ROCKMINER ASIC miner official thread

[Billbags]

On that pi issue, try another sd card with a fresh image, new pi power supply 5v-1.5a, New Ethernet cable, New usb cable and a different Ethernet port on the router and then while pi is on try pressing on the second biggest chip on the pi and see if it reboots. Sometimes an intermittently failing LAN9512 chip can cause loss of connection and a reboot. Its the 25MHz crystal that stops oscillating. Could be that the crystal has been hit too hard, (the PI falling off a table perhaps) and the quartz sliver cannot vibrate freely, or it has a weak electric connection, or one of its capacitors (C86 & C74) is bad (too large capacitance, it should be no more than 47pF)

[sushi]

It seems Rocket Box was evaluated by one of their technical writers from CoinDesk.com

http://www.coindesk.com/coindesk-mining-roundup-bitfurys-latest-venture-global-scrypt-network/




Interesting review result  

[klintay]

It seems Rocket Box was evaluated by one of their technical writers from CoinDesk.com

http://www.coindesk.com/coindesk-mining-roundup-bitfurys-latest-venture-global-scrypt-network/




Interesting review result  

the R3 is even better!! I love the design and the weight (only 4.5 kg). Its a great miner 

[kcal63]

Well its a bit of a Rube Goldberg device but I managed to swap out the fan on my RK (BTW if you look up the operating specs of the model number and find it listed as a 150 CFM that is WRONG, it appears to actually be the 210 CFM model) I replaced it with a fan of similar size that moves 154 CFM. That was not nearly enough to keep this beast cool (primary prob was blade on bottom over heating, not enough clearance there to put a fan directly on the heat-sink as I did with the other three blades) so I added 80 mm 74 cfm fans to each of the three blades that are accessible then to cool the bottom blade I took the orig fan added a speed controller, lowed the speed by about 30% - 40%  and placed it just behind the unit to cool the bottom blade. Using only slightly more wattage than the orig fan used at full speed I now have a rig that has a decibel reading of 34 rather than the 62 of the orig setup and the blades stay at a constant 38C for the top three blades and 41 C for the bottom blade. I tested the setup by moving it out of the controlled room (23.5 C)  to a room with ambient temp of 29 degrees C for a few hours and blades stayed below 46 C (43,44,46 and 44). With the latest 1.3.0 pi image I am getting a direct hash reading of 521 GHs with an 8.8% reject rate and at the poolside (I have tried a few already) I am getting 473 GHs. This is with the freq set to 350 (I tried 320 and box runs cooler and reject rate drops to 5.9% but hash rate falls to 470 direct and 423 poolside).
Looking at new frame designs to reconfig this thing. At first I thought to go with a setup similar to the R3 but now am leaning towards simply taking all four blades apart and putting them on a wire plate with fans top and bottom. It looks like I could reduce noise and thermal conditions quite a bit by doing so. Will post pics in a week or so after the project.

[cjcole8]

Has anyone been successful in making the Rockweb Pi image wireless? The WiFi device connects and gets an IP address and everything, but for some reason if there isn't a physical cable plugged in, the thing doesn't seem to want to hash for me.

[sushi]

I haven't tried that yet...  For Wi-Fi on S1 and S2, Netgear Wi-Fi bridge worked really well, if you have to hash via Wi-Fi

Has anyone been successful in making the Rockweb Pi image wireless? The WiFi device connects and gets an IP address and everything, but for some reason if there isn't a physical cable plugged in, the thing doesn't seem to want to hash for me.

[TrekRider]

It seems Rocket Box was evaluated by one of their technical writers from CoinDesk.com

http://www.coindesk.com/coindesk-mining-roundup-bitfurys-latest-venture-global-scrypt-network/

http://cdn.imghack.se/images/037e975c8494768dff992411ac6e07f8.png


Interesting review result  

By "interesting" you mean "missing everything that may discourage people from buying"?  Like all of the damn hardware errors and rejects...

[TrekRider]

Anyone know how we could get the RK/R3's running on Minera?  UI kicks rockminer's ass.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=596620.0

[mstrongbow]

Anyone know how we could get the RK/R3's running on Minera?  UI kicks rockminer's ass.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=596620.0

MultiMiner is detecting my R-Pi controlled RK-Box (fw 1.2.1) currently in the same fashion it would detect an Antminer S1
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=248173.0

Well its a bit of a Rube Goldberg device but I managed to swap out the fan on my RK (BTW if you look up the operating specs of the model number and find it listed as a 150 CFM that is WRONG, it appears to actually be the 210 CFM model) I replaced it with a fan of similar size that moves 154 CFM. That was not nearly enough to keep this beast cool (primary prob was blade on bottom over heating, not enough clearance there to put a fan directly on the heat-sink as I did with the other three blades) so I added 80 mm 74 cfm fans to each of the three blades that are accessible then to cool the bottom blade I took the orig fan added a speed controller, lowed the speed by about 30% - 40%  and placed it just behind the unit to cool the bottom blade. Using only slightly more wattage than the orig fan used at full speed I now have a rig that has a decibel reading of 34 rather than the 62 of the orig setup and the blades stay at a constant 38C for the top three blades and 41 C for the bottom blade. I tested the setup by moving it out of the controlled room (23.5 C)  to a room with ambient temp of 29 degrees C for a few hours and blades stayed below 46 C (43,44,46 and 44). With the latest 1.3.0 pi image I am getting a direct hash reading of 521 GHs with an 8.8% reject rate and at the poolside (I have tried a few already) I am getting 473 GHs. This is with the freq set to 350 (I tried 320 and box runs cooler and reject rate drops to 5.9% but hash rate falls to 470 direct and 423 poolside).
Looking at new frame designs to reconfig this thing. At first I thought to go with a setup similar to the R3 but now am leaning towards simply taking all four blades apart and putting them on a wire plate with fans top and bottom. It looks like I could reduce noise and thermal conditions quite a bit by doing so. Will post pics in a week or so after the project.

I should have my stacking clips ready soon! You can add a set to the bottom miner and raise it up off the surface for better cooling.
Currently looking at options for strengthening the clip design for possibly stacking more than 2 units stacked as these miners are heavy!

[Billbags]

Those clips should really help with airflow to that bottom blade.

[ManeBjorn]

I am reviewing a RK3 now, let me know when you are ready with those.  I will get a set and put it in my article as well like with the R-Boxes  The Breakout board case and stack holders are great.

Anyone know how we could get the RK/R3's running on Minera?  UI kicks rockminer's ass.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=596620.0

MultiMiner is detecting my R-Pi controlled RK-Box (fw 1.2.1) currently in the same fashion it would detect an Antminer S1
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=248173.0

Well its a bit of a Rube Goldberg device but I managed to swap out the fan on my RK (BTW if you look up the operating specs of the model number and find it listed as a 150 CFM that is WRONG, it appears to actually be the 210 CFM model) I replaced it with a fan of similar size that moves 154 CFM. That was not nearly enough to keep this beast cool (primary prob was blade on bottom over heating, not enough clearance there to put a fan directly on the heat-sink as I did with the other three blades) so I added 80 mm 74 cfm fans to each of the three blades that are accessible then to cool the bottom blade I took the orig fan added a speed controller, lowed the speed by about 30% - 40%  and placed it just behind the unit to cool the bottom blade. Using only slightly more wattage than the orig fan used at full speed I now have a rig that has a decibel reading of 34 rather than the 62 of the orig setup and the blades stay at a constant 38C for the top three blades and 41 C for the bottom blade. I tested the setup by moving it out of the controlled room (23.5 C)  to a room with ambient temp of 29 degrees C for a few hours and blades stayed below 46 C (43,44,46 and 44). With the latest 1.3.0 pi image I am getting a direct hash reading of 521 GHs with an 8.8% reject rate and at the poolside (I have tried a few already) I am getting 473 GHs. This is with the freq set to 350 (I tried 320 and box runs cooler and reject rate drops to 5.9% but hash rate falls to 470 direct and 423 poolside).
Looking at new frame designs to reconfig this thing. At first I thought to go with a setup similar to the R3 but now am leaning towards simply taking all four blades apart and putting them on a wire plate with fans top and bottom. It looks like I could reduce noise and thermal conditions quite a bit by doing so. Will post pics in a week or so after the project.

I should have my stacking clips ready soon! You can add a set to the bottom miner and raise it up off the surface for better cooling.
Currently looking at options for strengthening the clip design for possibly stacking more than 2 units stacked as these miners are heavy!

[noheroe]

For the future, if I want to keep my miners in good shape, what kind of thermal paste should I buy? any brand in particular?

[mstrongbow]

For the future, if I want to keep my miners in good shape, what kind of thermal paste should I buy? any brand in particular?

Some will say ArticSilver of nothing!
Others will say ANY thermal paste will work.

I will say...any REPUTABLE brand thermal compound/paste should work great!
I use Evercool Sidewinder STC-01 for rebuilding my GPU's
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835119060&cm_re=sidewinder-_-35-119-060-_-Product

[mstrongbow]

I am reviewing a RK3 now, let me know when you are ready with those.  I will get a set and put it in my article as well like with the R-Boxes  The Breakout board case and stack holders are great.

Anyone know how we could get the RK/R3's running on Minera?  UI kicks rockminer's ass.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=596620.0

MultiMiner is detecting my R-Pi controlled RK-Box (fw 1.2.1) currently in the same fashion it would detect an Antminer S1
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=248173.0

Well its a bit of a Rube Goldberg device but I managed to swap out the fan on my RK (BTW if you look up the operating specs of the model number and find it listed as a 150 CFM that is WRONG, it appears to actually be the 210 CFM model) I replaced it with a fan of similar size that moves 154 CFM. That was not nearly enough to keep this beast cool (primary prob was blade on bottom over heating, not enough clearance there to put a fan directly on the heat-sink as I did with the other three blades) so I added 80 mm 74 cfm fans to each of the three blades that are accessible then to cool the bottom blade I took the orig fan added a speed controller, lowed the speed by about 30% - 40%  and placed it just behind the unit to cool the bottom blade. Using only slightly more wattage than the orig fan used at full speed I now have a rig that has a decibel reading of 34 rather than the 62 of the orig setup and the blades stay at a constant 38C for the top three blades and 41 C for the bottom blade. I tested the setup by moving it out of the controlled room (23.5 C)  to a room with ambient temp of 29 degrees C for a few hours and blades stayed below 46 C (43,44,46 and 44). With the latest 1.3.0 pi image I am getting a direct hash reading of 521 GHs with an 8.8% reject rate and at the poolside (I have tried a few already) I am getting 473 GHs. This is with the freq set to 350 (I tried 320 and box runs cooler and reject rate drops to 5.9% but hash rate falls to 470 direct and 423 poolside).
Looking at new frame designs to reconfig this thing. At first I thought to go with a setup similar to the R3 but now am leaning towards simply taking all four blades apart and putting them on a wire plate with fans top and bottom. It looks like I could reduce noise and thermal conditions quite a bit by doing so. Will post pics in a week or so after the project.

I should have my stacking clips ready soon! You can add a set to the bottom miner and raise it up off the surface for better cooling.
Currently looking at options for strengthening the clip design for possibly stacking more than 2 units stacked as these miners are heavy!

You got it broski! Shouldn't be much longer as I am wrapping up a couple new designs, one of which I am super excited to be test printing today 

[kcal63]

First, mstrongbow please let us know when those clips are available. I am looking at adding a few more RK's or R3's once I get the kinks worked out of the test system and they sound like a quick solution to my clearance problem.
For thermal paste I went with my trusty Zalman STG1 thermal grease since it lets me reconfig without using a pry bar to separate pieces.
If you know that you will not need to reconfig again you could go with any good thermal compound such as Diamond-7 or  Arctic Silver.
(I have been building PC's for 25 years now, although I got my first mining hardware in May).

[bobsag3]

First, mstrongbow please let us know when those clips are available. I am looking at adding a few more RK's or R3's once I get the kinks worked out of the test system and they sound like a quick solution to my clearance problem.
For thermal paste I went with my trusty Zalman STG1 thermal grease since it lets me reconfig without using a pry bar to separate pieces.
If you know that you will not need to reconfig again you could go with any good thermal compound such as Diamond-7 or  Arctic Silver.
(I have been building PC's for 25 years now, although I got my first mining hardware in May).

We have had good luck with D7 and AS5 for our miners.

On our units, it seems that the newest firmware and replacing several of the USB cables on some of our bad ones helped a bit, along with some strong fans behind them. We are also working on testing a small piece of bent aluminum over the top of the R3s to better force airflow.

[suchmoon]

I'd like to thank everyone for the helpful posts in this thread, and minersource in particular for delivery/support/software. RockMinerWeb 1.3 works like a charm with my RK-BOXes, 480-500 GH/s poolside. I was able to set them up just in time for whatever the current SHA256 mining craze is, will certainly help towards ROI

[Billbags]

I had noticed the elapsed time in rockweb was restarting at various times during the day, which means the pi/rockweb/cgminer were problably rebooting. It didn't look too noticeable at pool at the time. I started trouble shooting the pi and have since started using a 2.0 powered usb hub with its own power supply and it has stopped any reboots for the last 24 hours. My hash rate is now really stable at the pool. There is no more varience on the rk-boxes hash rate than any of my other miners. Before it was consistently going between 445-480 ghs, now it stays around 480 ghs at the pool, occasionally dropping to 450 ghs for a short time just like any other miner would and then returns very stable.


http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00DQFGJR4?pc_redir=1405274323&robot_redir=1#

Note: There are cheaper 2.0 powered usb hubs, I've just had good luck with this one while mining with pi's and had a few around the house. Remember pi's are picky about usb hubs. Most 3.0 usb hub's are not fully compatible. That's why I've always used powered 2.0 usb hubs with pi.

Note: I am also using a seprate power supply for the pi itself.(5v-2.1a UL listed)

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005AWO8V0/ref=cm_sw_r_udp_awd_DsAXtb15B8RPS

Update: pi still restarts once a day, sometimes twice. It's so fast it doesn't really affect anything. The miner keeps mining, the hash rate stays good, so I'm happy with that. Problably a paging problem with software that needs some kind of "sudo nano reboot" command or something.

[Trends]

Sounds like a familiar problem "rebooting pi's"
Could you have just power the hub rockminer sent you?

[Billbags]

Sounds like a familiar problem "rebooting pi's"
Could you have just power the hub rockminer sent you?

Looks like a simple 5v barrel plug can be added to end of pcb. Slots are already there for a barrel plug if u don't mind soldering. It looks simple.
Note: I have not actually done this and this is only a possiblity. I am not responsible for anyone damaging yourself or equipement.

Looks like these type of barrel plugs:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JR5AE0U/ref=cm_sw_r_udp_awd_T6yXtb16K0K6EA0E


Update: pi still restarts once a day, sometimes twice. It's so fast it doesn't really affect anything. The miner keeps mining, so I'm happy with that. Problably a paging problem with software that needs some kind of "sudo nano reboot" command or something