Thanks Rich.... I have an S5 that needs a BBB, of which I can pick up locally.
And Aarons6, I actually forgot about that... I'll have to look into changing that. Thanks for the reminder
I found this on the Forum a while ago, cannot remember where but saved a copy. Paragraph one from the end covers using a retail BBB.
How to resurrect an Antminer S5 with a broken BeagleBone Black board (self.BitcoinMining)
submitted 2 months ago * by [deleted]
Got a dead miner? Hating life and want back in the game while the SHA-256 diff is rising? If you do and the cause of your dead miner unit is a bad BBB motherboard, this post is intended to help you get it up and running again. I wrote this in frustration for this hobby at what is available out there. This guide is useful if you are past your warranty. If you are within warranty, Bitmain is decent about repairs, so open a ticket and go through the steps. If not, you have to figure it out and see which bit is bad. Sorry. Forge on, you’re on your own with your dead thing now. Maybe this helps, maybe you electrocute yourself, who knows? Just kidding, its only 12V. Still, by doing any of this you take the work and responsibility on you. I hated trying to find the solution from bad documentation and have been at this for two weeks. If it works for you, send me a tip at 13gp7UfnRLw9PeDXsgmVwYdAuYRubZw7zv. Read the whole deal and if it seems right, maybe this helps. HELPFUL. Thanks.
The Bitmain Antminer S5 has three major components: the Beaglebone Black (BBB) motherboard, the spartan-6 FPGA daughterboard controller board, and the ASIC blades (2x). Power is supplied by an external PSU. The following instructions can be assumed to work to fix the BBB part, if:
(i) Swapping out the PSU did nothing to help revive, and (ii) when the miner unit is powered up the unit fan spins slowly (so the FPGA daughterboard is powering it), (iii) the Red LED on the daughterboard is lit, and last (iv) the four green LED on the daughterboard are on, but the unit still does nothing. In our test case, the BBB ethernet jack lights blinked for a little bit, but there was no spool up of the unit fans, it never ran, never beeped, and there was no way to reach the unit via SSH, or get a web page or console. This implies something wrong with the BBB or operating system. Maybe its a brick, maybe not. Here are some ideas to try to help if the above criteria are met:
A. Your unit OS is messed up but everything else is ok? You may need a new linux software system only. Try to follow the Bitmain SD card rescue protocol. Get a faster class (>10?) bootable micro SD of 4-8 GB and do this procedure to write it to the card:
https://bitmain.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204339655-How-to-create-a-bootable-MicroSD-card-with-factory-setting-. The S5 system image you need will come from this
https://bitmain.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203461209-Jan-7-Firmware-Image. And for pete’s sake if you are on a Mac, be careful with your dd commands. use diskutil list. Write to the correct SD device, not the hard drive for example with the likes of sudo dd bs=1m if=/Users/you/JanAntminer.img of=/dev/disk1. Be patient, it has to write every freaking byte one by one. This whole thing is to get you a new miner image, stick it on an SD card, insert it into the miner, and power up. Now, remove the freshly toasted SD card, put it in the miner BBB and try to boot. Does it work? Good job, ignore the rest of this. You are done. Thank whomever made that image. And biophile6. You will have to leave the card in as I understand however, so you want a fast card now that the system is read/writing to slower SD rather than fast eMMC memory. No Go? Move ahead to the next (B). We are getting deeper each time. Sorry. More sucky tinkerage.
B. You maybe have a power management chip issue (PMIC). Its possible. There was a guy on the forums who did this after a power surge in the house. So you have to disassemble some stuff to get the BBB out. Power everything down, remove the 6 pin PSU supply wires to the blades. Touch some grounded stuff again, and remove the BBB as follows. You will need a phillips P2 screwdriver. There are four screws holding the daughterboard to the frame. Remove them lefty loosey and don’t let them fall down into the unit. You have to remove this stuff because the BBB is tightly wedged into the steel case at the ethernet jack. If you try to force it out, you’ll bend the daughterboard header pins and then not be able to get your bone back in. Careful not to drop the screws into the fins. Unattach the BBB-Daughterboard assembly from the frame plate. Slide it back a little away from the ethernet jack. Now you have free access to the BBB. Pull it out steady and even on each side. Dont pull on the white wire harness to the ASIC. Hold the daughter while you separate them from each other. Great. They are free. Time to diagnose on the BBB.
Now you need power since the BBB is detached from Big Mama, and is scared and lonely. Reassure your board, it might be ok with some warm juice. The first thing you will see is that a bunch of stuff normally on the stock BBB is not actually there in the stripped down custom version of the BBB used by Bitmain. Thats ok. There isnt a power jack, so you have to solder a supply line on to the board. Dont use a new barrel jack, because there is something in the way of it on the daughterboard, and if the BBB barrel is there it wont fit back together. Presumably you could stick one on the backside, but ehhh 22 Ga solid copper wires are fine. To know where to attach, look at the BBB board face, there is a largish rectangle on the board print, next to the pwr LED. Thats the BBB power input normally where a jack goes. Run a red wire to the gold oval hole inner most, and a black to the one outermost near the ethernet jack opening side. You can also see if these are the right holes, by flipping the board over; there is a small resistor inline between the + and -. The third oval hole there is just an anchor for the barrel jack port, and isn’t used except structurally. (At least it doesnt have a current or open circuit ohms to the other two pins). Now solder them in. Also to note, the BBB has a power management chip, but is being fed 5V by the daughterboard, which in turn gets it from the blades. Normally, the pins 1-10 on the BBB header have voltage on them to power capes. But apparently now thats where the BBB is drawing power. AND its not obvious with so much normal BBB stuff gone (no USB, HDMI, capacitors, momentary boot/reset buttons, whether if we stick power to the new power wires, if it will ACTUALLY be regulated by the power management chip, or if thats even wired to it, or if you are running a mainline defib right into the CPU eyeball. I was amazed that the header was used as power. Its like in through the out door. Anyway so your source should be 5.0- 5.1 V to be safe. Normally the input can be 6-12 V but we dont have the schematics for this board so just use a well regulated 5V off a voltage regulator, supply, or 5V USB line spliced out and destroyed for this purpose. Attach power. Now does the pwr LED light up? Good. Let it boot. If you only get a pwr light and no heartbeat LED or CPU LED, you are likely a dead BBB. Too bad, so sad; your dad. Unfortunately you can only see that sad fact by pulling it apart from the unit, unless you are a dentist with a good tiny mirror to see up into the crack. (C) is not going to help you. You will need to request a BBB replacement from Bitmain, or get a new BBB. But if you have all the LEDS Goto (C). If not, declare dead, go to (D) for the new board setup.
C. Try to fix via debug pins, serial and terminal. This section is informational only. It presumes you had all the BBB LEDs on, that you can now see, cause the thing is flipped over from its original mount. Ours tried and failed this step so this set of steps on a linux box never got somewhere productive, but you might be in this camp. I share because I care. Go ahead. Now try to communicate with the semi-live board via serial TTL debug pins. Because so much other component stuff is gone, thats the only port you have. There isn’t any USB and it went dark via ethernet, so thats now your option. We attempted to use an FTDI to serial debug pin adapter board to communicate with it. Get one for 8 bucks. Install the drivers on the PC. Most of the generic ones for Arduino work, but when attaching you must be sure to orient the ground pin to the one closest to the ethernet jack, sometimes labeled J1. It can physically fit either way but we want it right. The pins are symmetric 0.1 pitch, 6 in a row. Lay the BBB ethernet jack to the right and look down at it. The debug header is now toward the rear, and the FTDI serial USB adapter guts are face forward to you. Thats the right way. Ground to 1. In our example the BBB pins are 1, 4, 5 active. The others are unwired. Pin 1 is J1. Your FTDI board should be transmitting (TX) on 4, and receiving (RX) on 5. The BBB will be TX on 5 and Rx on 4. Its opposite, not identical. Don’t freak. You might even have little information flow arrows as guides on your board. If you are using a USB FTDI prolific serial cable like Adafruits, with the floppy loose ends that aren’t in a connector package, you are on your own to work out which wiggly end to attach, just dont attach the power Red which carries a deadly 5V, since your BBB runs on 3.3. And probably if you boot with TX and RX wrong, you just wont get a terminal. Move along, nothing else to see here.
Make sure your adapter board is switched to 3.3 v if there is a toggle. Now, attach the FTDI USB adapter correctly to the BBB. Run the USB line to the computer. The adapter board should then light up and tell you its ready as a USB serial adapter device, but this isnt enough juice to power the BBB which as we remember from our last mutual annoyance is a greater 5V. Next attach power to the BBB and try to boot up with your power wires carrying at least 460 mA 5V. (Don't attach the ethernet line since that will draw power (and doesnt work anyway otherwise you could have been fixing using SSH)). Now, if you are lucky, you can open a terminal or putty to it, # cd to your /dev/ttyusb* and see that there is a new thing attached at /dev. For example # cd /dev/ #ls tty.u* -al. Do you have a serial device listed? Good. Try to connect from the computer via command line. You want to use the linux or mac program “screen”. It may work on PC I dont know. This works for example # screeen /dev/tty.usbmodemfd123 115200. Screen is the program running in your PC terminal, the /dev line is your address, and which is all acting like a shell session, and the 115200 is the modem baud rate for this serial connection. Does that work? Maybe wait if it goes to no cursor, cause your board is booting off a card. If the terminal hangs, or hangs up, check the Tx and Rx lines. They may be reversed. Switch and boot again. If you get a ‘PTY’ port problem, or the system does not respond, it is likely dead. If you get a terminal, congratulations, you can now use your awesome linux shell skills to mole around in there and fix the issue. Sorry, I have no idea what the problem is with your board. Muck about, fix some conf files, whatever. Maybe opkg update/upgrade your angstrom rot. Fix a conf file. But if you cant solve it, you now need a new board either from Bitmain support (0.3 BTC) or as below (D).
D. Dead BBB board, make a new one from the store.Ok, so you tore apart and your thing bit it. Sorry it didnt rescue. BUT, you have new mad skillz writing SD cards and a unit that can now accept BBB right? Go get a new BBB rev C for ~50 bucks. I dont know if an A5B will work, or a B. I was not able to use the SD card trick on a Rev B, since mine did not boot from the boot button and SD card normally. I have no idea if yours will work, it might. Anyway, get a new stock BBB and try to boot it off a power supply, with the card in and the boot button down. It should flash the heartbeat and another periodic regular LED. This is good. Now get a set of BBB 23 pin headers like
https://www.adafruit.com/products/706. This is because your new board is a big fatty and has all manner of stuffs attached, that the old one didnt, including that barrel jack we talked about. You need standoff headroom to attach it back to the unit. So, attach those headers, and you get your space. Get your Bitmain image SD card. Go back to (A) to make a new one if you wrote over it. Put it in the BBB. Attach the BBB back to the daughterboard. Attach power supply leads.
Now boot, but the crappy thing is that you have to hold a tiny little button down during boot time, with your finger. You have to put your finger in between the mother and daughter boards. That little button is right under the SD card slot. Hold it down apply power, wait for about seven seconds. (I know this move sucks but its 12V. Wear latex gloves or something, make a plastic spork hook, whatever you need to do to feel safe). But you have to boot with that button depressed to get the system to boot off the card. Normally the Antminer card will boot of an SD if there is one in the slot (thats not normal behavior, but it helps us) and a regular BBB boots from MMC onboard memory. So it should work, Voila! If there was anything wrong with your BBB and that was the only thing bad, you should now hear the default ant-pool config spooling up your unit in about ten seconds, using your miner to feed itself blocks. It is Aliiiiiiveeee! Muahahahah. Quick, go to your internet router and open up the network display. You should see “antminer” on a new DHCP address like 192.168.1.33. Open that webpage. The little vampire is using your electricity now and you arent getting any blocks or coins. You need to put in your pool info in by the normal web page console at http://192.168.1.X/cgi-bin/minerConfiguration.cgi You can SSH into that address at root/root for kicks. Change your root password like I did.
Congrats, you have a newly working S5 for about 50 bucks. If not, you are the proud owner of a 4GB BeagleBone Black that you can run Ubuntu off of. Going forward the only sad thing is that it now has to be booted that way EVERY time the power goes down, so a UPS might be nice. You have to leave the card in. You also have to put your pool info back in every time, but thats the way it is. If you know a way to write the image to the MMC so it doesn't have to do this boot button thing every time, that would be awesome to share. If you know how to mod the SD image so your pool info is automatically in there, ditto. Thanks. 
. Make S9 like S1 plz.
