Cairnsmore1 - Quad XC6SLX150 Board

[gigantic]

i got 1 board not getting any shares, and i got 1 board that cgminer refuse to accept altought it is showing in the device manager, 2, out of 6..

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[yohan]

is there a guide for the controller setup?

I'll put that back shortly updated. I took off the link to the Rev 1.1 version and forgot it had the only manual.

BTW, Yohan, a linux SPIProg would make flashing a few boards a lot faster, now I need to detach/attach usb cable from/to boards and windows laptop I use to flash them.

spiccioli.

We are working on improving SPI programming. Our aim is to get rid of the VM and do something more native. There should be something for Linux as well. It's really just a matter of having the time to do these items currently. Moving the bitstream forward and dealing with CGminer/driver bugs is a higher priority at the moment but these other things will come behind those things.

[yohan]

Controller update zip has been updated to include instructions. Get it at http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/cairnsmore/cairnsmore1_support_materials.html.

[yohan]

BTW, Yohan, a linux SPIProg would make flashing a few boards a lot faster, now I need to detach/attach usb cable from/to boards and windows laptop I use to flash them.

Which Windows version are you using? I found some old laptop with XP Professional on it and every time I plug a different CM1 it re-installs the FTDI drivers. Takes some minutes for each board to flash (need to accept non-signed drivers each time) - really annoying

The process for programming the SPI Flash is very slow. Expect 30-40 minutes per board. We do have a plan to include parallel programming of the array and this will make an obvious time saving expecially if we can make it work over multiple boards at the same time. For this to happen it needs our own bitstream so we can add some necessary support features.

We have been using Win7 and XP here.

[testconpastas2]

Controller update zip has been updated to include instructions. Get it at http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/cairnsmore/cairnsmore1_support_materials.html.

Yohan I think you've forgotten to add the controller .exe into the zip. 

[yohan]

Controller update zip has been updated to include instructions. Get it at http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/cairnsmore/cairnsmore1_support_materials.html.

Yohan I think you've forgotten to add the controller .exe into the zip. 

Thanks. I think that is sorted now.

[spiccioli]

BTW, Yohan, a linux SPIProg would make flashing a few boards a lot faster, now I need to detach/attach usb cable from/to boards and windows laptop I use to flash them.

Which Windows version are you using? I found some old laptop with XP Professional on it and every time I plug a different CM1 it re-installs the FTDI drivers. Takes some minutes for each board to flash (need to accept non-signed drivers each time) - really annoying

The process for programming the SPI Flash is very slow. Expect 30-40 minutes per board. We do have a plan to include parallel programming of the array and this will make an obvious time saving expecially if we can make it work over multiple boards at the same time. For this to happen it needs our own bitstream so we can add some necessary support features.

We have been using Win7 and XP here.

What?

30 minutes per board to flash controller FPGA? On my vista 32 laptop it takes 30 SECONDS to flash it?!?

spiccioli

[spiccioli]

BTW, Yohan, a linux SPIProg would make flashing a few boards a lot faster, now I need to detach/attach usb cable from/to boards and windows laptop I use to flash them.

Which Windows version are you using? I found some old laptop with XP Professional on it and every time I plug a different CM1 it re-installs the FTDI drivers. Takes some minutes for each board to flash (need to accept non-signed drivers each time) - really annoying

Zefir,

vista 32 bit.

spiccioli

[Keninishna]

BTW, Yohan, a linux SPIProg would make flashing a few boards a lot faster, now I need to detach/attach usb cable from/to boards and windows laptop I use to flash them.

Which Windows version are you using? I found some old laptop with XP Professional on it and every time I plug a different CM1 it re-installs the FTDI drivers. Takes some minutes for each board to flash (need to accept non-signed drivers each time) - really annoying

The process for programming the SPI Flash is very slow. Expect 30-40 minutes per board. We do have a plan to include parallel programming of the array and this will make an obvious time saving expecially if we can make it work over multiple boards at the same time. For this to happen it needs our own bitstream so we can add some necessary support features.

We have been using Win7 and XP here.

What?

30 minutes per board to flash controller FPGA? On my vista 32 laptop it takes 30 SECONDS to flash it?!?

spiccioli

SPI flash is slow but controller takes like 15-30 seconds.

[yohan]

BTW, Yohan, a linux SPIProg would make flashing a few boards a lot faster, now I need to detach/attach usb cable from/to boards and windows laptop I use to flash them.

Which Windows version are you using? I found some old laptop with XP Professional on it and every time I plug a different CM1 it re-installs the FTDI drivers. Takes some minutes for each board to flash (need to accept non-signed drivers each time) - really annoying

The process for programming the SPI Flash is very slow. Expect 30-40 minutes per board. We do have a plan to include parallel programming of the array and this will make an obvious time saving expecially if we can make it work over multiple boards at the same time. For this to happen it needs our own bitstream so we can add some necessary support features.

We have been using Win7 and XP here.

What?

30 minutes per board to flash controller FPGA? On my vista 32 laptop it takes 30 SECONDS to flash it?!?

spiccioli

SPI flash is slow but controller takes like 15-30 seconds.

Might be talking at cross purposes here. Array FPGAs take the 30-40 mins to do the SPI Flash. Controller is very fast and less than a minute to do it's internal SPI Flash.

[spiccioli]

BTW, Yohan, a linux SPIProg would make flashing a few boards a lot faster, now I need to detach/attach usb cable from/to boards and windows laptop I use to flash them.

Which Windows version are you using? I found some old laptop with XP Professional on it and every time I plug a different CM1 it re-installs the FTDI drivers. Takes some minutes for each board to flash (need to accept non-signed drivers each time) - really annoying

The process for programming the SPI Flash is very slow. Expect 30-40 minutes per board. We do have a plan to include parallel programming of the array and this will make an obvious time saving expecially if we can make it work over multiple boards at the same time. For this to happen it needs our own bitstream so we can add some necessary support features.

We have been using Win7 and XP here.

What?

30 minutes per board to flash controller FPGA? On my vista 32 laptop it takes 30 SECONDS to flash it?!?

spiccioli

SPI flash is slow but controller takes like 15-30 seconds.

Might be talking at cross purposes here. Array FPGAs take the 30-40 mins to do the SPI Flash. Controller is very fast and less than a minute to do it's internal SPI Flash.

Yes, we were talking about different things here, but in any case flashing permanently FPGAs 0/3 from a linux pc is three times faster than doing the same from inside virtualbox, so if someone here has a lot of boards it makes a substantial difference in the time it takes to reprogram them all.

Anyway, this morning I was going to flash my boards back to rev 1.2 when I decided to restart the host pc for the twentieth time just to see what serial connections were going to fail this morning and... surprise, it found all FPGAs and they are now all hashing again... I really don't know why the previous nineteen times it was not working properly (yesterday I've restarted boards, power supplies, usb hubs in every conceivable combination... go figure).

spiccioli

[ebereon]

My new boards arrived yesterday. Serialnr. 400+ !

I updated to controller version 1.3 and after 5 hours one board was offline, Com's disappeared in Device Manager too.

I will post cgminer results when it was running 24 hours without a Com disappeared.
I'm using win7 32bit on netbook without USB energie saving settings.

EDIT:
Powerconsumption:
10x CM1
1x Netbook
1x ATX PSU 1000W

270 Watt@220V
~3600Mh/s

[yohan]

BTW, Yohan, a linux SPIProg would make flashing a few boards a lot faster, now I need to detach/attach usb cable from/to boards and windows laptop I use to flash them.

Which Windows version are you using? I found some old laptop with XP Professional on it and every time I plug a different CM1 it re-installs the FTDI drivers. Takes some minutes for each board to flash (need to accept non-signed drivers each time) - really annoying

The process for programming the SPI Flash is very slow. Expect 30-40 minutes per board. We do have a plan to include parallel programming of the array and this will make an obvious time saving expecially if we can make it work over multiple boards at the same time. For this to happen it needs our own bitstream so we can add some necessary support features.

We have been using Win7 and XP here.

What?

30 minutes per board to flash controller FPGA? On my vista 32 laptop it takes 30 SECONDS to flash it?!?

spiccioli

SPI flash is slow but controller takes like 15-30 seconds.

Might be talking at cross purposes here. Array FPGAs take the 30-40 mins to do the SPI Flash. Controller is very fast and less than a minute to do it's internal SPI Flash.

Yes, we were talking about different things here, but in any case flashing permanently FPGAs 0/3 from a linux pc is three times faster than doing the same from inside virtualbox, so if someone here has a lot of boards it makes a substantial difference in the time it takes to reprogram them all.

Anyway, this morning I was going to flash my boards back to rev 1.2 when I decided to restart the host pc for the twentieth time just to see what serial connections were going to fail this morning and... surprise, it found all FPGAs and they are now all hashing again... I really don't know why the previous nineteen times it was not working properly (yesterday I've restarted boards, power supplies, usb hubs in every conceivable combination... go figure).

spiccioli

There are definate differences depend in what order you fire things up in and so on and we think this is a blend of OS, drivers, CGminers issues probably more than hardware issues at least when the Controller is Rev 1.2 onwards. We saw a definate problem yesterday that is related to the power supply ramp time and that's why we did the Rev 1.3 of the controller. It solved our problem with this power up problem which is also related to the twin or Icarus build. It's possible that for other environments it Rev 1.3 isn't yet the best solution and Rev 1.2 is better.

We will contine to track down these bugs so keep reports going to the bitcoin support email.

[ebereon]

With controller version 1.3, I can't flash other bitstreams (eg. 200M_beta.bit from icarus) to SPI, but temporary works! After power on, all LED's turned on and remain turned on. With twin_test they turn off and only orange/amber remain turned on until it start hashing.

[roomservice]

@Enterpoint Team & yohan:

Today i almost made world first in accidently destroying a cairnsmore1 board by putting in a wrong atx power supply cable (yeah call me stupid - i deserve it).

Seconds after i realized that some black smoke raised into the air over the board, i shut down the power supply.

When i took a closer look at the accident i realized that i just bought the worlds best fpga board for bitcoin mining available because all i had to do is put in a non-broken fuse from another cairnsmore1 board. It works perfectly again. WOW - just awesome! Thanks for bringing in the fuse into the design - that really safed me a board

I'll contact your sales - maybe you can supply me with a new fuse.

Hallo again,

today i managed to replace the broken fuse from one of my cairnsmore1 boards.

Good news: board powers up red leds show up on each fpga and fan is working.

Bad news: windows and linux host doesn't recognize the board as a usb device even after switching the cable. so the incident harmed the usb interface of the board in some way.

Any ideas left how to bring the board back to life on usb?

[yohan]

With controller version 1.3, I can't flash other bitstreams (eg. 200M_beta.bit from icarus) to SPI, but temporary works! After power on, all LED's turned on and remain turned on. With twin_test they turn off and only orange/amber remain turned on until it start hashing.

I don't think anything should have changed on the programming side but we do know if run the array programming tool from Linux directly it is an unstable process. That's why even under Linux we recommend the VM approach. It basically slows it all down and it looks like there is something like a timing loop in some of this software. We are going to lose the VM part eventually but we need our own native tool ready to do that and it's still a little while away.

You have probably already done this but check dip switch settings are those recommended for programming.

I am going to do a document for Rev 1.3 dip switch settings and hopefully I will get that done today.

[yohan]

@Enterpoint Team & yohan:

Today i almost made world first in accidently destroying a cairnsmore1 board by putting in a wrong atx power supply cable (yeah call me stupid - i deserve it).

Seconds after i realized that some black smoke raised into the air over the board, i shut down the power supply.

When i took a closer look at the accident i realized that i just bought the worlds best fpga board for bitcoin mining available because all i had to do is put in a non-broken fuse from another cairnsmore1 board. It works perfectly again. WOW - just awesome! Thanks for bringing in the fuse into the design - that really safed me a board

I'll contact your sales - maybe you can supply me with a new fuse.

Hallo again,

today i managed to replace the broken fuse from one of my cairnsmore1 boards.

Good news: board powers up red leds show up on each fpga and fan is working.

Bad news: windows and linux host doesn't recognize the board as a usb device even after switching the cable. so the incident harmed the usb interface of the board in some way.

Any ideas left how to bring the board back to life on usb?

This really depends on where the short circuit current went and that's really hard to pedict because it also depends on what paths exist in external equipment. It could be any of a number of components that have failed or at the currents you had it's possible PCB tracks have been vaporised. Can you see any obvious physical damage.

Does the Controller red led flash or come on?

If you are in any way technical and happen to have a multimeter it is possible to check if the power supplies are still working. Other than that you have the option to have us evaluate it and repair if possible. There may be a charge for this or carriage charge depending what state it is and what we think needs doing. Either way you should contact us on the bitcoin support email bitcoin.support AT enterpoint.co.uk.

There is another possible option that we can make the board work on the up/down structure when that is availkable. However that depends on what the current fault is. If a regulator has blown then that would almost certainly need replaced.

[m3ta]

UK shipping cost is £8 + VAT. EEC 32€ + VAT, US $40. Please ask for other places.

This is courier/express prices, right?
Because Seur Express ships a Plasma TV across Europe in 48 hours for 30€.

[rjk]

UK shipping cost is £8 + VAT. EEC 32€ + VAT, US $40. Please ask for other places.

This is courier/express prices, right?
Because Seur Express ships a Plasma TV across Europe in 48 hours for 30€.

Derp, I'd be 99% sure that that's subsidized by the margin on the device.

[Lethos]

I'm expecting mine some time early next week 

Been a while since I've been this excited about new hardware.