Topic: Hacking KNC Titan / Jupiter / Neptune miners back to life. Why not? - page 43. (Read 76586 times)

Ok, got the power chip off the board, since the DigiKey order *finally* arrived. Christmas sucks sometimes. :-)

Now, just a quick tip: For these boards pre-heating to 300f then using the air tools at 325 degrees C is not enough to make the chip come loose. Fine. 375 is more than enough. So I don't need to use the "dragon" mode of 450c. That's nice to know.

Need to wait for an hour for cool down, then check all the caps for shorts, then try putting the new chip on and see if the BB brings up all of the power rails. If so we have progress.

*nod* Yup, burning cables. The magic thing about it is the hotter the copper gets the higher the resistance and voltage drop. Positive cycle till all hell breaks loose.

For a 600 watt draw that would be 200 watts per wire. At 12 volts that is 16 amps, which should have 12 gauge wire min with 14 gauge really pushing it. 16-18 gauge wire (the kind they use in cheaper supplies) can only handle wait forget it. A 10 foot 18 gauge wire hauling 16a will drop *4* volts. Or 64 watts. Toaster wire.

Will do, absolutely. Do you happen to take some sort of electronic currency, maybe... bitcoin?

No problem, what's the worst that can happen? I do remember when one of the miners I was testing and doing some serious hacking to exploded in a plasma fireball, but that's why you have a fire extinguisher.

This is really cool thanks for documenting your progress for us all to check out and use! It's given me the drive to attempt to salvage some old s1's and an s3 (simply to see if i can).

lightfoot pm me your address, any chance you can pay for shipping?

it starts from the port on the asic side then usually runs the whole cable, i have ram'd atlast 2 vega pus, and two antes 1300 plat.

That would be a pretty straightforward fix, out of curiosity do you plug them into a powered supply (that snap spark will cause resistance points on the connectors). When they melt the connectors do you just solder the power supply wires straight to the board?

just pcie connectors melting, overclocking the fuck out of them

Sorry, I was thinking P2/P2A type connections with 4+12 and 4 grounds. Better but would cause a lot of funny crowbars.

what kinda gear may I ask also (lurking)

Sure, send it over. What kind of problems have you had over the years?

i have bunch of dead knc gear i could donate.

In the meantime here is what a Neptune board looks like ready to have parts pulled:



Note also the Hakko part puller that thing is a literal God for removing stuff. And the Zephlux, the ultimate flux to get stuff off and on boards

Very interesting. With the fpga off the board, the following is going on:

1) The red/white/blue super bright LED is always on. Must be pulled low by the fpga outputs. Hm...

2) The power up command still does not work:

root@Neptune:~# io-pwr init
TPS65217 OK. Modification A, revision 1.2
Wrong SEQ4 value 0x40
Wrong SEQ4 value 0x40
Wrong SEQ4 value 0x40
Wrong ENABLE value 0x00
Wrong SEQ4 value 0x40
DC/DC converter configuration failed!

Interesting. Next up is to pull and swap the TPS chip. Why would that fail? Hm. But with the FPGA off I can check all the power lines to see what's going on.

Ok, so I pulled the FPGA from a broken Neptune controller board. Thoughts:

1) These boards are *thin*. Almost don't need the overhead heat, I might be able to flow the new chip onto the board just with the pre-heater. Nice. Note that the temps on the board were 250c when I hit it with 350c top air for 15 seconds, then picked it with the Hakko. Came up clean. Much thinner PCBs than other miner products.

2) Now I just need to let the board cool down then I'll work on testing the board sans fpga. If the power supplies come up then that was probably it.

Quick thought: I don't see how. My older Rpi has a completely different gender on the pins to the Neptune board (the pins from board to BB are male to female on the BB. My Pi has male header pins). So to start with an adapter would need to be made, you can't just plug a Pi into a Neptune board.

That said, anyone have a confirmed picture of a Titan board with the Rpi off?

yeah some guy claimed he went from titan to neppie board...probably did it is how knc works on this stuff..but yeah the fpga is close coded their is talk on the knc swedish thread about reverse engineering such ...but it is a long shot

as far as titans if the PI is shot you can replace with a regular raspberry pi B+ 512mb version (or whatever the standard version is ..I think it is thus) you can't use the newer pi someone tried...you can make cables that is out their for info....a guy is making a run of 10 bridges between the pi and the 6 port board (neppies don't have such) he is keeping 3 out of the 7 i will get one just in case...so only thing left in the whold shebang is to get a copy of the fpga and with an old jupiter board and some mods supposedly it could be done a clone hack tweak and all them broken titan boards could be brought back to life

but i suspect the guy is right you you can go backwards....toss the titan bridge from pi to 6 port board away....you pop on the BBB on andthe only thing diff on the 6 port board is the SD firmware and what is on the FPGA chip and viola....you then can restore/repair  your raspberry pi 8 grade science fair project for 10k ...they do have the whole knc evil genius thing down..and also by using the PI they save 1/3 price on each shirt pocket computer used to run the Titans.....evil genius pays ...indeed (can't believe i got an orig titan )

Would going to 8 pin change anything? All it adds are 2 more grounds, still only have 3 12v.

Maybe. KNC seems to have come up with the super-dooper-bright idea of putting their FPGA I2C mux and general goat-gathering tool on the outside board instead of inside the miner, they don't seem to have changed the concept between the Jupiter and Neptune.

Not sure how the Titan works though, if you want to send me a Titan hashing board (does it use the same heat sinks as the Neptune?) I can give it a try. The questions you can research include:

Does a Rpi board have the same side connectors and signal points as a BB?
*exactly* What kind of FPGA is used on the Titan controller board?
Are there any other chips on the Titan board?
How does the software in the Rpi download the code to the FPGA and power sequence the DC-DC supplies?
Take some really good pics of the Titan board and post it to this thread. Both sides, focus in on the chips.

If the Titan has an insane amount of hashing engines, they might have had to make changes to the FPGA-CPU interconnections to handle the extra traffic. Maybe, don't know.

Send me a working Titan hashing board and I'll give it a go. Worst case board explodes or something. I'm going to try to fix these two while waiting on another, it's $60 for the FPGA from Digi-Key and BGA replacement is tough but not impossible.