Topic: ANTMINER S2 Discussion and Support Thread - page 5. (Read 355888 times)

Thanks for the info Zelek.


Over the weekend my 5 year old son stuck a pen inside the grill of one of my S2s and it snapped a blade on the fan. Can't really get too mad at him as he was bringing me a cupcake at the time because he thought I might be hungry.

Any data on replacement fans around?  I know the size but was wondering if there is a preferred aftermarket model?

Power supply stuff. Anyways I decided to hold off and wait until another few paychecks come in so give me about 2 weeks and I'll order a S3+.

No. Since we don't know about any kind of upgrade kit for S2s - no. It is very inefficient in sense of power - here is another "no".

Take S5 instead.

Why not the s3 or s5?

Well I just might give in and buy an S2 off amazon... Yes or no?

Yes, I have a number of miners, including my AntMiner S2, in a quiet rack cabinet. I had to for that location as it is situated in a shop (well, a gymnasium) in a mall and needed to be inaudible. The rack cabinet does do a great job of quietening the sound of the miners, I can't hear it above the ambient noise of the mall (e.g. there is a water fountain nearby that makes more noise).

I'd say the main issue with the cabinet I have is that it can't take more than about 5kW of heat. It is designed to house regular IT equipment, rather than bitcoin miners which put out a lot of heat in comparison. Whichever cabinet you are looking at, I'd say the heat is the biggest factor limiting how many miners can fit inside. My cabinet is a UCoustic from Acoustiproducts, and while it is a wonderful cabinet (it really is!) they say on their website that it can handle 7.2kW (see http://www.acoustiproducts.com/en/ucoustic_active.asp), whereas I'm finding a limit at about 5kW*. Basically the cabinet fans just don't push enough air through to cope with it after about 5kW. I know this because I have another cabinet with 2x Spond SP30s, and one of the SP30s doesn't reach it's max speed of 4.5TH/s because it is too hot. If I run just one, it is fine. If I run two, the top one only runs at about 3.9TH/s because the firmware limits the speed of the ASICs to prevent them from overheating (a good thing).

So I'd only recommend a cabinet if reducing noise is a must-have.

FYI I have some videos of both my quiet rack cabinets:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.7208256
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.8897531

* This would depend on the temperature of the intake air. These cabinets are designed to run in an air-conditioned office (so you can save space by not having a dedicated server room), so they might be able to handle 7.2kW if the intake temperature is say 21C. My cabinets are not operating in air-con however (the gym location gets sun-strike through the clear skylights, so even though there is air-con in the mall it doesn't really keep up in that area and it ends up being higher, like a normal non-air con room temp. The cellar location has no air-con). So it depends on the environment where the cabinet will be installed.

Ah yes! Of course, I should have thought of that. I did replace the original SD card with a high quality one I bought specially, but it has been running for a long time and I guess corruption can happen.

Thanks - good to know it's just a standard BBB (if it comes to needing replacement).

Very helpful, thanks dogie (and nice to get official confirmation that the controller is a standard BBB). I'll start troubleshooting with another SD card as suggested.

It's at a remote location (i.e. not at home) so it might take me a while to get access, but I'll report back.

That's fine.

Assuming PSU is fine because those AX1200is are rock solid.

1) Try and reflash the S2's SD card with a working image. Better yet, find another 4GB+ SD card to test / replace it with.
2) If you're getting exactly the same effect, as others have said buy a BBB over the counter and drop it in. After that its a lot more complicated to diagnose so lets leave it at that for now.

Let me know how you get on.

Any succes on underclocking and undervolting the s2?

I updated to last firmware(Wed Oct 29 10:13:19 CST 2014) and i see new options like Frequency 193M
Any ideea on what setting i need to put under Voltage?

THX!

Zelek,

I know this has nothing to do with your questions but in your post you stated that you have the units in a rack. Is it s server rack?  If so how is the temperature on the units?

I have 6 A2s and a few LTC machines and was thinking about buying a server cabinet from a place down the road but was concerned about the heat disbursement.

RCMco

Sounds like it might be the old problem of a corrupted SD card. Take it out and try to read it on your pc to see if it's still ok.

My S2 (batch 2) stopped running 78 hours ago, after running flawlessly for months. It has been hashing since 2014-04-17, the only thing I did early on was replace the PSU with a Corsair AX1200i.

So after hashing for 9 months, all of a sudden it stops.

The display is blank and the red LED is on (red = bad sign, normally has a flashing green LED). The fans are working, and I can see the green Ethernet networking light flashing inside on the BBB controller. None of the lights on the hashing boards are showing.

The unit is in a stable environment inside a quiet rack cabinet. The other miners in the same cabinet are working fine (a KnCMiner October Jupiter which has been hashing for 1 year 3 months, an S1 hashing for 11 months, and a Spondoolies-Tech SP10 hashing for 8 months). Nothing physical (e.g. G-shock, liquid) has happened to the unit.

Looks like a failure of the controller, as the web page won't come up, and I can't even ping the IP address of the unit (which I have fixed on my router using DHCP Reservation).

I only have one S2, so I can't troubleshoot by replacing the controller board with one from a good unit.

I'm I right in thinking that this is BBB controller failure? If so, it is possible to get a replacement?

Thanks Dogie,

What do you think reasonable percentages are for the Diff1#, DiffA# on the HW line?

My S2 has been running for 2 hours and I am at:  2456  0.1358%  0.1506%


Thanks again.

Diff1 is how many shares submitted by the miner to the pool, in terms of difficulty 1 shares.
DiffA is how many of those were accepted.
DiffR is how many of those were rejected.
DiffS is how many of those were stale [submitted for a previous block, when the network has changed blocks.]

At the risk of asking a stupid question can someone please explain the following:

I have purchased 4 S2 units and flashed the firmware to the most current version. On the miner status tab there are some terms I am not really sure of and would like an explanation. I checked the manual and search online but couldn't find anything.


1)  What is the Diff1#, DiffA#, DiffR# and DiffS# ?   
2)  Also, in these columns there is a % in the HW row. Which percentage should I be concerned with about and what is a reasonable percentage?


NOTE: This may have been covered in a previous post but the forum search is down so I couldn't check without reading all 255 pages.

Thanks,
Michael

Hmmm , seems like a dead thread....   ...since the S5's came out.

I'll post how I got my S2 to rotate through the pools just in case someone else is also finding a creative way to power these S2's and have them remain profitable.

The standard residential electricity rate here is $0.13/kwh. To save money on electric, I'm using my electric Co's ~Time of Use~ plan. From 8am to 8pm, my electricity is $0.17/kwh - I don't mine then and really nothing is running in the house in the time period so it really does not matter. But, from 8pm to 8am, my electricity is a measily $0.05/kwh. Mining is profitable with that rate. The weekend is a little different - at 8pm Friday, the rate goes to $0.05 and stays there till 8am Monday. At $0.05/kwh and this BTC slump we endured, I was profitable all the way down with the exception to the very very bottom end of that exchange value slump where for a brief moment, I went RED.

My miners are set up on 240VAC, using Allen Bradley industrial controls, relays, contactors, terminal blocks etc, all that I found at auctions, flea markets and yard sales, the miners turn on automatically at 8PM and turn off at 8AM. All of this is in a NEMA enclosure and using current NEC code for the construction. (If the house burns down, they cannot point to my miner control panel because its built to 2014 NEC code ). I have a revision I need to install though. I'm finding that when the system turns on, the inrush of current must create a small brownout because occasionally one miner will not fully turn on and mine, it will just sit there, blank LCD and a red light till I unplug and re-plug. My revision is to add individual timers and relays for each miner. So, 8pm comes along, the scheduling timer energizes the mains contactor and one miner powers on, 2 seconds later the timer energizes a relay and another miner comes on, 2 seconds after that, another timer and relay etc etc. That will eliminate the inrush current brownout.

I guess I'm telling this because there is a slew of cheap azz equipment that could still be used for profit mining if your electric company has something similar to We Energies Time of Use rates.

So I have 12hrs of mining to play with and several different coins I'd like to mine. Having the S2 miners automatically rotate through the pools makes this somewhat complicated electricity/profitability situation into mostly unattended mining.

This is how I  got my Antminer S2's to play nice with the ROTATE command in cgminer.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

~~~~~SSH into your S2, I use Putty, but that is my preference, use whatever you like....

user - root
password - admin

cd /config

vi cgminer.conf

~~~~~press the letter I to edit the text and use the arrows to move around

~~~~~add a COMMA at the end of the last command line like so:

"bitmain-voltage" : "0750",

~~~~~I have my S2's running at 200mhz, I found that increasing the voltage a little stabilizes the HW errors a bit.

~~~~~Now add the following line:

"rotate" : "xxx"  

~~~~~ replace the xxx with how many minutes you want to mine on each pool

~~~~~press Esc

~~~~~press :

~~~~~enter the letters wq

~~~~~press the ENTER key

DONE! - well, almost.

You will notice that in the miners GUI - the Miner Configuration tab, everything went blank. That's ok.

!!! DO NOT HIT THE ~SAVE AND APPLY~ BUTTON !!!

You must do a SYSTEM RESET.... found in the SYSTEM tab.

Once your system resets, you will see that the Miner Configuration tab is back to having its data in the blocks.
If you want to see the ROTATE command working as a test, set the command as "rotate" : "5" then do the Esc : wq followed by the system reset. Then watch the Miner Status tab, the mining will switch pools every 5 minutes, you'll see the information changing on the different pools.

Don't forget to go back into cgminer.conf and edit the rotate command to the operational time you want.

Just for info, I have 3 pools entered, I have rotate set for 240 minutes.... every 240 minutes, the system switches pools, and by the time 8am rolls along, I have cycled through all 3 of the pools.


:-)

I don't know if this has been asked and solved - the search function in this forum is disabled at the moment....

I would like to have my S2's rotate through my list of 3 pools (3 different coins )....

SSHing into the S2, I tried adding ~~ "rotate" : "360" ~~  into the cgminer.conf file, but I cannot seem to get it to work. Depending on how I insert the command, after editing the cgminer.conf file, all the pool data in the MINER CONFIGURATION tab goes blank and has an unresponsive save button or after resetting cgminer, the cgminer.conf file reverts back to what it was before my edit.

Has anyone figured out a way to change the mining strategy on an S2?

Thanks

Hardware Version   2.2.3.0
Kernel Version   Linux 3.8.13 #1 SMP Fri Jan 17 23:04:23 CST 2014
File System Version   Wed Oct 29 10:13:19 CST 2014
Cgminer Version   4.6.1

Yep, and I just can't support a supplier that is clearly competing with its customers in the market. I don't understand how people don't see that supporting them means they make more money and build bigger farms and push up the difficulty so everyone earns less... makes no logical sense at all.

I wasn't very impressed with the offerings from Bitmain after the S2, so it's all I have at the moment... solo mining at CK's pool to see how much luck I have