Cointerra Hardware Support **Unofficial

[FuryFever]

As for your totally dead board, power it up on a car battery using my instructions a couple pages back. One big spark, one pop and a few seconds later and you will see the board light up save for one dead core. If you want you can then replace the bad mosfet otherwise just run it on 7 cores. You won't get the orange light anymore after you short it. Just make sure you get the polarity correct.

I may have to try this in an attempt to resurrect the dead board in my TerraMiner as well.  As you recall, I have one machine that is only running on one board as well.  It kicks on for like half a second and then immediately turns off.  So, why do you need to run it on a car battery to "fix it" (or, rather, from the sounds of it, to blow up the one bad mosfet or chip that it preventing the board from working and then the rest of the board will work) like you explain?  If you try running it off of the power supply, is the board just telling the power supply to stop supplying power because of a short, but the car battery doesn't care and will keep supplying power until it blows up?  That doesn't seem to be my experience though as when my machine is running, I checked the voltage at the big power connectors to the board and I was getting 12 VDC to the dead board, it just was still not turning on and working.  I would think then that this would be the same result if I apply power to the dead board from a car battery - it will try to turn on for half a second and then turn right off to try to "save" the board.  (Which, in actuality, is still ruining the board since I can't use it either way! lol...)

Thanks for the tips and pointers though!  I know I definitely appreciate it as a CoinTerra noob, lol...


(Which, BTW - due to being very busy with work lately and coming home at 8:30-9pm at night, I still haven't had a chance to open up one of my TerraMiners yet to try to redo the thermal paste with the Liquid Pro that I bought.  Hopefully one day this week I will get a chance to do it.  If not, definitely by Friday or Saturday then.  I'll keep you all posted with how it turns out whenever I get a round to it.  In the meantime, I just bought a used AntMiner S5 off eBay for (probably a bit too much money, but...) $600 with a Corsair 850 Watt power supply.  I just hooked that puppy up and got that mining away at 1,156 GH/s or so for a couple of days now.)

I also found a sale on metal shelving on eBay last week, so I bought a 6-tier, 500 Lbs per shelf rated tubular steel shelf with casters for $69.99 with free shipping to put all my miners on.  The cheap $14 4-tier plastic shelving I bought at Home Depot to temporarily put my miners on wasn't working out and the weight of these CoinTerra monsters was bowing the shelves pretty badly, even though I put them as far out on the edges of the shelves as possible and staggered them to try to prevent that from happening.  Well, at least I have a more safer shelving solution to put my miners on now that is a lot more sturdy and stable.  I should have just bought one of those in the first place.  Oh well, live and learn, I guess.  Now I have a nice, purdy, shiny rack in the corner of my basement for all my miners, lol!  Check out some pictures of my setup:

Here is the old plastic shelving I was using (BAD!):
http://www.Pittinaro.com/images/basement/BitCoin_Miners/Old_BitCoin_Miner_Shelving_01.jpg

Look how bad the TerraMiner is bowing the shelf!
http://www.Pittinaro.com/images/basement/BitCoin_Miners/Old_BitCoin_Miner_Shelving_02.jpg

Even my AntMiner S2 did a number on the shelf it was sitting on:
http://www.Pittinaro.com/images/basement/BitCoin_Miners/Old_BitCoin_Miner_Shelving_03.jpg

Here is half of my new shelving that I assembled with the wheels on it (All 6-Tiers was just slightly too tall to fit in my basement, unfortunately.  Thankfully, this shelving was semi-modular, so I could construct two 3-Tier shelving units out of it, which came in handy.):
http://www.Pittinaro.com/images/basement/BitCoin_Miners/New_BitCoin_Miner_Shelving_03.jpg

Now, the guy who sold me the AntMiner S5 told me that it is important to have the bottom closed off to improve airflow so it will cool it properly.  Since these shelves are open wire mesh, that wouldn't be the best to put my S5 unit on.  So, rather than buying some wooden boards to put it on, I cut up the box that my shelving came in to make a decent base to put my miner on:
http://www.Pittinaro.com/images/basement/BitCoin_Miners/New_BitCoin_Miner_Shelving_05.jpg

The box was obviously slightly larger than the shelving unit, so I had to round out the corners so the cardboard would fit between the posts that the shelves mount on:
http://www.Pittinaro.com/images/basement/BitCoin_Miners/New_BitCoin_Miner_Shelving_07.jpg

Here is my new shelving with my two AntMiners mounted on it:
http://www.Pittinaro.com/images/basement/BitCoin_Miners/New_BitCoin_Miner_Shelving_09.jpg

And finally I added the TerraMiners to the bottom shelves and powered everything on:
http://www.Pittinaro.com/images/basement/BitCoin_Miners/New_BitCoin_Miner_Shelving_10.jpg


I just still can't get over how quickly these miners are improving though.  Look at the AntMiner S2 next to the latest AntMiner S5.  The S5 is WAY less than half the size and weight of the S2 miner and it has about 100-150 GH/s more mining power to boot!  It also uses almost HALF of the power to do so (not quite, but pretty close...).
http://www.Pittinaro.com/images/basement/BitCoin_Miners/AntMiner-S2-and-S5-Side-by-Side_02.jpg


(Oh, and sorry to hijack a thread about fixing CoinTerra miners with pics of my mining setup, but I figured it is somewhat topically related at least...)

[adaseb]

Your antminer looks bent. The S5 on the side?

Looks like someone gave it a nice kick.

[Cefalu]

FuryFever - maybe consider orienting the intakes ( the fronts ) for the Terraminers to point toward the wall.
The exhaust fans create a jet of hot air which is easily felt 4 feet away.  
Mine are also next to a wall, I shoot the hot air into the center of the room and pull cool air from near the wall.
Just a thought

[FuryFever]

Your antminer looks bent. The S5 on the side?

Looks like someone gave it a nice kick.

Lol...  Yeah, I think that is just from shipping.  The sides on the S5 are very flimsy plastic.  They are not metal or anything.  I guess as long as it just helps direct the airflow, who cares what they look like?  (Of course, me personally I'd like it to be nice and straight looking, but what can you do?)  To aid in cooling the S5, I'd actually like to put a rear fan on it too to help suck the air out from the back instead of just having one fan to push the air through the front of it.  But even so, it is still running fairly cool, despite being in close proximity to all those TerraMiners.  It seems odd to me though that one board in the S5 is running "cool" (relatively speaking...) at 52 degrees Celsius, but the other board is running "hot" at 68 degrees Celsius.  Both of the boards have their heatsinks facing inwards with the fan blowing on them, so I would think it should equalize the temperatures better than that.  Maybe at some point after I'm done fiddling with my TerraMiners, if I have any Liquid Pro left, I can redo the thermal paste on my AntMiners to see if they will run any cooler as well.  Couldn't hurt, right?  At least for right now, the AntMiners are running about 20-40 degrees cooler than my TerraMiners, so I'd say they aren't really an issue.

[carman336]

I may have to try this in an attempt to resurrect the dead board in my TerraMiner as well.  As you recall, I have one machine that is only running on one board as well.  It kicks on for like half a second and then immediately turns off.  So, why do you need to run it on a car battery to "fix it" (or, rather, from the sounds of it, to blow up the one bad mosfet or chip that it preventing the board from working and then the rest of the board will work) like you explain?  If you try running it off of the power supply, is the board just telling the power supply to stop supplying power because of a short, but the car battery doesn't care and will keep supplying power until it blows up?  That doesn't seem to be my experience though as when my machine is running, I checked the voltage at the big power connectors to the board and I was getting 12 VDC to the dead board, it just was still not turning on and working.  I would think then that this would be the same result if I apply power to the dead board from a car battery - it will try to turn on for half a second and then turn right off to try to "save" the board.  (Which, in actuality, is still ruining the board since I can't use it either way! lol...)

It sounds like your problem may be different if you are reading 12V at the big connectors. Do you have any orange lights on your power supply?

To answer your question though the reason you need to use a car battery (or a monster bench power supply) is because you have a short in the mosfet (source to drain is most common). This short causes the board to draw too many amps from the power supply and the overload protection kicks in. I believe the terraminer has a 1100 watt power supply so if we assume that one channel is drawing all 1100 watts then that's roughly 91 amps. If you are going to blow out the short you need to supply more than that. It's possible a supernova 1300 could supply enough but the easiest and cheapest thing to do is just get some #12 primary wire and hook it to a car battery. Most car batteries are capable of supplying in excess of 600 amps at 12V plus there's no overload protection so even if you draw all 600 for a few seconds it's not going to kick off. That will be more than enough time to overheat the shorted mosfet.

Now on to what I think your problem is. I suggest swapping power supplies to rule that out as a possibility. If you take the retaining screws out from the back of the terraminer and depress the release clip they slide right out. Just switch the 2 you have and see what happens. If it follows the power supply then that's bad. If not then you have a board problem. I still suggest trying the car battery approach to rule that out as well but it's likely something else failing on the board. Usually catastrophic failures can be spotted visually. Remove the board and carefully inspect all hardware. It's also possible that the board is not detecting the water pumps. You can try swapping the pump cables from the board that works just to see if it will run. DO NOT start mining like this because you will overheat it almost instantly but it will at least help you narrow down the issue.

Let me know how all that works and we'll move on from there.

[LeviWalker]

Anyone try to update cgminer on these units? Would it be worth it? Mine are running 4.3.5 and the current is 4.9.1 so I would imagine there have been some improvements in the last year. Mine run fine but I wonder if they would run any better with newer code.

What do you think?

[carman336]

Anyone try to update cgminer on these units? Would it be worth it? Mine are running 4.3.5 and the current is 4.9.1 so I would imagine there have been some improvements in the last year. Mine run fine but I wonder if they would run any better with newer code.

What do you think?

I wouldn't expect any improvement. CGMiner uses a custom driver for Cointerra devices and considering they went under I doubt there have been any improvements since the latest firmware release. Furthermore the problem was never really with CGMiner in the first place but rather the trashy firmware on the terraminer. If yours are running fine, pray and don't look to hard at them. That reliability can change at the drop of a hat. 

[LeviWalker]

Yea I hear ya .. if it aint broke ... right?

I actually just found this post from ck on the matter .. I may give this a shot and see if it does anything. Easy to fall back if needed. I have a node running CKpool on a server in the same rack with these miners so I can easily test it out.

I suggest you take the top off the cointerror, pull out the usb cables from the beaglebone controller and plug them into any pc running linux. The device works fine from any controller running cgminer.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28402.msg10717197#msg10717197

[FuryFever]

It sounds like your problem may be different if you are reading 12V at the big connectors. Do you have any orange lights on your power supply?  I suggest swapping power supplies to rule that out as a possibility. If you take the retaining screws out from the back of the terraminer and depress the release clip they slide right out. Just switch the 2 you have and see what happens. If it follows the power supply then that's bad. If not then you have a board problem. I still suggest trying the car battery approach to rule that out as well but it's likely something else failing on the board. Usually catastrophic failures can be spotted visually. Remove the board and carefully inspect all hardware. It's also possible that the board is not detecting the water pumps. You can try swapping the pump cables from the board that works just to see if it will run. DO NOT start mining like this because you will overheat it almost instantly but it will at least help you narrow down the issue.

Let me know how all that works and we'll move on from there.

If you read back a couple of pages to my original post about my TerraMiners, I had already tried all of those things that you mentioned prior to first posting.  I read through this thread and tried some of the "quick fixes" first to see if I could narrow down the problem.  Both power supplies work fine and are supplying good power to the boards.  I tried swapping the power supplies and the problem stayed with the board closest to the power supplies not turning on.  I have two solid green lights on the back of each power supply.  I tried swapping the pump connectors and couldn't get the board to start up that way either.

Now, on to what I have NOT tried yet since my first post about this due to lack of time:  I have not yet tried physically switching the locations of the two boards.  I have not even tried removing the bad board to check out underneath it yet.  The top of the board looks good though and I can't see anything out of the ordinary.  The tops of both boards look identical and nothing seems blown.  I haven't tried removing all of the Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste that I slathered on all of the chips yet either.  I THOUGHT that stuff was supposed to be non-conductive, but is it possible that the thermal compound could be shorting out one of the chips or something?

For now, I have it running on the one "good" board.  The Arctic Silver 5 compound SUCKS @$$ though and I have to run the board at power stepping 7 and I'm only getting about 200-260 GH/s out of it right now.  Even if I can't get the bad board to start running again, if I redo the thermal compound on the chips with the Liquid Pro and get it running on one board at 812 GH/s, I'll be happy with that for now, I guess.  It's better than nothing and better than what I'm getting out of it now, lol.

Even my other "Miner formerly known as the good TerraMiner" has gone down the drain and I haven't even touched that one.  It was running at the full 1,622 GH/s when I first got it and set it up to mine.  In less than a month (and dozens of reboots to try to get it to start mining better, which only seemed to result in losing more hashing power each time, which is annoying...) it is now down to barely 1,000 GH/s!  (It is currently running at 1,035 GH/s at the time of writing this.)  It looks like CTA0 is still running at max capacity as I am getting 811 GH/s out of it, but CTA1 is the problem.  It is throttled WAY back to only 220-225 GH/s and it is still running temperatures around 60-75 degrees Celsius.  Looks like it is time to redo all of the thermal compound on that machine as well.

I actually just found this post from ck on the matter .. I may give this a shot and see if it does anything. Easy to fall back if needed. I have a node running CKpool on a server in the same rack with these miners so I can easily test it out.

Haha, small world, right?  I've been mining on CKPool as well with my miners.  It has been pretty decent for me, but the guy who sold me the AntMiner S5 told me to switch to the AntPool for better payouts.  He said they don't charge any pool fees, as opposed to CKPool's 0.9% pool fee.  IDK, for some reason I still like mining on a smaller pool to help distribute the hashing power of the network more so everyone isn't just mining on the same big pool, but the no fees is definitely a big lure for me...

[carman336]

OK. Sorry about that. If you are getting 12V at the input connection then swapping board location probably wont help you. It sounds like an issue with the board. Arctic silver 5 is non conductive but it also sucks. Noctua is much better IMO. Do any of the status LEDs light up at all?

[LeviWalker]

Just wanted to let you know that running the goldstrike's directly into a linux box and bypassing the BBB did not yield and noticeable results for me. I ran several different versions (from 4.3.5 to 4.9.1) of cgminer and the results were all about the same. I was using the binaries and did not compile but I would expect the results to be the same.

[Cefalu]

I got around to attaching my dead board to a battery yesterday using the cables which led to the
power supply. I pulled the board and walked it to my car.
 I had another person with me, neither of us heard audible pops
and we didn't see anything is bubbled/charred.

The first time I hooked it to the battery all the LED's lit up, then went off and all but one relit. I think it was D38.
All the others, including D45, lit up and stayed solidly lit.
I left it attached for like 10 seconds, we neither heard nor saw anything.
Did it again, same deal.
Did it again, seems like something had changed, the point where I attached the pos cable to the battery started to sizzle.
I disconnected, thought I'd just not pressed hard enough.
Repeat, pos connection started to sizzle.

[carman336]

definitely something wrong with that board. Has it ever worked properly or was it that way since you received it? If it's always been that way I would say try switching the polarity. I can't say from experience but I have heard reports of these shipping with reverse polarity and flipping the cables helped. D45 light means you have a dead chip but all LEDs should only flash on for a second and then begin cascading.

Carefully check the board again for bits of solder sticking out where they shouldn't. When mine blew it melted out the bottom and oozed out from under the surface mount mosfet. It doesn't sound like you had the same problem but it's worth checking anyway. If you have time you can try testing what components you can with a multimeter. You can get a good idea of the status of the inductors, resistors, mosfets and capacitors without removing them. Just look for a reading that's significantly off from the others. Then replace or remove the faulty component and try again. It's not a sure fire test but it's way easier than breaking out the rework station.

Besides that I'm running out of ideas. It's likely there is a serious issue with that board that's beyond my ability to troubleshoot remotely or even at all.

[carman336]

also the sizzling is a sign of a bad connection. If the connector sparks and you make contact again in the same location the connection usually isn't as good which can lead to the sizzling you heard. If you hook back up to the regular power supply now what happens?

[altcointalk14]

Was anyone ever able to decompile the binary firmware for these boards?

Or does anyone have the source code for the firmware? (same thing)

If so, I would pay something for it. 

Thanks!

[Mikhail UA]

Was anyone ever able to decompile the binary firmware for these boards?

Or does anyone have the source code for the firmware? (same thing)

If so, I would pay something for it. 

Thanks!

Are you interested in the image of the firmware?

[Mikhail UA]

Greetings to all.
Can anyone help?
One of the boards is zombie.
When this indication diodes occurs in a strange way. They light up together and faded out in a second. When connected to cgminer - zombie. The power supply is blinking yellow led.
I would appreciate any useful information.

[alh]

I got around to attaching my dead board to a battery yesterday using the cables which led to the
power supply. I pulled the board and walked it to my car.
 I had another person with me, neither of us heard audible pops
and we didn't see anything is bubbled/charred.

The first time I hooked it to the battery all the LED's lit up, then went off and all but one relit. I think it was D38.
All the others, including D45, lit up and stayed solidly lit.
I left it attached for like 10 seconds, we neither heard nor saw anything.
Did it again, same deal.
Did it again, seems like something had changed, the point where I attached the pos cable to the battery started to sizzle.
I disconnected, thought I'd just not pressed hard enough.
Repeat, pos connection started to sizzle.

Someone else might be able to correct me, but a car battery while billed out as 12V is usually more like 13v+

Seems high risk to connect to your board. Just my $.02

[carman336]

Someone else might be able to correct me, but a car battery while billed out as 12V is usually more like 13v+

Seems high risk to connect to your board. Just my $.02

That's only when charging. Nominal voltage on SLA cells is between 2 and 2.15 volts fully charged. Generally I read around 12.2 on a battery that's been sitting for a few hours. My instructions say to always test voltage first and don't do it while the car is running because then you are correct. Charging voltage is usually around 13.5.

[carman336]

Greetings to all.
Can anyone help?
One of the boards is zombie.
When this indication diodes occurs in a strange way. They light up together and faded out in a second. When connected to cgminer - zombie. The power supply is blinking yellow led.
I would appreciate any useful information.

Have you attempted swapping the power supplies? Orange light means either an AC issue (problem with power supply itself) or DC issue (usually a short in the board). Read back a couple pages for my posts on this. I provide instructions for how to handle both scenarios. In your case because the board lights up it's probably an AC issue which means you need to replace the faulting power supply.