.

[wolfey2014]

Wolfey, thank you for the tip. My single grid is now hashing between 400-425.

You are very welcome but, please tell me which post or posts you are quoting and, so others can see what you're talking about too.

What exactly did you change? What are your current comm port settings?
I didn't know that a single GS5 could mine that fast.
What clock speed are you running it at?

Peace
Wolfey2014

I think I spoke too soon. Right after my post an hour ago, my hashrate ranged between 225-375 with an occasional 400.

My Settings:
WinXp32, Com5,
Receivebuffer8, Sendbuffer14,
baudrate 38400,
850Mhz.

I will continue to monitor.

Cool,thanks.
I'm still fine tuning and its kind of hard to find the best balance of clock rate, baud rate and buffers.
I'm trying 'hardware control on one of my 5 pods right now, speed has increased to over 420, up from 204 with 115200 baud (probably too fast for the USB hub or my laptop UARTs) ,,send =14 / recv = 8. ....
Clock is still set to 800. I had 3 or so of them crankin out at over 350 to 498 yesterday.
Best way to monitor hash rates is at the GUI printout, not the ones on the pool.

Maybe we can work together some to figure it out, since you are running only 1 GS5.
Let me know how it goes.
I wish the LTC cpuminer guys would have included hash rate, temp and fan speed/control/enable/disable.
Peace
Wolfey2014

[csmflynt3]

Wolfey, thank you for the tip. My single grid is now hashing between 400-425.

You are very welcome but, please tell me which post or posts you are quoting and, so others can see what you're talking about too.

What exactly did you change? What are your current comm port settings?
I didn't know that a single GS5 could mine that fast.
What clock speed are you running it at?

Peace
Wolfey2014

I think I spoke too soon. Right after my post an hour ago, my hashrate ranged between 225-375 with an occasional 400.

My Settings:
WinXp32, Com5,
Receivebuffer8, Sendbuffer14,
baudrate 38400,
850Mhz.

I will continue to monitor.

Cool,thanks.
I'm still fine tuning and its kind of hard to find the best balance of clock rate, baud rate and buffers.
I'm trying 'hardware control on one of my 5 pods right now, speed has increased to over 420, up from 204 with 115200 baud (probably too fast for the USB hub or my laptop UARTs) ,,send =14 / recv = 8. ....
Clock is still set to 800. I had 3 or so of them crankin out at over 350 to 498 yesterday.
Best way to monitor hash rates is at the GUI printout, not the ones on the pool.

Maybe we can work together some to figure it out, since you are running only 1 GS5.
Let me know how it goes.
I wish the LTC cpuminer guys would have included hash rate, temp and fan speed/control/enable/disable.
Peace
Wolfey2014

Changing the baud rate to 115200 and receive buffer to 8 fixed all of my issues so far on Win7. I am running at 850MHZ solid for over 16 hrs so far. I am thinking the receive buffer change makes the difference on these for whatever reason

[Dryleaf]

Is there anyway to measure the hash rate other then using the pool if you arent using the controller? Right now I am just using the cpuminer and it doesnt show any actual hash rate.

[jmordica]

Is there anyway to measure the hash rate other then using the pool if you arent using the controller? Right now I am just using the cpuminer and it doesnt show any actual hash rate.

No. This is why I'm having a fit trying to unlock this controller so I can get things like this working.. I'm screwed after upgrading to 2.0.3. The've encrypted the root password..

Also, I tried the failsafe method but this didn't work. First of all, there is no indication that the controller is going into failsafe mode when performing the necessary steps for openwrt. Second, even when I'm guessing it's in failsafe mode I try to log in and it rejects my telnet session.. Third, I tried to capture udp packets coming from the controller but nothing was of use. OpenWRT (on some units) is supposed to send a certain packet when it is ready for the reset button to be pressed but I saw nothing and the lights never flashed like the guide said.

At this moment, these wiibox controllers are more locked than the lighteningasic ones (as far as I can tell).

Anyone with additional knowledge please help?

I know I could use Raspberry's but my shipments come with the openwrt controller so I'd like to get ssh'd back into it..

[simon66]

Also, for some odd reason, my G5 device (Gridseed 5) keep blinking green and red but my pool says that I'm mining at 300Kh/s.

Thanks!

What are you expecting?  Each unit should only give you around 300kh/s...

Are there step by step instructions for installing and running on the pi (can minepeon be used)?

I know each unit will mine at around 300Kh/s but why is the red LED blinking while one of mine, the red LED is off.

[wolfey2014]

Wolfey, thank you for the tip. My single grid is now hashing between 400-425.

You are very welcome but, please tell me which post or posts you are quoting and, so others can see what you're talking about too.

What exactly did you change? What are your current comm port settings?
I didn't know that a single GS5 could mine that fast.
What clock speed are you running it at?

Peace
Wolfey2014

I think I spoke too soon. Right after my post an hour ago, my hashrate ranged between 225-375 with an occasional 400.

My Settings:
WinXp32, Com5,
Receivebuffer8, Sendbuffer14,
baudrate 38400,
850Mhz.

I will continue to monitor.

Cool,thanks.
I'm still fine tuning and its kind of hard to find the best balance of clock rate, baud rate and buffers.
I'm trying 'hardware control on one of my 5 pods right now, speed has increased to over 420, up from 204 with 115200 baud (probably too fast for the USB hub or my laptop UARTs) ,,send =14 / recv = 8. ....
Clock is still set to 800. I had 3 or so of them crankin out at over 350 to 498 yesterday.
Best way to monitor hash rates is at the GUI printout, not the ones on the pool.

Maybe we can work together some to figure it out, since you are running only 1 GS5.
Let me know how it goes.
I wish the LTC cpuminer guys would have included hash rate, temp and fan speed/control/enable/disable.
Peace
Wolfey2014

Changing the baud rate to 115200 and receive buffer to 8 fixed all of my issues so far on Win7. I am running at 850MHZ solid for over 16 hrs so far. I am thinking the receive buffer change makes the difference on these for whatever reason

Okay, so since I wasn't happy with the results I was getting from some other port settings,and after reading what bcajes wrote about getting good results from my earliest tweak, and since he's getting great resutls with it, I decided to revert to those settings for all 5 miners.

Current hash rates being reported at my pool are
Miner 1 = 377KH/s
Miner 2 = 447KH/s
Miner 3 = 341 "
Miner 4 = 336 "
Miner 5 = 447 "
Total    = 1946KH/s! Datswutahmtalkinbout!  

Settings for each VCP are - 115200 baud - 8 -N - 1 - None - FIFO buffers set at - Recv = 14 - Trans = 14.
Setting the Transmit buffer back to 14 is basically the trick.
Helps to prevent overflow packet losses and give maximum performance out of the GS3355-5 miners.

I'll update again in the morning after letting these things cook overnight.

Peace
Wolfey2014

[gamefixer]

very informative thread! 

[CartmanSPC]

Ok, testing my first miner.

Still waiting on delivery of some USB hubs and power supplies so I thought I would just hook one up to my computer and run it overnight.

You can see how it's doing at: http://xpool.net:8860/static/miners.html
It's currently the only miner on that node.

Setting:
minerd.exe --freq=600 --gc3355=COM4 --url=stratum+tcp://xpool.net:8860 --userpass=7Rcgymoe8TUoWkyMnVsPn9eHMaAtx677s3:x

I will try different freq's tomorrow. It's currently at ~235-260+ KH/s

Here are my power usage notes.
12v 30a 360w led switching power supply all by itself:    0.16 - 0.17 amps        8.3 - 8.8 watts
One Gridseed just plugged into the PS & USB port:                0.25 amps      13.7 - 13.9 watts
Scrypt mining:                                            0.28 - 0.29 amps      15.5 - 16.0 watts


Early results seem to indicate they work well with P2Pool.

Video (use HQ): http://youtu.be/nu8_IqxVCiQ

[darkfriend77]

That is just ... what I need ... if that would be stackable too ... perfect for scrypt mining ...

maybee the part with out miners could be hold smaller ... it only needs 2 power supply or one atx ... and 2 usb hubs ....

great stuff spotswood

[SummersideGuy]

Has anyone been able to get these to dual mine under windows

[Andareed]

Is there anyway to measure the hash rate other then using the pool if you arent using the controller? Right now I am just using the cpuminer and it doesnt show any actual hash rate.

No, the hash rate is determined entirely by the frequency, absent hardware errors. At 850 MHz you are looking at around 360 kh/s.

[Andareed]

Also, for some odd reason, my G5 device (Gridseed 5) keep blinking green and red but my pool says that I'm mining at 300Kh/s.

Thanks!

What are you expecting?  Each unit should only give you around 300kh/s...

Are there step by step instructions for installing and running on the pi (can minepeon be used)?

I know each unit will mine at around 300Kh/s but why is the red LED blinking while one of mine, the red LED is off.

The green LED is programmed to alternate between on and off once per second; the red LED will alternate between on and off every time a nonce is reported, i.e. every time you find a correct hash.

[Spotswood]

That is just ... what I need ... if that would be stackable too ... perfect for scrypt mining ...

maybee the part with out miners could be hold smaller ... it only needs 2 power supply or one atx ... and 2 usb hubs ....

great stuff spotswood

Its not that big:

[darkfriend77]

Update:

...
Mining Software:
- cpuminer-GC3355-win32-fixed for LTC only (low watt fixed)
- cpuminer-GC3355-win32-fixed-OC for LTC only (low watt fixed and OC support up to 1200mhz) (read)


...

[miaviator]

Is there anyway to measure the hash rate other then using the pool if you arent using the controller? Right now I am just using the cpuminer and it doesnt show any actual hash rate.

No, the hash rate is determined entirely by the frequency, absent hardware errors. At 850 MHz you are looking at around 360 kh/s.

This is not true

Thanks miaviator for this complete and accurate tutorial. I'd managed to get the ASICs hashing on Windows, but only got them running on Linux thanks to you.

You state that "There is currently no way to check hashrate aside from using the controller or checking at the pool".

Actually, there is one : cpuminer has a -S option, which allows writing its output to syslog. You then need to write a syslog filter to isolate output from the different cpuminers and output to a separate logfile, and some shell/perl/ruby script to parse the logfile and produce relevant statistics. You won't get directly the hash rate, but using the accepted lines, you can make an accurate guess.

Fully agree with you that this souldn't be an issue if Jack was providing proper support to the product he sells.

Eric

Also different units will run at different speeds based on coin difficulty and clock rate and chip quality.  Mine likes to hit 260Khs at 850 clock and 330 at 800.