Topic: Cointerra Terraminer Half Speed PSU/Board problem?? (Read 9452 times)

Maybe this will help someone in the future, the capacitors are:   100 microfarad, 4 volt, size 1206; 20% tolerance.

http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/12065C104MAT2A/478-3353-1-ND/930145

Thank you for your help, I have learned a lot and you have pointed me in the directions I need to learn more.

I am going to try and replace the power inductors and see if that gets the board working again.

PA2891.261HL  Is the part number, but its a pain in the ass to try and find these not in shipments of 4000+.

Do you have any idea what specialty shops I could find 16 of them without having to commit to a full shipment -_- 

I found the Pulse specs online, maybe I can find a comparable product somewhere else.

The coils are the big square grey things. Yes the pulse units.
See if they conduct current, they should, if they dont, they are busted for sure.

The thing is, even if they do, they could still be busted.
The coating inside, on the wires if it melts, it will still conduct current but it will act as a short not as a coil.

The ins and outs of static vs dynamic measurement

If you can find them cheap, replace them all. the are quite unrelable. A few puls coils went down on my bf hcards, sqeling.

I assume the coils are the Pulse units.  I will check those and see.

Its worth trying to measure the resistance between each coil aka out to see if there is a short, i mean put one lead to ground and check each coil output.
Maybe the one having the least resistance or no resistance is busted.
You could have a busted coil also.

Hope this helps. If not, its just done.

Here are a copy of hi-res images, the first one you can see the damage ( well the clean up ) at the bottom, the second image you can see the two capacitors I took out @ C556.  Right now the power supply still comes on, just no power goes the board.  I checked with a voltage meter, and the board is not asking for power for whatever reason.

The power supply is still showing the yellow light.

I can't embed because the images are too large.

http://abecx.net/bitcoin/DSC_0224.jpg
http://abecx.net/bitcoin/DSC_0225.jpg

Ok, still the same issue, its showing a bad ground ( I assume ).  The beagle one is plugged up to the same power supply and it works.  I've swapped out both power supplies, they both work on the good board.  I also swapped the power converter device ( whatever that thing is the plugs up to the power supply ), and same thing.

I am trying to find anymore obvious issues on the device.

I have a feeling the previous owner had really shitty power, and blew a few circuit breakers.  Any other tips to track down the issue?

I'm pretty sure the device was still under warranty, but I've opened it up and troubleshoot, I doublt Cointerra would work with me on it.

I took that capacitor off because I didnt realize that it had to be off the board to check capacitance.   23.61uF was the result.

I will try and power up the board with out it.  I thought that removing it would be enough as well, thanks for reenforcing that.

For what its worth, the bad cap was still conducting current across.

1. Get your meter, measure to see if the capacitor is in shorts(it normaly wouldnt but its in a circuit and i cant tell).
2. Just remove it and try to power it on, one capacitor wont make the diffence.
if the removed/burnt capacitor conducts current it is most probably the one causing the faultt

I had the same problem and after troubleshooting and looking over the board, I found a blown capacitor ( I think its a capacitor at least ).

I have a ton of older bit coin hardware, and some upgrade kits for block erupter blades, but I obviously need to find the right capacitance.  Any ideas where I can get clarification?

http://abecx.net/bitcoin/cointerra.jpg

http://abecx.net/bitcoin/cointerra2.jpg

I tried to do that already but nothing worked. the actual board has no lights on it. if switch the cables it causes a short still nothing after that.

I noticed that some people are claiming to have fixed the problem by switching the power cables around:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/cointerra-terraminer-half-speed-psuboard-problem-638180

But I am not absolutely sure if I should do this.  I scare that it will caught fire or burn the board some how.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_merchandise_authorization

But if you've opened up your terraminer you have voided your warranty and they will refuse.

I emailed them asking for a new board. they said they don't sell parts.....    out of warranty because i opened the case to dust....... 
have to send the whole unit to TX. they will test it and if its the board it will cost  $1200  and about 3 weeks at least for a new one.....
needless to say.. NO THANKS!!

Just bought a whole perfectly working terraminer for 1800 of Craigslist.    At this point i will hold on to my "shorted" board til we are all 100% sure its not fixable. i bet its some stupid little component that goes out on all of ours that have no power / no fans / yellow / orange led on the power supply with the bad board.

RMA? 

Yellow light means there's a short somewhere. Only real solution is likely to be RMA.

Thx so did the "flip power cable" method work?? Or do you mean it caught on fire 

Im selling my board with the cooler for 750 shipped if anybody is interested.

No idea how to fix the yellow light issue. i have the same issue.  as for the pumps...  there can be many problems.  the inside of the copper plate may be gunked up. or air in the pump. does the pump spin? get a 12v power brick and only power the pump. should sound like a muffled humming. if its loud you have air.  did you try liquid pro for the paste?  I'll buy your broken rigs. Private Message ME

So did the "switch power supply" method work?  Can someone summarize the possible reasons and solutions to the "yellow light of death" problem?

I have got an ultimate CT having both the "yellow light of death problem" (thus killing 1 board), and the "stopping pump problem" (thus killing 1 core) ... it is now running with only 1 core at 400 GH/s ......



Thanks.

 Sparks a lot, no fans fire.

 Why did I read reverse the power on secondary board twice. Hell Ill try it.

 Yup. This forum really needs to be combined here... https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=641998.new#new

So I got the board out.  Rectangle Pyrex dish and 2 bottles of 99 iso alcohol.   Old tooth brush that vibrates too.  Soaked, washed, scrubbed, and rinsed the board with iso.  Dried it off with some towels and waited about an hour and it still has a short between the positive and negative.  There is a component that has burnt out but I cant physically see any, even under a lighted magnifying glass.  anyone have any suggestions on what to do next?   Seems like more and more people are getting the same problem.

BFL part two!!

I'm located in Texas, I can make a trip down there to check stuff out for members if anyone would like. I could also camp out and see if anyone shows up to the building for a week, but that would require donations for hotel rooms. There is probably a member located in Austin that it might be easier for them to check out, just finding someone to do it is the big thing.

FYI

I was in Texas last weekend, im based in sweden, so I decided to have a drive down to cointerra and found their building. CLOSED

Not a car in the car park, and only 1 sign showing Cointerra were there.

Does not look good to me as they are supposed to be working hard on the new 2TH machines.

joolz

I also now have the "COLOD"  Cointerra Orange Light Of Death    if anyone has an idea on how this can be fixed please post!


backstory...
Got he miner march 5th.  Sometime in april the webgui showed only one cta.  Opened it up to find one of the power blocks came off the main board. soldered a piece of wire to the board and to the block cuz I could not get the block hot enough to melt solder under it.  Any ways, it worked. was always HOT.  Tried new thermal paste. Still hot.  Tried liquid pro got it cooler and one of the pumps stopped working so it would got to 120c and shut off.  Took the pump apart and pulled out a bunch of white butter/grease out of it and the white rubber"channel" inside the pump. Pump works again and now the whole board wont power... no leds at all and on the power supply it shows one green and one orange light.  Its the board closer to the psus.  after all the thermal paste and liquid pro usage and frustration of taking it a part a thousand times i think i killed it. Last try to bring it back to life will be to remove the board from the case completely and give it a nice scrub down with iso alcohol.

nope I havent solved this issue yet.

Venom,

I am having the same power problem you had.  One board has a problem but if you disconnect the power supply from the board it reads a solid 12V.  When I connect the power, there is a spark and then the PSU shuts down and the light goes orange.

Have you solved this yet???

If anybody have experience fixing this miners let me know, I can pay for the service

Thank you, i'll try this next.

its likely a coincidence, usually when you get extra CTAs in the web interface it means the board has failed and reset, when it reconnects to cgminer it is added as a new device, i think i have a rough idea of whats likely happened but its only a somewhat educated guess. when it was running at 1.2 chances are one core on one of the boards was overheating and being throttled or even temporarily disabled resulting in the lowered hash rate, however after it hits a certain temp (i believe around 120C) the board shuts down completely, it then restarts and gets re-added then fails again.

if you open up the rig and connect the board to cgminer with cointerra enabled youll get better error reporting, by no means is it concise but it will at least tell you when the board resets or gets disabled, sadly ive never gotten a board back to full power but i have got some from dead to running at half power. if you happen to be lucky then it may be as easy as replacing the thermal compound on the problem board, but sadly ive found its rarely that easy

New miner here, forgive me for my ignorance.

I'm also having a problem with mine. I bought it and the guy said it had a "bad core" but it still sat stable at 1.2TH with the power stepping set to 6. I just switched my password and now its freaking out, can't get anything over 900 GH for any period of time. It originally only showed CTA0 & CTA1, now they will go off and other CTA's (CTA5, CTA2, etc) are showing up and turning off. I can solve this by restarting the machine but still cannot get back to the 1.2TH i was sitting at. How did changing my pool password effect this?

**edit**

Well after playing around some more it seems like it has settled back down @ 1.2TH but for some reason it would only do this with the power setting on 5 instead of 6 like it used to be?

Can anyone tell me if anything in this looks off?

https://i.imgur.com/75zn5rt.jpg

no theyre always like that (well i havent seen brown ground cables before only black) its how i worked out that you can switch them round, still not sure why it fixed the prob though

If anybody has the knowledge in how to fix this machine PM me so we can discuss a price.

hmm?

It looks a bit closer to the orange component.

but the other board has the same layout, what makes you think that will make any difference?? I notices that if the power cables are not connected to the main board there is 12v going thru the wires but as soon as I plug the wires to the board there is a spark and the psu goes from all green to green and orange :S

Try replacing the metal washer in the center of the power board with a non-conductive washer.

It looks like it could be shorting.

that crossed my mind as well but the order in how they are connected to the board is switch as well so that has nothing to do they are even label backwards.  the good board has black as ground and green as power on the other one green is ground and brown is power.

It's strange that the good board has the +12V line on the outside, but the bad board has the +12V on the inside.

Assembly error?

Take a picture of the two boards connected to the PSUs (one board per PSU).

There is a fairly large component in the middle of the board that has a tendency to explode....

Well I just literally did all that right after I read your post, I found out that the PSU board works fine because it still powers the beagle board but it wont power the main CT1 board. I did remove the wires just to see if there is power coming from the psu board and I got 12v steady but as soon as I plugged the wires connected to the CT1 board the DC green light goes orange so is not my psu board is something with the main board. I unplugged all the fans and cooling pump and still nothing so I dont know what else to try, no fans worked at all the board remained dead at all times. I which I could post a video so you guys can see. Any other ideas?? I can not acces my cointerra forum anymore sinces those bastards deleted the whole forum

that sounds like its almost identical to the problem i had (well one of them anyway) and i literally mean what i say on the cables, i didnt get new ones just changed how they are connected. unscrew the bolt that holds in the 12v (green and yellow wire) remember which terminal it came off, now unscrew the bolt for the black GND wire, bolt the black GND cable to the terminal you took the 12V green and yellow cable off, likewise bolt the 12V to the terminal the GND cable came off, do this only at one end (either on the power board or on the main goldstrike board) hopefully it should now power up. why this works i dont know, but it seems to

what do you mean by swapping the psu cables? did you buy new cables

well okay the PSU's are good. I unlatched the power going to the board and its shows both green light that means

PSU is good.
Connector from PSU is good. now nothing connected except the fan and the power still no fan?
does that mean that the board is gone?

the beagle powers up
can access the web interfacce but no fans or hashing

if the fan doesnt turn on then its not the water pump, it looks almost identical to the prob i solved by swapping the 12V and GND terminals, AC light on but not DC, does it power the beagle if connected? The DC light doesnt need to go green for that)

also have you tried powering the PSU with just the power board connected? no beaglebone and no big power connection? if its still not firing up then try the board thats having problems in place of the board that still works, eliminate everything else individually, will the board hash? if yes will both PSUs power it up with a known good power board? (dont forget to test with the terminals connected both ways just to be safe) if yes then its almost certainly the PSU, i think its likely to be the powerboard or mainboard though id guess as you still have power in the supply or the lights at the back wouldnt be on

I got the PSU swapped and everything unplugged water cooler pump nothing.

the fan never turns on.

these things have tons of issues that can make them not boot, in this case i can think of two. one of which has a fix which i dont understand the workings of but it works so i dont question it. lets start with the important bit, does your PSU power up at all, eg does the orange light go green them flick back to orange?

if it flicks orange/green

this seems to be an issue with the watercooling, not the actual cooler itself just the system not correctly reading it, if you watch the lights on the front of the board they will cycle across and then stop and restart, i dont have an actual fix here as swapping the board into another rig didnt work, it still clicked out the power indicating that its not the pump at fault but something on the board. in any case the half fix is to simply unplug the offending water pump (do one then the other, youll know if it starts hashing that you got the right one) its not going to bring it fully back to life but it will hash on just the core that the cooling is connected to.

next up is what happens if you just get an orange light on the psu and the fan on it turns on (in this state it will still power the beaglebone too) and im not entirely sure why this fix works but when i swapped the cables round on the power board (12v off and onto and and vice versa) it powers up, i have no clue why this worked but it did

i have had 2 PSUs fail on the rigs i look after before too and they dont do that, you just dont get lights at all and nothing happens, i do have the original data sheet for them too and the second time around we just replaced it rather than sending the rig all the way back to the US, heres a link to where i found them:

http://www.digikey.co.uk/product-detail/en/PFE1100-12-054NA/179-2421-ND/2627912

but for info there will be no 12v unless the green lights are both on, if you want to test if the PSU is good disconnect everything from the power board and connect just the board to the PSU and power it, this should fully switch it on and give you both green lights (obviously dont touch the terminals, theyre live) as long as that happens your PSU is likely good and the problem will be on the board. what we do need is for cointerra to open source that board firmware as these things have a ton of issues.

also it looks like cointerra have ditched their forum, pretty much all mention of it is gone

I found something similar at cointerra forum but now the forum is not accessible which sucks

this is what i have been able to find dont want to spend money to see if it works or not since the design is different.
http://media.digikey.com/Photos/Power-One%20Photos/SNP-OP-BOARD-01.jpg

I have the same problem. If Anyone knows where to get that please let me know

I also have the same problem that you do, I found out that what's causing the problem is the little chip attached to the PSU, I switched them and the faulty one started working and the other one stopped. While doing that the faulty one caught on fire aswell.. I guess that the solution is to get another piece of hardware like that, or similiar.. If anyone knows where I can get one, of even if I can get one please share it.

One of my Cointerra Terraminer wont work at full speed, the second PSU shows a orange light and I heard that it might be my power supply. So I bought a brand new one and still didnt work so since my machine is out of warranty I decided to open it to see if I could find the problem. Well I tested the wires coming out of the power supply and I noticed that there s no power going to the main board from the wired nor power coming out of the board connected to the PSU. Does anybody had the same issue before? Is there anyway I could get just the board that connects the psu to the wires??? I would really appreciate any kind of help