Topic: Hacking KNC Titan / Jupiter / Neptune miners back to life. Why not? (Read 76842 times)

I'm just now noticing this, since I haven't been on here for a long while, but I've added your Titan Firmware image to my page.

Ah yes adaseb: The secret to removing components from the Titan boards is to use a pre-heater. Warm the board to about 150-200c and the components will come off easily with a small amount of localized hot air. Just be sure to keep the airflow level low; otherwise you could blow off small components.

This is how I replace the power plugs: There is way too much copper in the board to remove them with a soldering iron at room temperature, but taking the board to 200c allows you to use an iron to remove them. Then wick out the solder from the holes and put a new one in.

I had to this this hot air removal job on a Jupiter before. Basically I had a few boards which had 1 or 2 dead components so i figured I would remove from a dead board and add to a board with 1 dead die and get all 4 working instead of having a Jupiter with 4 modules and each modules had 1 dead die.

So I tried heating up that part which I think was a large VRM but I had to keep adding heat. And after 30 mins i finally got it off and it still didn’t work. Most likely added too much heat and fried the VRM.

Soldering it back on was the easy part but getting it off was a pain.

Oh help here on the forums is free of course. I only charge for my personal efforts to do stuff. That's why I published all my findings.

Thank you again. Let me know what i "owe" you for your help. If you find something that might help me, let me know. I'm willing to invest some money in my miners. At the same time I look for a new chip online.

It's not too hard if you have hot air rework tools. The chip costs around $50 or so I think, and you take the old chip off, remove all the old solder, then put the new one on the flat pads, line it up carefully, and flow it into place. I use a bit of flux on the board, helps the solder melt cleanly.

This is the second time in a week or so someone has been asking about these boards. I'll check to see what I have here.

Thank you, but it did not work. The board lights up white 3 times (The only thing flashing green and blue are the lights at the BB ). Do you think it´s possible to fix the FPGA chip or must I find a new borad?

Hm. Try again without the display. The light should flash white, then again maybe, then go green or blue. If it doesn't then the FPGA chip on the board was damaged, possibly by a cube's ribbon cable being plugged in upside down or not properly on the cube itself (ie: plugged in on only half of the pins)

Thank you for your prompt reply. first i connected the board to power and lan = the light in the display goes on (no numbers) and the light in the corner flashes blue 3 times and stays off. I think the lamp should have turned green for the next steps.

It's nice to hear that there are still some neptune miners online. They are great for my purposes, i always have some unused electricity that i can use for mining.

Thought I'd update: I have about 8-10 cubes still up and hashing litecoin, the power plugs continue to burn out every year or so, I tried soldering wires directly to the pins but gave up when I realized that without supports I'd probably break the connections in the board. But they still run and as of a month ago were still making ROI. Pretty good for an 8 year old miner.

Yeah. First you want to find out if the controller light goes green (or is it blue) with no cubes but display. Then see if the display updates. Then try one cube not plugged into power but connected with the cable PROPERLY. See if it shows up with a temperature in the web display. Then try plugging it into 12v (shut down before every plug or unplug or power change). One step at a time.

If you know how to use an ohm meter read the thread for how to figure out if a cube is shorted. Note one bad cube can take out the controller.....

Hello everyone, I still have a complete set of kncminer neptune and some electricity for free, so I wanted to connect them again. Everything went well at first, but now the miner status says "stopped" and the display lights up but show nothing. I reboot, reset and reflashed the system = nothing. Before I read the entire post my question: Can I find the solution here? Or does anyone have a quick tip? Thank you and excuse my English.

December 2021 and I'm still mining LTC with a string of 5 titan cubes. One of the cubes blew out and I haven't fixed it yet so I am down to 300mh of hashing. And given the silliness of Dogecoin, I'm still mining at a profit.

Insane little things.

The Neptune requires the KNC controller board to operate. Reason being all of the polling logic and such was done by a FPGA that was located on this board, along with a Beaglebone Black to run stuff like general housekeeping and the BFG mining softeware.

If you have one of these boards, you should be good to try. If you just have the cube you need a controller board (which supports up to 5 or 6 cubes depending if you want the little display on the board).

A Neptune and controller can run fine on a 600 watt supply. But the Neptune is not going to be efficient by any stretch of the imagination.

I know how wild it is even being here this late into this things life cycle but I actually just came across a single neptune for free, and I was trying to figure out a few things.
I'm new to asic's and this is intended as a project, not something to be profitable, I know how much of a loss it runs at. I currently have 1x Neptune cube, and a PI thats flashed as a control board for a different asic (avalon series). Do the neptunes REQUIRE a BBB or can a pi be used in replacement of the bbb/ factory controller.

Also, For just running a single cube, what kind of power supply would it need? since its only one, would something like a 600w psu from a pc be enough for just a single? And then there is the issue of the 10 pin connector and i dont have a convertor for it, is that needed? does the convertor from an Avalon 741 work as well?

sorry if its hard to follow, its hard to follow for myself.  

I got it for $50.00 about three or four years ago with a good 1300 watt power supply, actually got it for the aluminum case and the power supply.

It was not working when I first tried it and I was able to fix it and get it to mine.

I enjoyed tinkering with it.

Never really mined more than an hour so so just to see if it would work, then I put it on a shelf.

Yes I had many of those KnC Jupiters. These ASICs actually made a killing for the first owners because they took orders in mid 2013 and they delivered them right before BTC went to like $1100 from $100 or so.

From what I recall they cost like $5000. However if you mined all the way thru middle of 2014 when mining got unprofitable you would of net yourself maybe $20K per ASIC if I recall correctly.

But you are correct, its only for SHA256D which is Bitcoin pretty much. And even with free power you won't make anything. Keep those KnC Jupiters in your museum. Maybe one day they will be worth something.

So some old KNC miners are still chugging along. LOL

I still have my Jupiter miner sitting on a shelf, I pulled the beagle-bone out of it a couple of years ago just to play around with it using it as a small Linux server. LOL

Can I mine anything with it if I put it all back together?

EDIT: Looks like the only use would to mine a new sha256 coin and only after it launches and hope the coin does something, so i'll get it working again and may give a go or just stick it back on the shelf.

Well, crap. I really should follow my own advice....

So I was starting work on a second controller for the "B" condition cubes. These are the 2-3 die cubes that I will run on one of my beaglebone controllers instead of the Rpi that has Tarkin's firmware. Since Tarkin's code does some pretty nifty monitoring of power supplies and cube temps and does restart of failed dies I figured I would load the best cubes on that controller and put the lesser ones on a dumber one.

I swapped in a sixth cube last week which was a 4 die unit. Worked well at 250mh and since I found another one marked "4 die" I figured I would replace one of my 3 die units and bring that controller to 4 4-die and 2 3 die. So I plugged it in, hooked it up to the same ps that the 4 die cube was using and powered up.

A quick flash of the light on the controller told me I fucked up. Quick flash followed by quick flash means a short on the spi bus and since that is shared with all cubes one fucked cube can damage others. I SHOULD have checked the resistance of all 10 pins with respect to pin 10 (ground) but I was in a hurry.

In this case it cost me the cube that was on the same power supply, the 4 die one. Both now cause the controller to beacon, but on a positive note the other 4 cubes appear ok. So I put the old cube back (3 die) on and put another 3 die cube in. Oddly enough the ribbon cable also does not work anymore, although I can't see damage I'm guessing it blew open in the failure.

Moral: Always check a cube before putting it on a controller with other cubes. Drat.

The very fact that people may need these things repaired again blows my mind. But... well, odder things have happened.

The Lightfoot BB firmware is over here on Dropbox. https://www.dropbox.com/s/iz0z2bpzpcetpil/knc-lightfoot%204gb%20version.7z?dl=0

Damn, it even works. Fast too. Oddly enough I don't think anyone ever donated LTC, even though a bunch of people used it. Note to self: Tarkin's license thing was a good idea. Go figure. Tarkin should start selling his code again too.

You can figure out how to uncompress it with 7z then burn it onto a 4gb or larger SD card, it's a simple ISO image.

Currently the five titans are happily hashing at 300mh and I'll be adding some more from the pile this weekend. That should get me a solid 500-600mh, which is plenty.

And if anyone blows up their Titan and needs repairs, drop me a line and I'll give it a go. Oddly enough my repairs turned out to be a hell of a deal in the day for all concerned.

I'm also fixing this pile of Dragonmint T1 boards I accumulated, they are profitable too. Will wonders ever cease?