GekkoScience NewPac / Terminus R606 (BM1387) Official Support Thread

[kingofhammers]

Could be an issue with the temp sensor. It's weird that I've tested seventy of these things and not seen any problem and you've got two of them doing the same thing. Usually when multiple anomalies coincide I start to question the user before I do the hardware.

I'm guessing you power-cycled the miners and the issue persisted, otherwise it'd be barely worth mentioning...

Yes, I power-cycled the miners. I'm not an expert in mining hardware by any stretch but my line of work is electronics, specifically avionics systems. If there is known voltage/amperage/resistance at specific points that I can check for that will perhaps help in identifying the issue just let me know.

I know my way around test equipment, just not code or command line. Nine of ten times I suspect PEBKAC as well, just because I know me. I'm still hitting ~2.8T with all four I just want to make sure that I'm not causing damage to the units.

I ordered the temperature sensor that @phillipma1957 suggested so I'll have some definitive data on temps tomorrow evening.

[1715016865]

1715016865

[1715016865]

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[sidehack]

Only real problems, besides it being annoying to have lights blinking at you unnecessarily, is that if it does overheat you won't know, and that the DPOT for setting the voltage is on the same I2C bus as the temp sensor so if it's an issue with the bus the voltage might get set erroneously or not set at all when a button is pressed. The firmware sets the starting position in non-volatile memory on the pot so it'll always start up at the last setpoint.

[kingofhammers]

What would be the best way to test for correct voltage settings, a test point to check or a particular pin?

If the fault is on the I²C bus where should I test and what logic (high/low) should I be looking for?

I'm going to do another power down, would you recommend a specific voltage setting before doing so?

Again, these units are hashing away as expected, just have a few more blinky lights.

[House Xylander]

How would I go about saving a log of the cgminer instance so I can see why it keep crashing at varies stages?

[sidehack]

As long as they're still working correctly (or at least satisfactorily), figuring out what's going on might be purely academic. If you want to test the voltage setting, measuring between ground and any of the test pads adjacent to the per-node capacitors on top (they're yellow) while pressing the up/down buttons will tell you if voltage is getting set right.

There are no direct testpads for the I2C bus, but there are a couple high-tie resistors could be probed. I've already planned a PCB revision with increased test points, including an optional pin header specifically for sniffing the bus. Hasn't really been necessary yet, because in literally every test of every prototype and production miner so far, it's all worked.

[House Xylander]

Added the --gekko-noboost setting for btc.viabtc.com and it seems to be working. no crashes so far after 20 minutes.

I set the target freq of the R606 as 600. It has run over an hour and changed the target to 368 and then 15 minutes later changed again down to 362 which result in about 460gh. I have the R606 set to 450mv (setting 6) should I move it up to 7 or down to another setting to reach stock 750gh.

[rockmoney]

What would be the best way to test for correct voltage settings, a test point to check or a particular pin?

If the fault is on the I²C bus where should I test and what logic (high/low) should I be looking for?

I'm going to do another power down, would you recommend a specific voltage setting before doing so?

Again, these units are hashing away as expected, just have a few more blinky lights.

Have you tried running only 2 or 3 units at once to isolate a potential power insufficiency (or possible limitation of pi), and/or data/throughput jam?

Sounds like a lack of power or communication jam, especially when using AsicBoost. I would try running the two units with the flashing lights by themselves, and see if that helps.

Not very familiar with raspberry pi, but ~400 Watts+ seems like a big ask?

Added the --gekko-noboost setting for btc.viabtc.com and it seems to be working. no crashes so far after 20 minutes.

I set the target freq of the R606 as 600. It has run over an hour and changed the target to 368 and then 15 minutes later changed again down to 362 which result in about 460gh. I have the R606 set to 450mv (setting 6) should I move it up to 7 or down to another setting to reach stock 750gh.

Move it up to 7!  


@kano - I currently have four R606 miners on your pool, all with R606 in their worker names. My newest one is averaging 1.10Th/s on the pool if you want to grab some stats. I'm back in PA now btw, and two additional R606 miners will be online soon!

[sidehack]

The blinkly lights has nothing to do with power or communication. It's an issue with the temp sensor, which is connected to the onboard microcontroller, which is not affected by voltage or USB anything.
Just to be double-clear, the white light is flashing while hashing on all of them, but on two of them the red volt-setting LEDs are blinking?

Without ASICBoost, the theoretical peak speed is about 575MHz (~800GH) on a wide-open USB bus. If the bus is shared out with something else and/or the processor is slow and timings aren't perfect, it'll be less than that. See the guy above whose pod, without AB, only saw about 500MHz. This is a USB limitation completely independent of core voltage setting. You may need to get a system working with AB, or plug into a more powerful controller, to get stock speed.

[vh]

New build (ef74c27)

Instructions for linux:
    rename old (save), clone again, build.

Windows binary: cgminer-4.11.1-windows-gekko-ef74c27.7z
    
Fixed statline overflow.
    + display shows garbage string in windows when driver appended info exceeds 64 bytes.
    + possible trigger for core dump.
    + possible cause of "shutdown signal received" via feedback through ncurses.

Suspended periodic frequency checks.
    + use case does not apply anymore.  free up some traffic on the bus.

Step down BM1384 frequency on shutdown.
    + part of december code lost in r606.

[mstrozier]

Morning all.  And just confirming sidehack mining on a pool without ASICBoost enabled.  I pointed the R606 back at Magnificent Pool which does not support AB. After running for 14 hours now it settled on (on volt setting 3) at 481Mhz and hashing at 625Gh.s for an average.

Screen shot: https://ibb.co/92Nv1x1

Maybe if I bumped the voltage settings a bit more I could level out at 500 - 550Mhz however I'm pretty happy where it's at.

[House Xylander]

The blinkly lights has nothing to do with power or communication. It's an issue with the temp sensor, which is connected to the onboard microcontroller, which is not affected by voltage or USB anything.
Just to be double-clear, the white light is flashing while hashing on all of them, but on two of them the red volt-setting LEDs are blinking?

Without ASICBoost, the theoretical peak speed is about 575MHz (~800GH) on a wide-open USB bus. If the bus is shared out with something else and/or the processor is slow and timings aren't perfect, it'll be less than that. See the guy above whose pod, without AB, only saw about 500MHz. This is a USB limitation completely independent of core voltage setting. You may need to get a system working with AB, or plug into a more powerful controller, to get stock speed.

Thank you, will be moving to Kano pool, changing power supplies and will change the controller to a pi perhaps.

[kingofhammers]

Just to be double-clear, the white light is flashing while hashing on all of them, but on two of them the red volt-setting LEDs are blinking?

This is correct.

My temperature sensor comes came in today, so I'll check for temps and update later. All four topside heat sinks are showing ~26^oC. I'll also update the cgminer to the most recent version and see if that changes anything.

Here's my current cgminer screen:

https://imgur.com/a/pZpetQg

Everything seems fine.

[rockmoney]

New build (ef74c27)...

Thank you vh! I just switched all of my R606 miners to this latest version. First, those stray characters have disappeared now, which is good. Will let you know if I experience any problems, but all has been good so far! Thanks again!

[philipma1957]

This is correct.

My temperature sensor comes came in today, so I'll check for temps and update later. All four topside heat sinks are showing ~26^oC. I'll also update the cgminer to the most recent version and see if that changes anything.

Here's my current cgminer screen:

https://imgur.com/a/pZpetQg

Everything seems fine.

So looks like your temps are good. Must be the heat sensors.

Assuming you tested each one by itself. And the blinkers blink when stand alone one unit at a time.

[kingofhammers]

I've updated cgminer to the most current version, thank you for that @vh

So looks like your temps are good. Must be the heat sensors.

The temps do seem fine.

Assuming you tested each one by itself. And the blinkers blink when stand alone one unit at a time.

I tested the temperatures on them by pointing the laser at the heat sink through the access area where all the connections are made. I did this on each individual unit.

The leds blink before I even connect the units to the pi that I'm using as a controller. I've cycled power on the units several times. I could disconnect them and reconnect them one at a time but I don't see the point in doing that, given their behavior. Without a great depth of knowledge on the design and which components are all tied to the I²C bus, I am very hesitant to go in and touch anything for anything but testing purposes, which at this point doesn't seem necessary as the voltage adjustments appear to be functioning correctly. I am able to destabilize the units and crash them by lowering voltages.

I'll keep an eye on the temps but I don't think there is anything that is actually wrong. If it becomes an issue I may go in and probe around the areas that were named earlier.

@sidehack said it before and I agree, at this point its purely academic, given that the units are performing as expected.

[philipma1957]

Yep and for 15 bucks meter cost you have extra confirmation that the gear is good.

Since the gear is 1200 cost the meter is worth it.

You know if btc keeps going up I may not solo mine this gear.

I could break even if btc goes higher.

[mstrozier]

Morning all.  And just confirming sidehack mining on a pool without ASICBoost enabled.  I pointed the R606 back at Magnificent Pool which does not support AB. After running for 14 hours now it settled on (on volt setting 3) at 481Mhz and hashing at 625Gh.s for an average.

Screen shot: https://ibb.co/92Nv1x1

Maybe if I bumped the voltage settings a bit more I could level out at 500 - 550Mhz however I'm pretty happy where it's at.

After more testing I wanted to post up and update to this.  Apparently the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ is my weak link in this chain.  It'll run the R606 however getting the 'stock' or higher speeds just wouldn't happen.  The Raspberry Pi 3 B+ has a quad-core ARM A53 CPU producing 1.4Ghz and carries 1GB of LPDDR2 RAM.  Granted this is a great tool for such a small SBC (small board computer), however for my application it just isn't working.

When I run the r606 on the Pi for non-AB supported pools, no matter what volt setting I use, it'll never go over 481Mhz.

I then found a Litecoin Cash pool that supported AB.  I finally broke past the 481 mark but not by much.  After 12 hours of running, it settled at 518Mhz.  Tested then on multiple volt settings with the freq set to 700 then in 4 hour increments.  Same results would slowly drop down and then remain steady at 518Mhz with AB enabled.

At this point I wondered if it was limited to these LCC pools I was using.  So I set my miner to point to solo ckpool and solo mine Bitcoin.  6 hours on this run, and leveled off at 512Mhz on this one.

On each test, there were many ASIC Plateau errors and Missing Nonces from chip 0, 7, 9 and 1 throughout all of my testing on the Raspberry Pi.

Today I changed my hardware around.  I moved my Gekko newpac's and Futurebit Moonlanders over to the Raspberry Pi.   And I moved the R606 over to my Ubuntu Linux Box.   This is now the only device attached to this box and it's specs is a AMD  FX-6300 with 16GB DDR3 RAM with 1TB of storage.  Originally was a FX-8350 however I really didn't need the power draw from the 8 core processor so swapped it out with the 6300.

And so far on this machine, I have had 0 Asic Platues and 0 Nonce errors.   I am still waiting for it to level off on the non-AB supported pool.  So later this week I will come back to this post and update it my tests on this Linux box on various pools.

All in all, very happy with my purchase....and while shopping on Amazon today for some electronic parts (needed some resistors / caps) the r606 showed up in my suggested items....so bought another one

[rockmoney]

@kingofhammers - Especially because of your background and knowledge, I would definitely wait to hear from sidehack, and get his input. He should be on in the morning, and be able to provide the info you're asking for.

Also, thanks for your willingness to work together with this great community in order to determine if there's actually a problem or not. Unfortunately, you guys are out of my league on this one, but please let me know if there's anything I can do to help!  

[sidehack]

Kingofhammers, I may have you send me one or both of those miners for some testing and repair or replacement. Temperature detection and blinking the LEDs was the last thing put into the firmware so error handling is less robust. I can probably fix the temp sensors to start reporting properly, and maybe use one as a testbench for removing the blink if the temp sensor reports an error condition; right now it can't tell the 0xFF of a disconnected/unresponsive sensor from a reported temperature of 255°C.

But if you don't mind the blinking, and they're still mining as expected, I'll leave that up to you.

[philipma1957]

Kingofhammers, I may have you send me one or both of those miners for some testing and repair or replacement. Temperature detection and blinking the LEDs was the last thing put into the firmware so error handling is less robust. I can probably fix the temp sensors to start reporting properly, and maybe use one as a testbench for removing the blink if the temp sensor reports an error condition; right now it can't tell the 0xFF of a disconnected/unresponsive sensor from a reported temperature of 255°C.

But if you don't mind the blinking, and they're still mining as expected, I'll leave that up to you.

my 1 unit on a robust pc (amd ryzen 2700)  works very well volt setting is 6  freq is 750  which settled at 737.5 and hash is pushing 1th

uses a spare pci cable from the psu that powers the  pc.  the psu is a hi end evga plat IIRC