GekkoScience NewPac / Terminus R606 (BM1387) Official Support Thread

[CHRS-One]

Sorry everyone I have no idea if this is the right place to post this and I did some searching and am having a ton of trouble finding out what I need. So I had to move four R909 pod miners to a little handheld PC that is running Windows 11. I can get all the R909s to start with the .bat file but I find they won't run at full pace or anything near that. It also keeps telling me one of the units is "plateau" and it is seemingly resets the and tries again. The 4 units together have only reached 2 THs total and then they die and start back up from 0. I am. Not using barrel plus and have moved them all to a PSU. The voltage knob is turned almost all the way up and the frequency is set to 400 or even under that at times to see if I can get it stable. I have NO idea what I am doing wrong as I easily connect to viabtc and it starts to hash only for me to continue to run into the "plateau" issue. Could this be something going on with one R909 that isn't working well or do I have something not correct in the settings. Any help greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Every time I've run into "Plateau" issues its been because of dodgy USB set-up. Win 7, Win 10 etc have been notoriously bad for that. I can't comment on Win11 since I've never used it and will likely never use it, but I'd expect it to follow the same.

If I were you I'd ditch windows as I did and set-up a Linux machine or even a Raspberry PI to run it on.

However, if that's not something you can or want to do try making sure that each device is connected to a root hub on your PC, not all PC USB ports are the same some are a hub or two downstream from a root hub which can introduce problems with timing and latency.

If you're using an external USB hub, again make sure its plugged into a root hub on your PC. Or try a different external USB hub.

Bottom line, Windows can be a pain in the butt getting reliable USB comms.

I run all of my rigs on Rasberry PI's these days along with Kano's CGMiner and a few command line tweeks to get the USB stable. I currently have 16 GSF's running on one Raspberry PI 3B and its doing that without so much as breaking a sweat.

Okay so I think I may have figured out what part of the issue is. I don't think the computers CPU is able to run more than one at a time. I tried running one by itself and it is running fine. The Windows computer I am using is like a little pocket PC, where it almost looks like a pack of lemon heads with a screen. It has 4 usb ports in which I used all four of them having a cord going to the R909s. Is there a way you know that allows you to "trick" them into using all one hub. I have tried a hub that was usb 2.0 and it won't recognize it and none of the R909s show up. If I use a USB 3.0 hub I can get them all to show but then I am running into the same occurrence where they will plateau and they keep resetting within 5 to 10 seconds. Should I keep trying hubs or am I running into a wall because the CPU will never be able to support what it's trying to accomplish. I have tried to power the hub also to make sure that wasn't the issue and the plateaus continue to happen. I was using a raspberry PI that had a gekko stick miner on it and it was working well enough but the power supply to it broke or the rasp Pi itself did. I will try different ports with the hub and see if I can convince it to start working.

[Nexus9090]

-SNIP-

Okay so I think I may have figured out what part of the issue is. I don't think the computers CPU is able to run more than one at a time. I tried running one by itself and it is running fine. The Windows computer I am using is like a little pocket PC, where it almost looks like a pack of lemon heads with a screen. It has 4 usb ports in which I used all four of them having a cord going to the R909s. Is there a way you know that allows you to "trick" them into using all one hub. I have tried a hub that was usb 2.0 and it won't recognize it and none of the R909s show up. If I use a USB 3.0 hub I can get them all to show but then I am running into the same occurrence where they will plateau and they keep resetting within 5 to 10 seconds. Should I keep trying hubs or am I running into a wall because the CPU will never be able to support what it's trying to accomplish. I have tried to power the hub also to make sure that wasn't the issue and the plateaus continue to happen. I was using a raspberry PI that had a gekko stick miner on it and it was working well enough but the power supply to it broke or the rasp Pi itself did. I will try different ports with the hub and see if I can convince it to start working.

Sounds like you're running into some hardware limitations on the mini-PC you're using, chances are all of the USB ports are 2 or 3 devices downstream of the root hub. A lot of mini-PC designs use USB hubs to add peripherals, Wi-Fi, Network, SSD etc etc, so what you end up with is a bottlenecked system that's incapable of running low latency devices.

Here's what I would do in your position

Buy yourself a Raspberry PI 3B, 3B+ or 4, they're not expensive $30-40 ish (https://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-3-model-b-plus), probably less if you can find one on Ebay. Make sure you get a compatible power brick for it as well.

Don't go for the PI 5 while it has more horse power the OS is not stable yet.

Buy a good quality microSD card and Install the Raspberry 32bit PI OS Lite which is a Debian Linux port without the graphical front end. This is really easy using the Raspberry PI installer, plenty of online support and instruction for that. (dont use the 64bit OS as that requires extra work to get the USB stable)

Learn how to connect to it over SSH terminal, its not difficult.

It sounds more scary than it is. If you're running windows use something like Putty to connect over SSH  https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

Get a copy of Kano's CGMiner installed https://github.com/kanoi/cgminer/

Follow the build instructions to the letter dont skip anything, make sure to include the gekko drivers when you build.

That should give you a working binary for CGMiner.

Plug your devices into the USB ports on the RaspberryPI, set-up the command line to point to your pool and away you go.

The hardest part will be building CGMiner and getting the build environment set-up correctly. However, if you follow the instructions carefully it should work fine.

Good luck!