Topic: Avalon ASIC users thread - page 175. (Read 438387 times)

Is this B#2 or B#1 unit?

Has anyone noticed on their controller fpga board that the little USB chip deformed due to heat? When i put my finger on it, it's extremely hot. When the unit boots up cold it runs fine for about 15-20 minutes then hash rate goes to zero and it starts cycling running at low hash rates <1Gh/s. It seems like that chip on the controller needs a heat sink. I re-arranged my cabling and went zip tie crazy which seemed to improve the situation somewhat; but the unit still dies after a time. Checking the TP-Link, I was getting usb errors when the unit stops hashing.

https://en.bitcoin.it/w/images/en/a/ab/Avalon-controlunit-v1.2-usb-serail-chip.JPG

The chip is so deformed/warped on my board the lettering is completely gone.

Going to see if i can find a tiny heat sink to affix to it tomorrow. Maybe that will improve things.

I ran into a new sort of issue with my (batch 1) Avalon tonight.

I noticed it was no longer mining, and when I logged into the web UI, it loaded, but I was unable to load the cgminer status tab.

I ssh'd in, and saw way too many instances of /usr/bin/cgminer-monitor running:

http://pastie.org/7977320

At that point I rebooted the Avalon using the 'reboot' command, and it resumed working normally.

I'm running the 20130419 firmware.

I'm still running 0225 firmware, it has been up and running since my last recondition of the heatsink, more than a week. Periodically cgminer would restart after  FPGA ran into disorder and reported all strange values from sensors (thus no more submitted shares), but after cgminer restarted, everything would back to normal again, no reboot/hardware reset needed

With this firmware, I can confidently leave the machine running at home and go for vacation  

I also tried 0419 version, although the FPGA seldom run into disorder, but once it does, no cgminer restart will solve the problem, a power cycle is needed

+1

+1

Nice work.

Glorious. I gonna tip you from my Avalon's income.

Yes, even after ckolivas and BitSyncom seems got agreement
And speaking for ckolivas (who is present here) is bad manners.

How nice... never ending story here... let it go.

Cancel that. Xiangfu set me up with usbmon on his standalone avalon and I was able to track down the problem so direct USB is now working on the avalon itself \o/

Has not yet received any answers about my order №200000846.

BitSyncom very sorry that work with clients situation at this level.

It sounds like the FPGA code needs a rehaul.  Do you know if the 6GH/s devkit you are receiving has an equivalent FPGA setup on it?  If so, that would be a great place to test new bitstreams.  I would start the work myself using one of my Batch #2's, but since the controller board is irreplaceable, I'm hesitant to play around with it :/

Already did.

No the reality is, that (if) when you get your Avalon there are only 2 possibilities:
1) You will need to babysit or add extra power management hardware to it to keep it running
2) It will contain some or all of the changes ckolivas has done, over the past month or so, thanks to him being able to get remote access to Avalons belonging to Aseras, Xiangfu and Sitarow
Pretty simple and you will not find GitSyncom denying it unless he is lying or just ignorant of reality
(though he likes to do that here as further above is an example)

Don't forget that they are doing their part in working towards decentralizing mining.
That itself is costing them plenty. Look at asicminer and soon to be other projects that are offering local centralized mining to shareholders and are making a killing.

kano wants his free Avalon again

I'm not sure Avalon actually know the meaning of 'support', they are providing absolutely zero support for purchases either, beyond their avalon-ref github repo of course. Even the information in their github is not complete.

Actually it isn't the nature of OpenSource. That statement is blatantly false.
Typically hardware developers support OpenSource by providing the OpenSource software developers with hardware.
They understand that providing that hardware is good for them and good for their customers
I think you should read up about that before making false statements.
Even in the Bitcoin world it happens.
BFL do it, Black Arrow Lancelot does, Asicminer does, ModMinerQuad did ... and I'm sure there are others.
But ... Avalon does not since they have a monopoly where they can sell everything they have without concern for how they treat their customers.

So basically you are saying with the 6GH/s board, rather than sending a 22GH/s box with only one card or even a larger box with more cards, to save money you spent the effort developing a 6GH/s board ... right ... why do I wonder about the validity of that statement.

I find the statement amusing where you give the people who buy Avalons from you the go-ahead to donate to ckolivas ...
They need that from you?

Basically what has happened since January is that Avalon has failed to support the OpenSource cgminer software to fix problems with the version YOU released - ignore the official version, I'm talking about the Avalon version.

ckolivas has gone in and fixed a lot of these problems but due to lack of hardware and not having constant access to it, these fixes are slow to get out.
So, as with most of your support, it's bad luck for the customer.

If anyone is mining on an Avalon and is losing mining time due to it failing, you know why.

Ok, thanks for the detailed answer  


as soon as I'm a proud owner I will do this 

Avalon itself do not wish to get involved with it,
the reason for this is we wish to avoid all form of drama of the question "who deserve a unit and who didn't and why." not to mention the lack of Avalon Units due to attempting to scale up production

While we appreciate ckolivas' work very much, and we have donated bitcoins to him on various occasions,
the decision for him to support Avalon on cgminer is entirely up to him. We are not obligated to provide him an Avalon Unit just like he is not obligated to provide support for Avalon in cgminer, this is the nature of open source. if those Avalon Owners who wish ckolivas to continue supporting are welcome to donate to him so he can get a unit.

Of course, we'd like ckolivas and others to continue to support Avalon, so we have created the 6Gh/s dev-board( 65W, 40 degrees C passively cooled) so we can send to developers so it may aide them in R&D.

as ckolivas mentioned, he opted for the latter and will receive one shortly.