how to buy cheaper control boards for your antminer.

[mikeywith]

 
  It is very normal for a control board to stop functioning, and buying those could be a hustle giving the bad market conditions.

 a few days ago one of my  miners L3++ disappeared, tried to reset it in all different ways, nothing worked, the control board wasn't even flushing, tried a different PSU and it didn't work, so after some troubleshooting it turns out that the control board rested in peace.

so the cheapest used control board i found locally was 30$ , but strange enough i found an A3 control board for just 10$.

many people don't know that A3 and L3 have the same control board, so there is a very good chance that you can find good deals on control boards if you know what control boards are common in more than one model.

so here is the list from bitmain.


"S9/S9i/T9/R4/S9j"

"L3/L3+/L3++/D3/A3/X3"

"T9+/B3/E3"

"V9/Z9"

you can find these details buried in bitmain's website > parts products.


so really just make use of these information when you plan to buy a control board, in many cases you can get a used or broken V9 miner that will cost cheaper than Z9 control board and you get to keep the fans too  .

most old miners know these information already, but i am pretty sure many people don't, so there you have it.

Good Luck.

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[fanatic26_]

Merited for an extremely useful post.

Also, when you boot up the controller, make sure no cards are connected, then flash the proper firmware for what you need before hooking it all back together. Ive had some weird errors flashing them while connected to cards they dont recognize.

[mikeywith]

I replaced a good number of control boards, never unplugged the hashing boards, the key here is to ensure that you uncheck the "keep setting" before flushing the new firmware.

but ya in case you want to be extra safe, just disconnect the boards.

Thanks for the tip.

[philipma1957]

good info all the way around  thanks guys.

[papampi]

Great info, thanks a lot.

[mikeywith]

good info all the way around  thanks guys.

Sadly these info get buried underneath many b.s specially on this section of the forum, i have been proposing a dedicated sub form for alt mining technical and support, but so far theymos does not seem to be liking the idea.

This is one of the reason you see me much more active on btc mining because on that board you can actually exchange knowledge as oppose to having to dig for it here.   

[rldleblanc]

I have an L3+ that the control board has been giving me fits for a long time, most of the time it would not light up the blue LED (inside the control board), but occasionally it would light up and the machine would boot fine and run for months. We had a power blip last night and the machine would not come up, so I have an old D3 control board laying around and thought I'd try to flash it (before finding this thread).

The D3 control board won't take the L3+ firmware using the web interface, I have all the hash boards disconnected. I've unselected the 'keep settings' box, I've reset to default, I've downloaded the latest L3+ firmware from Bitmain, no luck. Are you having to flash the control board using the microSD slot? Is there something obvious I'm missing here? It seems that they would have a check to make sure you are not flashing the wrong firmware, but given that you can flash 3rd party firmware pretty easily, maybe not.

Thanks!

[rldleblanc]

Poking around the runme.sh update script, it is looking for /dev/mtd6, which this board doesn't have. Maybe this control board is bad too. But this seems to indicate why the upgrade is not happening. Maybe I can try to flash it from microSD slot.

[mikeywith]

Poking around the runme.sh update script, it is looking for /dev/mtd6, which this board doesn't have. Maybe this control board is bad too. But this seems to indicate why the upgrade is not happening. Maybe I can try to flash it from microSD slot.

there is nothing else that you can do , unchecking the "keep settings" + unplugging the hash boards probably all you need, i ca't think of anything else except that the board you trying to use is bad too.

but try to flush it back with a D3 firmware , see if it would boot up, also try a different firmware, maybe blissz firmware or just another version of L3.

[mikeywith]

bump!