Topic: Hacking KNC Titan / Jupiter / Neptune miners back to life. Why not? - page 27. (Read 76793 times)

Think I figured it out, it was cold the past day or so and I had the door to the mining stuff closed. Small wireless bridge in there to the main network, it was buried under stuff and the network connection was unstable. Put on table, seems happeir now.

Might have been signaling a intermittent network connection or something. No biggie.
C

I know ONE of the incarnations of knc firmware the light I think was blindingly white and stayed on if I remember correctly ..till they made a patch and next firmware upgrade
not sure how/what or if that could be related ..but only light related issue I've ever heard of with these...never heard of the rainbow you have

Hashing fine, now it's orange. Eh, I'll leave it alone for now but it is odd. Cranked the units down below 60mh and of course it's cold outside now....

er ...was it hashing? if so ...unsure....if that is the only symptom...not sure I've ever paid attention. For all I know mine does so too.

by the by had some issues with my Titans in last month 2x showing DISCONNECT and same on reboot (nothing like that to get the old blood pumping wth)

happened 3rd time tonite...s

Anyway, I used my head for once and rebooted my usb hub and also power to the charter cable (I have a static IP) and viola as per the last 2x back they came....

went into the hub of mine using Admin and looked at the manual settings... and double checked that the firmware was Newest (big whoop 2014 or some such) but latest

But as I hoped it was a simple problem ....it was as I suspected on a DIR-615 D-Link Hub ...there is a setting to SET your IP to a device with the MAC ID

and SAVE that IP as such ...so now 'where the hell did it go' when your hub 'farts'

so putting them in the table as such and matching the mac ID and IP to the Titan 1 and Titan 2 again  (previously showing up but un-named themselves off the table)



everything else was kosher and still set for my other stuff and IP's ..so it ..might have been something I did moving stuff around on the Titan Upgrade to Gen Tarkin's 2.0.0

(likely) ..then again the units are 'evil'


Anyway.....just something to look at first before making a NEW SD card or some other silliness if you get a big DISCONNECT message on continued Reboots and power downs.

and a reset of power off of your HUB and/or the cable modem brings it all back ..again I'm on static IP ....if that matters to anyone with same issues



(Every day ..every day....these Evil miners find new ways to give me a heart attack...never really die....but they are like the bi-polar girlfriend ....with the threats

too cut your manhood while you sleep.....in the titan's case .....ASIC suicide via bricking themselves...or in the Titans case..'show me some attention' ...always the 'threat' never the follow through..(yet) )

Drama Queens

sheesh

Ok, this is weird. Checked in on the Titan last night after a warm day. Titans were hashing fine but the light on the control board was bright GREEN. Rebooted, little green light came on, hour later it was BRIGHT BLUE. I have seen bright RED, GREEN, WHITE...

Is this normal?

The FPGA is the big chip. Do you know how to remove BGA chips from boards, clean up and reflow? I think I put the basic steps in the thread here somewhere.

If you would like you can send one of them in and I can test it with some stuff here. PM me and I'll take a look.

Havent got an Ohm-meter, but I am pretty sure that one of the cubes was damaged. Is there spare parts to order? Which one is the FPGA?

Hm. So you blew out two boards in a week? Odd. One of your miners must have a short or something that's taking out the FPGA signal lines, they are *not* buffered.

Before we blow up repairs, can you use an ohm-meter to test resistance from ground to each of the 10 pins on the 10 pin plug on each miner? One of them will not be like the others....

C

Is FPGA the big black chip? That one is cold.
How does this happen? This was the second board in one week of mining. They are used before of course. Im running 4 cubes on 2x 750w PSU, can that have some impact?
It does not work with one cube either.

Yep. Interesting. Is the FPGA hot?

Did it not work with just the one cube by chance?

Im back again. This night the miner stopped working again.

Two short white flashes from the led, and no cubes showing up on the status-page. Is the controller-board broken for real now?

So pulled one of the dies off this evening. Not easy, I had to get under it with a knife after cutting around it, that ribbon/mask is of course glued to the side of the chip....

The dies themselves are a micro-sized BGA, never seen anything quite like it. So small you can only see the grid with a loupe. But yes, that solder in there can melt and when it does it smears. Most times it just shorts out the chip, sometimes it hits the one signal to spi (mumbles), and sometimes it hits the supply for the die (which shorts the die). Reballing would be interesting, less than a .2mm pitch.

In further notes, heating just that corner of a chip is not enough to clear a short. Damn.

And the most interesting thing under a loupe: See those little balls around the dies? Those are solder balls. Probably from under the dies, extruded either due to overheating while pulling the top or overheating while running. That could short out a die very quickly, and could be the source of a control line short to ground.

Hm.

And in the meantime I've been working hard on a way to isolate chips. To that end I finally took the top off a chip to see what's up.

Here it is.



Note removing it was a bitch on wheels, however it told me a few things:

1) There are only four small dies on a chip, location of each is where the heat is. Focus your heat sinking on that.
2) If the board tacos and the dies lose contact with the lid you're fucked (what I just fixed by de-tacoing)
3) Whatever that glue crap is required almost 500c of top heat after soaking the chip at 360c. Even then was not enough to keep the fabric mat from delaminating.
4) The mat is interesting. I can't see the possibility of shorts inside the chip but outside die so shorts must be hard inside the die. Maybe I could blow them clear with enough low voltage current.
5) Cheap way to do it, the power bus underneath must have been a bitch. Maybe the chips needed the subframe support.
6) Need to find a solvent to dissolve the glue without damaging the dies. Then I could just pull the top, rip off the bad die, and go to town. Any thoughts?

Put another cube in that slot, set it to off, unplug it, then plug in the crazy cube in the same slot. If the other cube is not there it should come up as off. Needless to say don't have any other cubes plugged in with the crazy one in the event it decides to go batshit crazy.

New problem though, interesting.

No idea, as soon as I connect it to the controller the advanced settings-site stops working, so I cant set them to off.

Ah.... You have a cube that is going crazy. That's always kind of fun.

Any idea what it's doing? If you connect it and set all four dies to off is it still crazy?

C

I think I have figured out whats wrong. It is not all the asics that make the controller go bananas, it was only one of them. Now just 3 out of my 4 cubes are attached and it works!

Ok, this is what I have done:
I have booted the neptune from a mini SD-card, described in this guide: http://ssh.vyper.kafit.se/wp/wp-content/uploads/KNCMiner%20restoreguide.pdf

everything seams ok until I connect the asics to the board, then the status page and the advanced settings stop working. The asics dont get warm and the miner isnt running, so it is not just the web interface that stops working, it does not start mining either.

admin/admin gets you into the web page the first time. Then you set a password. For ssh you use root at the username and the password you set as the password.

For a Titan controller you can also log in as user pi, same password as root

C