Topic: Cointerra Hardware Support **Unofficial - page 10. (Read 57003 times)

Check this one... pretty obvious now why I have a CTA not showing up.  Bad thing is that even if I have replace the card with another ( and a card I can confirmed that it was working) , CTA still doesn't show up.  There is no voltage what so ever that pass thru.  If I swap card and PSU , same thing.

At least I didn't have a fire started...!

http://s12.postimg.org/xdfu26119/photo.jpg

ok so because i believe in sharing info with others especially with mining hardware makers that take little to no time to help users out after they fork out thousands and thousands of dollars i have decided to post some info here for the community and hope it helps some people out.

brief back story:

i purchased a terraminer from a seller on ebay that ran at only 700gh/s for about $500 and paid in btc. the seller was an awesome dude and got that beast sent out and packed very well. he showed pics of the miner both inside and out and there were no char marks on the boards. the psus were green so no board shorts in this miners case but i m working on boards that have those issues and will post that info as well if i get some extra free time when im finished fixing them.

problem #1 - the first thing to check when only one board is detected is the little black usb dual port hub they used in these machines. Now i have never ever seen this issue in all the years i have been doing pc/laptop component repairs so this kinda shocked me but when i was swapping the usb cables from one board to the next i noticed only one cable was able to talk to the beaglebone at a time. i assumed it was a cable defect even though there were no signs of cable damage. since these miners r hard to move around in even with all the extra room (weird....i know but if you have to hook and unhook the power cables to the boards as many times as i have your fingers get very very sore) i didnt remove the hub which i should have because it would have saved me troubleshooting time. one of the pins on the bottom usb slot was completely burned away. im not sure y this happened since i thought these got power from the psu and not from the usb hub but after taking it out and removing the housing cover from the actual usb board i saw the white electronic smoke marks on the corner of the case in the same place the burned up pin is located. now when i say burned up pin i mean gone....not charred or singed i mean there was a pin there but now there is no pin there at all so swapping the usb hub out was a pain because i had to unhook everything again but once i changed it both boards were detected. on to problem #2!

Problem #2 - the miner was detecting both boards and hashed away at much lower speeds then i had hoped on the second board so i pulled it out and saw the tell tail raised dots on a few mosfets. I immediately said awwwwww shitttttttt cause the codes printed on the top of chips doesnt always lead you to the component you need and cointerra wasnt gonna tell me shizz as usual so i gave the code a quick search and sure enough the one printed wasnt the full product number but luckily there was only one item with this number so the extra part of the code that was left off of the chip doesnt matter because that product family only has one version in it so no worries about getting one that is too low a spec or even too high. luckily digikey (awesome company) has these bad boys in stock and ready to go so i picked up some of them. here is the link:

http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/CSD16342Q5A/296-30314-2-ND/3074512

i had to pull out the bad ass ir station to replace them because these boards just suck the heat out of one spot so the smaller machine wouldnt get to the melting point of the solder no matter how long i waited but after swapping those out the board was running at 700gh/s just like the other one. now ik some are saying "but they should run at 800gh/s" but i paid $500 and resolved the issue and now get over 80% of the power out of both boards so beggers cant be choosers and risking damage from heating and cooling the boards to replace other chips wasnt worth another 100gh/s or risking losing more gh/s by mistakes on my part....im only human and like eveyone else i make mistakes so it wasnt worth it to me. 1.4th/s vs 1.6th/s was more then fine given the price i paid.


Problem #3 - the psu's ran pretty hot. this annoyed me even though they run fine. to resolve this i did a couple of things. first i opened the psu's up to see which was the fan was facing. i found out my psu's sucked air in from the back instead of blowing air out of the back which i would have expected it to do. so to get to step 2 i had to swap the airflow 180 degrees. to do this i remove the fan and pushed the 4 rubber holders through the mounting holes so it could be taken off of the plastic mounting plate (sounds confusing but if you look at it you will see what im talking about). once removed i flipped the fan around making sure to keep the fan cable facing the same way and pulled the rubber mounting legs through the fan holes to lock it back to the plastic mounting plate. the fan sticker has to face the back of the PSU (back being the area the power plug connects to). Once i test to make sure it works i put it back together and made sure they could power the mining boards and that nothing bad happened lol. **NOTE** im not responsible for ignorance. If you cant do this or havent opened things like psu's or computers before then proceed at your own risk and you risk being hurt big time from the caps in PSU's so please be smart.....pay attention to what you touch and dont rush things. On to #4!

Problem #4 - now that the psu fans are in the right direction i thought maybe i want huge airflow blowing into them to keep them ice cold soooooo thats what i did. I have some old delta fans that were installed in podiums to keep air flowing into the area where PC's were installed at a campus. these plug into the wall and run on 110v power so no special wiring needed and they move alot of air through their blades and dont sound like delta computer fans that resemble the noises plains make when taking off. they arent silent but they dont compare to the fans in the front and back of the miner already so ya it wont add any noise to your setup. i put the fan on the side after drilling a few holes because the fan is a little smaller so the original holes dont line up....they come close but if i had another inch i could have used them but i didnt so i just drilled some fresh ones no problem. the fan blows air into the hole which is why the psu fans needed to be set to blow air out of them and now into the same place the delta fan is blowing air because the delta fan will win killing the internal psu fan because of the pressure created. some may not care about psu temp but when i took the psus out after running an hour long test they were hot to the touch for a long time after they were in use which will slowly kill the machine. a cold machine is a happy machine. even though i paid little for the miner i didnt want to run it until it died.....i work on olectronics for a living....ik if you treat things right and take care of your stuff they will pay you back in the long run. and its always better to prevent issues then it is to scramble around waiting for stuff to come to resolve the problems your having.

problem #5 - the power cables. this goes without saying im sure but what the fuck was cointerra thinking when they decided to use utility power cables to power these miners?? they put extreme amounts of preasure on the terminal ports on bother the psu and the miner boards. i had one board that had the connector ripped off. sure they may be sturdy when mounted on the boards but the power cables have no give in them what so ever and will not sit perfectly and after tearing my fingers up trying to get them on and off the boards to test i finally said "fuck it" and went back to my car audio installation days and grabbed some 0 guage amp wire. this shit can handle 250a or 3500w per cable and thats for the entire length of a car which isnt whats needed here so if it can provide stable power to 2x jl audio 1000.1 amps which are powering 2x jl audio w7 13.5 subs then this can surely handle some wimpy miners and sure nuff (ik its enough) i was right lol. not only can it handle more then the entire miner puts out but its extremely soft and flexible unlike the cointerra psu cables. they will need to be zippe tied to keep them out of the way of the fan or laid down along the bottom of the case or whatever you choose to do but no matter the choice one thing is clear....im glad i "voided" my warranty by making these changes. I no longer have to wonder if my psus are gonna die from running hot or if i will rip off a post from the board. if they die i know it wasnt from heat or non flex power cables!


sorry guys for makin u read my essay. i try being as detailed as i can when explaining things like this and i hope it all makes sense but most of all i hope it helps someone out with a miner they are having issues with. just know if both of your hashing bards have the lights cycling through the bottom of the board it could be something as simple as a burned up usb hub port and most wouldnt think to look there....i know i sure as hell didnt but im glad i did even though i feel silly for not doin it before lol.

p.s. DO NOT FLIP THE POWER CABLES ON YOUR MINER UNLESS YOU FLIP THEM ON THE PSU TO MATCH WHAT YOU DID ON THE BOARDS. POS SHOULD NEVER BE HOOKED TO NEG. THATS JUST COMMON SENSE. EVEN IF YOUR DESPERATE DONT DO IT GUYS! I CANT BELIEVE SOME HAVE TRIED BUT I HOPE THIS STOPS OTHERS FROM ATTEMPTING IT. NOT EVERY MINER USES THE RED CABLE FOR POS AND BLACK FOR NEG BUT IF YOU PAY ATTENTION YOU WILL SEE EVEN THOUGH THE CABLE COLORS ARE NOT THE SAME THE WAY THEY ARE HOOKED UP IS. FOR EXAMPLE IF YOU HAVE A MINER THAT HAS THE RED CABLE ON THE NEG TERMINAL LOOK AT THE PSU....YOU WILL SEE THE RED CABLE IS ON THE NEG TERMINAL OF THE PSU TOO. THE COLOR DOESNT MEAN IS POS OR NEG....ITS HOW ITS HOOKED UP TO THE SYSTEM. I COULD HAVE USED YELLOW FOR NEG IS I WANTED TO. IT WOULD CONFUSE OTHERS AND I AGREE THEY SHOULD HAVE FOLLOWED THE TYPICAL COLOR USAGE PATTERNS THAT ARE A STANDARD THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE WORLD PRETTY MUCH BUT THEY DIDNT. MAYBE THEY DID IT TO CATCH MINERS OFF GUARD SO THEY FRY THEIR BOARDS CAUSING MANY TO PAY $350 JUST TO HAVE THEIR BOARDS LOOKED AT....I DONT KNOW....WHAT I DO KNOW IS IF YOU SWITCH THE POLARITY YOUR GONNA SCREW YOUR SHIT UP AND PEOPLE TELLING YOU OTHERWISE SHOULD BE IGNORED.....EVEN IF THEY ARE RIGHT IGNORE THEM.....IK I WOULD NEVER TEST THEIR THEORIES OUT EVEN IF IT WAS PROVEN TO BE TRUE BECAUSE IT GOES AGAINST EVERYTHING I HAVE LEARNED OVER THE YEARS ABOUT THIS SHIZZ. ITS OK TO BE A JEW AND NOT SPEND MONEY TO HAVE SOMETHING LOOKED AT BUT THERES NO EXCUSE FOR STUPIDITY SO YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

I knew they had blacks, guess I am just talking about my gridseeds a bit too much lately  

It is to communicate with the Beaglebone Black (these units do not have pi's in them,  they use the BBB's) and you should not need to use it except in cases of serious recovery,  which in my case was to unhack the units that had been left exposed to a public IP.

is it just standard usb serial (FTDI) or is it something custom?  I have never used that port so I dunno anything about it.  

Additionally does that port just let you talk to the raspberry pi or does it pass through to a CTA or what?  I guess I am asking why would I want to use that port?   more for the sake of adding to this thread than for personal curiosity since I am not physically local to any of my cointerrible boxes.

actually, it was not hard to figure out at all it just took a little bit of patience. I was not giving it enough time for the proper drivers to download. Once the drivers were downloaded and installed I got a connection right away.

Since it seems to have been problematic to do could you explain here what it took to get it working?  That way others can benefit from your experience

Nevermind,  I figured it out.

Can anyone here tell me what I need to get a serial connection to the usb port on the back of the unit?  Have tried multiple different pcs and cables and not getting anything to recognize it.

I tried that with mine using a $40 utilitech 6800 CFM fan from lowes.  That fan was quieter than my box fans and and moves more air.

As for the stepping, you can get finer grained control if you ssh into the box.

echo -n [0-255] > /Angstrom/Cointerra/cta_load

the 9 steps they give you is based on a simple math equation which is linked to the chip clock frequency.  I have also split what I set on some units because I had one board that could do 255 (stepping 9) and one that couldnt.  This required trickery because the way cointerra implemented support for their CTA boards you can only specify 1 number which gets applied to both boards.  I had wanted to tweak cgminer to accept a string of numbers to be applied similar to how you can set video cards separately.  Cointerra did a weak implementation in cgminer for their boards.  Their web interface would also need to be tweaked because you cant set each independently.

If you manually run cgminer as a test via the ssh session you can see the clock speed the asics are running at.  I have observed that some of my units will use different frequencies on the same numbers and I think that is why they did such coarse granularity.  Basically you might be able to get another 25MHz (the stepping the chips seem to support) by doing it by hand vs using the web interface alone.

You also cant override via the cgminer config file because cli arguments override the config file and this is always presented on the cli when cgminer is started.  This means that there will have to be a couple of tweaks to the firmware (php files and maybe 1 init.d file) so that its not a total kluge hack to split the stepping per board.

Hopefully my btcjam loan funds and I will be able to get some time to deal with some of this instead of chasing the carrot.

I am running my on stepping 7..  rock solid at :


Hash Rate

Accepted

Rejected

Errors

Totals 1,425 Gh/s 25,466,475 8,192 5
CTA0 713 Gh/s 12,750,604 7,168 0
CTA1 713 Gh/s 12,715,871 1,024 5


I am using a large box fan blowing air in the front that is allowing extra air to run through keeping it cool.

As soon as winter hits, there will be a rush to plug these machines back in.....

In the states, with the summer heat it is almost not worth mining.

Can you check the cgminer.log file I mentioned in the post above yours?  If you do not understand its output, and feel safe providing it to me I can look at it.  While it should not contain any information relating to passwords it might.  It will likely contain pool information such as username and stratum server.  You may not want to trust some random person on the internet with this information.  It is up to you whether you do or not.

It may be the pump, I know if the pump is bad the unit wont mine.  If it cannot initialize the temperature sensors it will not mine.  There are a few other things that if it cant get good data from it will freak out and refuse to do anything.



Here is what you need to do to get the file:

1. enable SSH access via the web interface (I believe default is enabled, many users disable it when they dont need it)
* goto the miner web page -> configuration -> enable remote SSH password

If you have never changed the root password you should log in immediately and change it.  The default is 'cointerra' and is a well known and thus highly insecure password.  If an attacker is able to log in they can make your miner mine for them instead of you.  If however your miner is not internet connected, is firewalled such that port 22 can only be accessed local/vpn or the CTA boards do not work its not as big of an issue but it still should be changed.


From linux:
scp [email protected]:/var/log/cgminer.log ./cgminer.log


From Windows:
This assumes that you download psscp.exe into the default download directory.  If you know enough to alter where you download to you probably know enough to change the 1 line below that needs to be changed.

Install scp.  I personally like the putty.org line of products, nothing to install just executables to run.  go to putty.org -> downloads -> pscp.exe
open a cmd window (windows-R -> cmd.exe  alternatively start->run->cmd.exe)
cd \users\%username%\Downloads
pscp.exe [email protected]:/var/log/cgminer.log .\cgminer.log


From OSX:
I dunno how to scp using only a mouse but there is probably a utility that will do it, where it is how to make sure its installed, whether it comes with OSX, etc is beyond my knowledge.


Now that you have the log file you can view it.  Any text editor will work, however for windows wordpad is better than notepad as notepad requires a CRLF end of line terminator and wordpad will work with the format of the file being just a LF line terminator.  

Note that there is a logrotate function on the cointerra box that makes some compressed logs of backups.  Check /Angstrom/Cointerra/logs for them if the log file you copied does not have what you need.


In particular you want to look for errors or other messages that will point to what is going on.

keeek: thanks for the pics. 

More  generically for other problems ... To aid in diagnosing these problems like pump failures there is a cgminer log file you can access with ssh which will contain error messages, for an example of the previous post error it will be
"Pump bad" (which will contain numbers letting you know which board and pump).

There are many errors that get reported that can help a bit, or perhaps just muddy the waters.

the cgminer log is in /var/log/cgminer.log (symlink to /Angstrom/Cointerra/logs/cgminer.log).  This might help you diagnose what exactly is going on with the unit so you know what corrective action to take.

The web interface may give pointers (such as was pointed out by the prior post) however the log file can give you more information when the web interface fails to provide anything meaningful.

My „Early January Batch“ Terraminer IV stopped hashing on one board after 5 months constant hashing. About every 4 weeks I cleaned the grid at the front side of the miner. These cleanings have been the only shutdowns of the miner. I kept the fingers crossed at the reboot, but it did not help. After the last cleaning only one board started hashing again. You could see both boards on the status page, but just one was hashing. At the faulty board pump speed was zero. I thought about just leaving it as it is, but now I have a new hosting possibility at much cheaper power costs... so I decided to try to change the pumps!

First of all... It worked! Both boards are hashing at full speed again (about 1.6 Th/s):

You can not buy the Terraminer water cooling system at a electronic store. They put two pumps on one giant radiator. So I bought two Corsair H60 instead (about 60 Euro each). Each H60 has a pump, a fan and a radiator.

To place these two radiators inside the miner, I removed one of the fans in the back. After removing this fan, there is enough space for two new radiators + fans. The next step is removing the old cooling system. Then I removed the old paste from the 2x 4 ASICs. The new pump came with heat transfer paste on the lower side of the pump. I thought that this is fine and installed the two H60s. This was a bad idea, because there is a frame around the 4 ASIC chips. This frame is slightly higher than the ASICs. Result: The ASICs had no contact to the pump and shutdown immediately because of heat. At least they did not get damaged.

The second try: I removed the H60s again. Then I removed the heat transfer paste from the pumps. Now I put Coollaboratory Liquid Ultra on the ASICs. One package lasts for 8 ASICs. After installing the new water cooling system I looked out for a place for the old fan from the back. It is not a perfect installation, but now it is mounted at the front side.


Beautiful silver ASICs:






Back side with one of the new radiators:




The new cooling system installed:












... and finally - the old fan at the front and the miner hashing again:

According to cointerrible you never ever need to because magic.

Its a sealed system so you are going to have to yank off one of the hoses and hope that you can seal it back up when you reattach it.  I have never done this as I have not appeared to require it.  Others have reported leaks so hopefully they can chime in.

I've tried to re-thermal past one of my units, just where one of the groups of four are bad on both boards. The result was no change in temperatures, which leads me  to believe my coolant must be low or the cooling blocks are clogged. How do you add more coolant to the system? Is their a plug to top off the system or do I have to cut and patch a hose to do it?

Thanks!
Posted from Bitcointa.lk - #ZS4Ze8HI51nhwAMK

It's all good. And yes it is a shitty situation.

Yeah, actually. I wasn't trying to attack you. It just seemed strange to declare a piece of hardware unprofitable when it is really only a unique (and very shitty) situation that caused it to no longer be viable. Sorry to hear about your power company. Hopefully you can find some co-location or sell it to someone in an area where power is more affordable.

Do you really need to know the whole story? Ok well listen. When I started out mining my electric rates were $0.19 per kw. After I added the Terraminers in March my electric usage went up considerably and every month my electric company threatened to raise my rates. Well they finally did it last month. They raised it to $0.34 kw. Happy now?