Topic: GekkoScience Compac BM1384 Stickminer Official Support Thread - page 115. (Read 268015 times)

Already shipped back? No, the discussion is only about four hours old and the post office doesn't run on Sundays.

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I am assuming this is the root of my failure.

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Very clean setup.  I really like the plastic.   I really wonder what a 3d printing master could do with plastic.

How fast are you running those 2 compacs?

Egg crate is made of stiff polystyrene plastic, so it's easy to cut. I typically use diagonal cutters. The plastic easily splits along the cut line. Very easy to work with. Got the idea to use this stuff from a very different hobby (salt water aquariums).

I bought a big panel a couple of years ago and have built out three small scale rigs out of the stuff. Usually I just tack down the power supplies, hubs, etc. with zip ties. Once the components are in place, the rig is effectively portable.

It's typically used as paneling for lighting fixtures, especially comercial fluorescents, in the US at least. Any building supply or lighting company should have it for pretty cheap. If you search for "egg crate plastic" you'll find a ton of options.

Egg crate is made of stiff polystyrene plastic, so it's easy to cut. I typically use diagonal cutters. The plastic easily splits along the cut line. Very easy to work with. Got the idea to use this stuff from a very different hobby (salt water aquariums).

I bought a big panel a couple of years ago and have built out three small scale rigs out of the stuff. Usually I just tack down the power supplies, hubs, etc. with zip ties. Once the components are in place, the rig is effectively portable.

It's typically used as paneling for lighting fixtures, especially comercial fluorescents, in the US at least. Any building supply or lighting company should have it for pretty cheap. If you search for "egg crate plastic" you'll find a ton of options.

I'm actually impressed, that make it super simple and super modular. How do you cut the plastic? With a wood saw? And where do you get those... "Egg Crates" for cheap? Then you just tie wrap the miner stuff and maybe hot glue or screw the plastic in place.

Right now i just put my stick on the hub and put it on the side so that the USB fan sticking out from the mobo blow air on it.

What is a good difficulty to start with at 200MHz? I want to include --suggest-diff in my cgminer.bat and currently have it at 84 which is working, but can you recommend an optimal value?

a switch that'll work with solo.ckpool: --suggest-diff N.  Set N equal to or greater than your hash rate in Gh/s.  Saves some unnecessary diff switching and high diff on startup.

I'm a big fan of egg crate for smaller rigs. It's not pretty, but it's super versatile.

Here's what my stick rig with Y cables looks like (repurposed from running a bunch of DualMiners recently):

Thanks for sharing!  Very cool use of the old block erupter cube.

I have been playing wit the Y usb still some to get more speed.   I need to find a nice way to let them sit infront of the fan's.  Looks very nice with usb direct on hub but y cable means I need a new design.

To quote myself from a post on the previous page made some three days ago:


One thing to note is this:



0.77V is about right for if you're planning on running up around 375MHz. Sticks come off my bench about 610mV and Novak runs 'em at 200MHz off that voltage. Errors are probably around a couple percent; it's hard to get an accurate read with the 512 vardiff we end up with but according to Bitmain's chip data 650mV is good for clean at that speed.

Sounds like your ASIC is damaged. Drawing excess current could be a bad FET on the buck or a near-shorted load downstream of it. If the heatsink is getting hot that means it's taking most of the power, which indicates the buck is probably working right but the ASIC isn't.
Another thing to consider is the buck isn't working right and is overvolting the ASIC, which is shunting the excess power and cooking that way. The real test is going to be measuring the Vcore and seeing what you find. If you can do that and let me know what it looks like would be a good first step. A different good first step would be to send it back for a replacement. I don't like selling things that break.

Regarding using cgminer to generate a config file, well that'd be something Novak'd have to look at. I've never used a cgminer config file, outside whatever's autogenerated by internal controllers on things. I've always run command line, or a batch file on rare occasions.

regarding turning up the pot, there's no way to break the ASIC unless other things are going seriously wrong. You can spin the pot screw in circles and you'll only ever get between 550 and 800mV, which is a completely safe range. The only problem would be if you took the voltage all the way up and then ran it without a fan might damage something, but you'll easily notice that the heatsink is getting very toasty.

I bricked one of my compac sticks 
RIP Compac #2
She still has a heartbeat as when sitting idle the green LED pulses slightly, but no more hash.

I want to be clear in saying I do not think this has anything to do with the quality of the product. I think there must have been something I did or it is a fluke. Anyone who was around when I spent weeks trying to get answers out of BITMAIN will know I am not shy about questioning quality and I have no reason to do so with the compac.

Symptom:
I woke up with a high HW count. Pulled all sticks and placed one at a time in the USB power monitoring device which goes between the stick and the hub and #2 was pulling amperage from 1.5 to 2.5 and bouncing around quickly from the low number to the high and all between. Voltage acting crazy as well bouncing from 4.7 to 5.1 and all between.

I checked the screw adjustment for voltage and have it sitting at about the 6 o'clock position relative to the pic in the OP by Novac which should be around .77 ish. I had been running them all at freq 200 while I slept. Nice Arctic Breeze Fan blowing on them almost directly under the AC vent.
Adjusting the voltage screw makes no change at all. It begins doing the herky jerky with volts-amps as described above upon insertion in the hub. Rebooted everything, re-installed everything, but same results. This is a pure hardware fault.

I don't think I pushed it too hard, kept the fan on, but maybe I let it get too hot somehow.
Or, maybe I had the voltage set too high for that low of frequency.
If she sits in the hub idle from a fresh cold boot of everything as soon as she sees power she starts to heat up way too fast, so I am assuming I have a short.

I plan to order more, and if you guys want me to try any tests I have a good meter and know how to use it, or if you want me to send it back to you for evaluation I would be happy to do so. If you want a vid, pics, etc I am happy to do that as well. I know from my own day job I have things sent back to me for evaluation just so I can see what happened for myself and many times it provides information I can use to help people avoid failures. No matter who is at fault we all learn from the experience.

One of my other sticks which is running beautifully at 200MHz at the moment shows a 4.98v 1.06a draw. I can lay my fingers on the ones running and it is slightly warm, but nothing that would even come close to making me move my fingers. The one which broke will burn my finger if I leave it there for more than a few seconds. She is throwing off the heat hard. The hub is cool to the touch everywhere.

I would enjoy hearing any ideas of what I might play with to try and get her back to hashing again, but it isn't anything I am going to cry about either. The first time I adjusted the voltage and used a higher frequency I accepted that I'd taken things in my own hands.

By the way, can you adjust the voltage live? While hashing?

Does the voltage adjustment have a dead zone?

Can you turn it too many times one direction or the other? I don't see that happening, but wanted to confirm.

What is a good difficulty to start with at 200MHz? I want to include --suggest-diff in my cgminer.bat and currently have it at 84 which is working, but can you recommend an optimal value? I will read a refresher on difficulty because that is what stick-mining is teaching spoiled miners like me who came after days of needing to use a Pi, everything stand alone with vardiff.

One other item just because I saw a couple of others mention the same thing is my cgminer will not write a conf file. Well, let me clarify, in the menu when cgminer is running you can select a menu option to write a conf. When I do so, it creates the file but it is completely empty.
I have done everything as administrator, from running zadig to cgminer I run as administrator.

I slept with nine of 'em in my room for a weekend when I first got test sticks together and didn't have trouble, which I'm usually pretty sensitive to lights when I'm trying to fall asleep so I figured it'd be no problem. I like the flash, but the green by itself is probably a bit brighter than it needs to be.