Topic: Building Your Own ASIC Miner? Yes You Can! - page 2. (Read 1108 times)

The chips are running in parallel to one another, if the temperature on any of the chips goes above 85C (185F), the chip stops functioning until its cooled back down to around 60C (140F) by the continuously running fans which ramp up upon a surge in temperature.
Now even though the thermals are well managed by software alone, i am sure manufacturing the PCB would require some specific things to be taken care of but, then again, thats where my knowledge of PCBs end and thats exactly what i need help with.
My point by the above statement was assuming that if we have a properly cloned PCB, slapping on the components isnt really too hard of a task.

Now as for the cost of cloning the pcb correctly and also the claims of alibaba sellers saying they are able to clone any pcbs for cheap if you ship one to them, i am in the dark.
But what i do know for sure, and i am sure you'd agree, is that its still not going to cost anywhere close to $10k.

That is a vast oversimplification of what goes into making hash boards...

This is a very high power density application that requires special attention to the thermal properties of the boards and where the chips mount. Specifically, the need for very thick power planes and a dense pattern of thermal vias under each of the chips to pull heat away from them and transfer it to the backside heat sinks. Many PCB houses have no idea how setup their reflow ovens to do that properly.

May I refer you to part of the results from forensics I did for AMT back in 2014 regarding why their hash boards were literally going up in flames https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.7610684

The PSU can supply a max of 12-15V 233A to the hash board while it only supplies 12.3V 15A to the control board as seen from the datasheet of the PSU on bitmain's website linked below :
https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=00020210302152412332Xrq3G3E60644

As for the mounting of all the components, they are cheap and available to buy from any component website or even alibaba including the main hashing chips and all other ICs as i stated before. The board has at most 5 kinds of different components on it other than the main hashing chips, tracking those exact components down is a piece of cake.
For someone with a tiny bit of experience with BGA and SMD components, getting a hash board ready would take no longer than an hour.

This, however does come with a caveat. The boards do have a microcontroller on them if i remember correctly to communicate with the control board. (i'll update with the exact controller model once i get the chance). But the data pins on the controller are freely accessible on the board itself (they soldered on a connector for it XD). Copying over the code from the controller to another should not be a hard task at all.

I'm pretty sure the hash board will draw a lot more current than the control board, right?

Somehow it's hard to find digital PSUs on Amazon that can output 150A and not some low amount like 5A or 10A, which makes me wonder whether high-power drawing PSUs are are only readily available from generic sellers on Alibaba (considering most of the PSUs end up in China anyway)?


But then how are you going to mount all the components onto the cloned PCB when you don't have duplicates of them? That's assuming you can somehow find out the model numbers of them all.

The control board and the hash board require separate voltages. In my opinion the best bet would be to spend the $300 to get an actual PSU thats meant to work with the miner. This then means that the only component thats not factory is the hash boards (and the fans). The hash boards simply have some SMD diodes for reverse current protection and some capacitors along with the BM1398BB chips.

Now speaking from experience, i've replaced hashing chips on antminer s17 pro in the past and they tend to work normally, the hash board does not look much different than s17 pro's hash board so i am pretty certain that the chips themselves are not tied to the control board in any way. Moreover even if they were, the chips are going to be from bitmain themselves so with a little bit of luck, they should end up working.

If someone manages to help with copying a hash board pcb for cheap then we're basically looking at an s19 pro for around $2000 if not cheaper, with added work of soldering the BGA chips and the SMD components on the board of course.
Alibaba does have services where you can send in a pcb and they'll clone it for you for cheap (again, pcb = just the board no components on it). But i sadly dont have a board i can sacrifice, hell there isnt even a proper image of the board on google yet -_-

As long as that PSU is externally controllable/programmable, it is exactly what is needed. Of course readouts of voltage & current are not required  
The key point is one needs to know how to communicate between the controller and PSU: Is it digital (I2C) or analog (0-10v = 0-100%)? Does the PSU report back to the controller to give basic status and actual voltage & current output?

Using programmable PSU's is one of the tricks used to make miners more efficient. Using 2nd stage hash board regulators to provide Vcore to the chips like the S9, A841 and other earlier miners is at BEST 95% efficient in converting 12v power to Vcore and more often around only 85-95%. By using a few more chips per-string you can use a higher baseline voltage and having the PSU itself do all regulation to set Vcore applied to the chip strings eliminates that drop in power efficiency.

Ah then to jerry rig something together one would need two power supplies with the outputs as mentioned in the link below, one to power the chips and the other one to power the control board.
https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=00020210302152412332Xrq3G3E60644

Still, not outta the equation considering that the variable output power supplies are going for quite cheap on chinese websites.
The main chips receive around 12-15v at 233A apparently and the control board is 12.3V at 15A (i think)

Now that i think about it, the control board is supposed to communicate with the power supply through a separate ribbon cable, most likely to shut off a board in case of abnormal hashrate or a surge in current. I will ask about how they power their oil cooled miners in their company and update the main post once i get the info.

Thankfully the power supply is not that hard to reverse engineer either and the control chip is most likely available to buy just like all the other chips, i'll take a look at my psu and see if i find anything as well.

Edit :
After taking another close look at the back of the psu,
The power supply uses a micron pic16f1704-I/SL microcontroller to communicate with the control board and uses a few other ICs for protection such as ix4340n.
The fans get direct input from the transformers so the fan speed on the power supply is not variable.
Now the microcontroller is programmable and the pinouts are conveniently available to access on the psu.
this micron IC manages the voltage regulation and also helps with the "sleep" feature that s19 pro has.


Now talking to my friend again i learned that their company buys as many PSU's they can from bitmain since they're relitively cheap but then they also have a third party manufacturer who makes these PSU's for them.
The PSU's, original or aftermarket, are going from anywhere between $240 to $300 at the time of writing this. which, then again, is not out of the equation considering the price of the whole unit.

Do you know whether Bitmain's firmware checks for unofficial parts at runtime (perhaps like what Apple does) and powers off if there are non-Bitmain parts inside? I think they could use that to force people to buy their own miners.


I wonder if a part like this would work: https://aliexpress.com/i/4000307508670.html ? This is an external part so I'm not too sure how you'd connect it to the casing.

The miner does not use a generic 12v PSU and what they use delivers a lot more than 20A. 12v*20a=240w so not even close to the over 3kw the s19 pulls. Modern miners use variable output PSU's that adjust the voltage to between 15-20vdc at well over 150amps.

Hi there!
Recently i bought two S19 Pros and ended up blowing the PSU on one of them which lead me to open it up and replace some mosfets to fix it.
While i was at it i decided to give the rest of the miner a clean so i dove in and began doing that. While in the process of cleaning i took a note of the components inside on the main hash boards and the control board.

I have a friend in china who used to be a business partner of my cousin and she now works for a ASIC miner distributor company via alibaba. I got in touch with her to talk about the making of these machines to get some more insight.
Now in the two hour long conversation i learned quite a bit about it and i will be sharing a few of the things i learned.

The reason its almost impossible to buy miners straight from bitmain or other mining companies is because they look for high profits rather than customer satisfaction, there are underground bids which take place between large distributors and the highest bidding company gets the cake. This happens weeks before the miners are released on their website for purchase.

Cutting to the chase. The distributor company that my friend works in used to be a PCB manufacturing company. They buy BM1398BB hashing chips straight from bitmain and manufacture their own hashing pcb's by cloning one of the original ones and end up oil cooling them. Now to me, all of it makes sense since all an ASIC miner has is a control board, a power supply and a few hashing boards. None of the components are tied to one another when it comes to the hardware.

Now while its possible to clone the control board and the information on it is as follows, it looks like its quite a tedious task considering that the actual board is quite cheap to buy straight from bitmain.
CPU :  XC7Z007S-1CLG225C
DRAM : M15T2G16128A (2L)
NAND Flash Memory : MT29F2G08ABAEAWP 2GB
Network Chip : PPT PM44-11BP
The linux based firmware that is stored on the flash memory is later witten to the DRAM at runtime and is available to download on bitmain's website and can be flashed using the sd card slot on the control board.

Anyhoo, oil cooling being a whole different story, I was told that each hashing chip costs about $2 and some select few companies can hook you up with the original ones. Which leaves me with needing a control board which costs around $200 and wiring which costs around $50 including the power cords which are not included with the power supply or miner purchase. A generic 12v 20a power supply that s19 pro needs costs a mere $60 where i live. The power supply costs around $240 to $300.

Now of course i did not include the small components like heat sinks, housing, tax and shipping costs and such.
But in hindsight if i were to build the whole thing on my own, it would cost a considerably less amount of money considering that these machines are going for around $10,000 if not more, per unit, at the time of writing this post.

I've been interested in this since i learned about it a few months back, but i lack the ability to clone boards and funds to get access to a board.
My point of writing this post is to learn more about things that i might have missed or gotten wrong and/or to maybe try out this project with someone who thinks they can help or have experience in pcb cloning/manufacturing without a schematic and finds this interesting.