Topic: Cairnsmore1 - Quad XC6SLX150 Board - page 74. (Read 286370 times)

Any chance of making some power boards with screw connectors instead of the phoenix ones? You'd have a much wider audience and sell many more.

I know there are not too much free space on the PDB but what about adding in future versions 3 or 6 independant power switch ( one per pci-e o per 2 pci-e)  so you dont need to turn off the full array, if you have any problem.

We are behind on acquiring the side blow brackets. Basicaslly we need to find a little metal shop to do that for us. So no side blow fan pictures as yet. Once we find the right place it shouldn't take long to have some available.

I am hoping to have a picture of PDB with a stack and showing the wiring via the Pheonix connectors soon. Probably not today but maybe tomorrow now. We have all the parts and just need 30-60 mins to work out cable lengths etc. and make the looms up. The plan is to offer something like 3-6 standard option looms where the each loom has 3 heads to power 3 boards. Price for one of these standard looms is GBP £20 / USD $32 / 26€ + tax each. We can also offer custom looms as well. Most of the cost is the connectors and labour to put them together so a bit extra length does not make much difference in materials cost.

Yohan. How much the pheonix cables??  any photo of side fans setup?

At the moment it's Henry Ford time and you can have any colour you want as long as it is green. We do have a military green version as well as the bright green. Our 2nd batch of PDB bare boards arrived today and they are close to the colour of the later Cairnsmore1 boards.

What other colors will it come in.  Spring is long over, and green is so out.

Like a baus.

Power Distribution Board for Cairnsmore1 is now available. Price is GBP £62 / USD $100 / 81€ + tax (if applies).



Local switch to turn it on but also a 3 pin header allows a semi-remote switch as well or other electronic control. How much power and boards it can handle is very dependent on the ATX power supply you pair it with but as a general recommendation 3 boards per PCIE input is a good balance of what is practical sensible level. More will be possible in some cases but you do need to check your PSU spec and cabling for what is possible. Each Pheonix header (Green connector) is rated 10-12A per contact depending on mating half so 20-24A per connector is possible subject to the PCIE limitations.  That's good for 4 Cairnsmore1 boards so we anticipate that most people will only use the outer connector run and none of the inner connectors.

The 3 Pheonix headers are available per PCIE input to make different wiring structures easy not necessarily as an indication of how many boards a PCIE can feed. We have also done this to make this product useful in other applications.

Thank you, giving the twintest a try right away, it's starting, hopefully I have more to report later
[edit]
Ok, it appears to be running at 1034 MHS reported at the pool... this is with 3 boards, Invalids are still nonexistent. The only improvement so far for me is that CM5, a core that would usually get one share and doze off, is doing slightly better: it's now up to 3 shares (0.27/m).

We found out why a few of you were having problems with DLLs missing on our version of CGminer. It's because we forgot to include them in the zip file. That's now fixed and updated on the support webpage.

Long term webpages are now up but temporary ones will remain for a while yet as they are faster to update.

Request: a fool proof guide to installing the drivers in windows 7, including the dipswich configuration if necessary.
..needless to say at current I am inable to get either of the two remaining boards to even detect in virtualbox : / ...wonder what I did last night to get it going.

The problem I keep running in to is windows dosent detect the device properly when plugged in, when I install the drivers manually it says the drivers are fine and refuses to do anything. When I use the options "let me pick" and "have disk" I get something in, but after the installation completes the status of the device is "This device cannot start. (Code 10)" and it dosent show up in virtualbox.
[edit]
Looks like I found the problem: it requires an ubs-3 port for some reason, what's up with that ?

Has anyone measured the power consumption of a board running the twin_test bitstream?

After one night of hashing the single board I have plugged in with the twintest bitstream is reporting in at 411MHS, and 2200 shares of which 4 are rejected at poolside. Nothing special or noteworthy there, but for some reason the rejected shares are all from the bitcoin side and on the namecoin side there are none. This is unuasual for me at bitminter, the norm for gpu rigs is that rejects on namecoin side are about 12-47 times greater depending on the rig. Also the bitcoin side rejects seem lower than on gpu rigs 0,006% vs 0,03%.

After power off and moving to a colder place, the unit don't work again with SW6#1 off ... I just do not understand how my board works...

Update on my hashrate with board#62-0015:

I don't know if my problems have something to do with my ambient temperature too.
The last days it was ~30°C when I had the problems to get twin_test working with SW6#1 off.

But today it's down to 26°C and it seems to work again with 278Mh/s for 1 hour average at the moment. The orange led turns on from time to time. I got a 15 minute break while the unit does nothing, orange led was always on in that time and after it, I did nothing it was start working and hashing again.

I have put a second Fan on the down side of the unit too.

I was in lowercases, thank you.
Meanwhile I managed to get the first board to hash I guess Im good for tonight, would of love to accomplish more but it seems that no amount of caffeine can help me out at this point.
While Im posting I should mention that I will be setting up a board for DrHaribo of bitminter to work on, once there is an actual working bitstream in exsistense, this should help noobs like me use the devices, as he's nifty java-miner is as simple as they get.

Strange...
When you type a "ls -l" do you see the files in the directory? And make sure you use the correct filename, the filename in UPPERCASE is XC6LX150.bit, I did a typo the first times, so I used xc61 (number one here! but it is a small "L")...

Here is my directory (ls -l) after copy the files from usb stick:


If you have the same, the commandline should work.

good luck!

yohan,

I'd say powered usb hubs are a must, I cannot attach more than three boards to my pc if not through a powered usb hub (if I try all kind of problems happen to the point that the whole pc freezes - btw, it's not a PC but an HP thin client, this could be part of my problem).

How much power (max power) does the board take from the usb port?

spiccioli.

[/quote]

Ok the running power of the controller part does vary with the clock generator setup and the build in there but generally it is about 40-80mA from what I have seen. The on-board regulator will take it from the 12V if available. We don't think this running power is an issue. It's the initial surge that might be when we plug in the USB and 12V isn't up. It's also possible that there could be current spikes when running e.g. when the controller configures and maybe in a few other occasions.

To a degree this problem will probably go away when we move to supporting the up/down structure with a resultant more limited USB usage. That said we will do more investigative work to establish a more exact cause as that is good engineering practise to at least understand that much.

I am reading through some of the other posts (i'm still doing that) and I agree the thread is getting a lot of take in but when we move from the temporary setup it will start to get better albeit probably after a slightly worse period as we transition. Documentation and other things should get a lot better post bitstream release as we swing more resources into that side of thimgs and stuff stops changing significantly every day.

First off, thank you for helping and more so thank you for being the hugest contributor in this thread and the huge amount of hours you've put in.
I assure you I have read every single post in this thread, on a daily basis since it started.
I find it odd that the typo in the pdf instructions hasnt yet been corrected, and apologize for asking this even tough I had read of it (multiple times) .. I just assumed it'd be corrected by now.
works.
does not work, but this time it's complaning about a filename issue to me. My initial hunch is that since the board im punishing is #108 the firmware filename on it has changed along the way. I'll re-read up on this , of how I wsh the search function on this forum worked better .. but for now Im going with the temporary flash.

I know it's hard to read all pages, I'm sure every page in this thread have informations that help to get it running, but to ask 56 pages is not a nice move.

So, first you have to make sure you connect the unit to the VM only when you want to programm the bitstream, if you do not then turn it off! The VM will take the unit automaticaly when you replug the usb cable. That's really bad and i had to fight with it to.

To programm the bitstream in tempoary mode use:
This takes a minute or so. Do not turn off the unit! If you do, the programming is lost, it's the temporary mode and saved only to the fpga ram.


To programm the bitstream in to SPI flash use:
(there is no Blank betwen "-I" and "xc6lx150.bit"!) The PDF is wrong here.
This takes ~8 minutes! Just wait until you read "Verify: success!" You must turn off the unit to get the bitstream loaded into the fpga. I always turn off and unplug the usb.

Make sure you know what controller firmware you have! SN 62-0001 until 62-0026 have the old firmware and you have to update that first. The old firmware have other dip switch settings and they are not documented. So programming is a pain without to know what switch do what.

I hope it helps a bit to get your first accepted share