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Topic: Hacking KNC Titan / Jupiter / Neptune miners back to life. Why not? - page 8. (Read 76765 times)

legendary
Activity: 3164
Merit: 2258
I fix broken miners. And make holes in teeth :-)
profits at $50 LTC at 10c kwh and current difficulty w/o elec considered, a 300mh KNC Titan with Gen Tarkin's Energy Saver setup for 1,250 watts.


24 hours   0.63360352 LTC   31.68 USD   2.94 USD   28.74 USD
7 days   4.43522461 LTC   221.76 USD   20.58 USD   201.18 USD
30 days   19.00810547 LTC   950.41 USD   88.20 USD   862.21 USD

sheesh....you are probably gonna get more busy lightfoot Smiley

I know. I just fixed three more today, the Post Office is going to send me a Christmas card or something.

But these are problems I can deal with. Keep them running at about 1,000mhz (~70mh) total and they run pretty happily.

copper member
Activity: 2898
Merit: 1465
Clueless!
Another day, more work. Titans keep on coming in, I've gotten to the point where swapping the plugs is quite do-able, and even the shorts on pin 8 (once a sure dead cube) are fix-able. Glad to see they keep on running if you need something fixed let me know!

Heh, who'd a thunk in Jan/Feb 2017 at $4.15 LTC or whatever KNC Titans now at 50 bucks an LTC would be making below on

www.litecoinpool.org (used the calc for that site ..no fee 105% payout)

www.litecoinpool.org/calc

profits at $50 LTC at 10c kwh and current difficulty w/o elec considered, a 300mh KNC Titan with Gen Tarkin's Energy Saver setup for 1,250 watts.


24 hours   0.63360352 LTC   31.68 USD   2.94 USD   28.74 USD
7 days   4.43522461 LTC   221.76 USD   20.58 USD   201.18 USD
30 days   19.00810547 LTC   950.41 USD   88.20 USD   862.21 USD

sheesh....you are probably gonna get more busy lightfoot Smiley

legendary
Activity: 3164
Merit: 2258
I fix broken miners. And make holes in teeth :-)
Another day, more work. Titans keep on coming in, I've gotten to the point where swapping the plugs is quite do-able, and even the shorts on pin 8 (once a sure dead cube) are fix-able. Glad to see they keep on running, if you need something fixed let me know!
legendary
Activity: 3164
Merit: 2258
I fix broken miners. And make holes in teeth :-)
Knc techs at the time said a bbb cost 40% more also.
Possibly, however they do seem to blow up a lot and take things out. Haven't seen a BBB fail yet. And with the glut of Neptunes out there it makes sense to take a bbb and run my code on it (free. whee free and all that).

But running a Pi takes forever. I'd consider porting the code to new models of Pi's but that would be a lot of work for a solution that's still slower than a BB.

C
copper member
Activity: 2898
Merit: 1465
Clueless!
Mine has been running solid since the .img file was uploaded. I truncated the largest unformatted space on it. I ended up with about 4.2gb of space taken up on a sd card. I burnt it to the sd card using win32 disk manager and started the controller with cubes i knew worked in it and it hasn't failed me yet. I can do all the things i used to on the original. ssh in and bring up the miner screen ect ect.

Maybe try reflashing it to the sd card or even truncating the largest unformated space on the lightfoots original .img file again.

Also try just using one cube at a time. I say that because i have a cube or two that i plug in and it basically wrecks the whole system. Nothing posts at all however, if i unplug it from the controller or from the cube directly (the controller cable not the power) everything works fine again. (did you find a solution or cause to that lightfoot)
I will play with those after my vacation i didnt have chance to play with it longer. All my cubes run perfectly fine. I bought 8 saturns/jupiters to tinker with controllers so im not in hurry, those will be my backups or to split sets or i will just sell them.
One thing I noticed a few days ago was that none of the pages were working. I was wondering what the hell was going on, then realized I forgot to turn on javascript on the page....

Everything worked fine. I think the process could theoretically hang, but the miners would keep mining and a simple reboot would fix it. So far though it's been dead solid reliable on the Neptune hardware.

C

Yup, rock solid and still faster then the Pi. They really muist not have been able to source many bbb at the time of the titan. Probably due to the neptune

Knc techs at the time said a bbb cost 40% more also.
legendary
Activity: 3164
Merit: 2258
I fix broken miners. And make holes in teeth :-)
Update: The latest version of my beagleboneblack code is uploaded and now just needs a 4gb SD card or bigger to run:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/vfks74mxqlrfyf9/knc-lightfoot%204gb%20version.7z?dl=0

I also updated the link on post #2, that is where I keep all my links and hints.
legendary
Activity: 1078
Merit: 1050
At last. Everything has been fixed, all the little boxes of repaired miners have gone out USPS Priority Mail, and I can take a break. Figured out how to fix MAT miner controllers as well; they run a version of Ubuntu that is similar to the installs for Beaglebones. So with a bit of work it's possible to get those un-wedged as well.

If you have anything broken, let me know. Should be a more quiet weekend, maybe I'll mow the lawn and things...


HAHA, good on you mate. You are doing a great thing. Keep it up.
legendary
Activity: 3164
Merit: 2258
I fix broken miners. And make holes in teeth :-)
At last. Everything has been fixed, all the little boxes of repaired miners have gone out USPS Priority Mail, and I can take a break. Figured out how to fix MAT miner controllers as well; they run a version of Ubuntu that is similar to the installs for Beaglebones. So with a bit of work it's possible to get those un-wedged as well.

If you have anything broken, let me know. Should be a more quiet weekend, maybe I'll mow the lawn and things...
legendary
Activity: 3164
Merit: 2258
I fix broken miners. And make holes in teeth :-)
Fixed another 7 boards. This came from a guy that had heat sinks on all of the power supplies, the sinks do allow more power to be pulled but in this case he literally baked off the high side FETs on the supplies. Fortunately he included a bag of supplies, however failures included shorted supply controller chips, and just a general 2 day mess repairing the boards. However I did get 7 fixed, one was fine, one was totally shot.

Today I am working on another three that look like rejects from someone else's attempt to fix boards. Hint: A soldering iron alone will not take off a power supply and ripping up the vias is not impressive. I'm focusing on one board; the drivers were blown and one of the supplies shorted the control pin to 12v. This blew out every single supply on the board, I have pulled up and replaced five of them so far. This is, to be honest, insane.

Oh well. Forunately I have a supply of Titan boards to raid for supplies. Still a mess...

C
legendary
Activity: 3164
Merit: 2258
I fix broken miners. And make holes in teeth :-)
So more repairs coming in and I'm seeing something interesting on a few of the cubes.

Apparently someone else is trying to replace the power plugs. That's great, but these plugs are burning out as well and after looking at it I see the problem:

It looks like they are being taken off with a very hot iron without pre-heat. Do-able perhaps, but the problem is that much heat on the bottom is de-laminating the lowest layer of the board; breaking off the pads and causing the lower plane to be powered off the top plane through the vias. Not good, more heat.

More of an issue; the new plugs are being soldered on without warming the whole board, so the solder joints wind up being cold-soldered in the midde of the board. This causes resistance which is causing a lot of heat and baking the pins.

I recommend snipping the neutral pins first, then warming the whole board to around 150c as measured at the board with an IR thermometer first, then tinning the leads with rosin/lead solder, then removing the pins one at a time. With the top three off the bottom three can come off as a set when you tin them (which lowers the melting point of the solder from the very high ROHS levels to a more rational level) at which point you can remove the solder with wicking, test fit the new connector, then put some flux on the new connector pins, put it in, take it off the pre-heater and quickly solder the pins from the bottom. Then put it back on pre-heat, and check to make sure all six pins have solder when viewed from the top.

I can post pics if anyone is interested, but this is important. If the ground leads ever fail or go high resistance the board is destroyed by the resulting voltage differential between the chip hotel supplies from the ground on the controller board and the current demands from the hashing engines. It wrecks the chip and is the only thing so far I can't repair.

C
newbie
Activity: 57
Merit: 0
Noticed there seems to be a few people on this thread who may be interested in some replacement parts for the KNC Neptune..  I have a few fully functional cubes for sale if anyone here is interested!  Check the thread here...  https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/knc-neptune-replacement-cubes-1923994

Thanks for looking!
J
legendary
Activity: 3164
Merit: 2258
I fix broken miners. And make holes in teeth :-)
Meantime back to cooking over a hot oven. Or rework rig. Whatever. :-)

Two more cubes in for repair, looking at them with interest. One had the normal blown drivers, fixed, testing at low speeds tonight for errors, then will ramp it up tomorrow. The second board is odd however. It doesn't crash a Titan controller board with Pi (man these things are so much slower than BB's) but it does fail to respond to PSU Spi requests with the power bus off. Might be a damaged supply screwing up the SPI bus, might be something else. Will review.
legendary
Activity: 1078
Merit: 1050
Ok, not directly about fixing Titans, but I figured this group would get a nice laugh out of this:
 https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:MkMLMXxZkQEJ:https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/knc-miner-returns-improved-mining-product-sale/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

Disappeared pretty quick, seems familiar...

I've dealt with the owner of that outlet and i have to say he is a shifty man indeed. I would not trust anything that comes out of that website, not even the time. Good laugh tho yeah.

I'm referring to cryptocoins news
legendary
Activity: 3164
Merit: 2258
I fix broken miners. And make holes in teeth :-)
Saw that. Oddly enough the Titan motherboard with some small fixes would be a pretty good place to build a 800mh per cube sort of device. But that's probably not going to happen.
newbie
Activity: 3
Merit: 0
Ok, not directly about fixing Titans, but I figured this group would get a nice laugh out of this:
 https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:MkMLMXxZkQEJ:https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/knc-miner-returns-improved-mining-product-sale/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

Disappeared pretty quick, seems familiar...
newbie
Activity: 6
Merit: 0
I have a bunch of neptune controllers if anyone needs them. 

Boomin1

msg me
legendary
Activity: 3164
Merit: 2258
I fix broken miners. And make holes in teeth :-)
Ok, got all four of these cubes working. All were totally blown, all now fixed. The last one I got three full dies out of four, turns out power supplies 2,3 were both shorted, had to remove them both. I'm a bit better at replacing power supplies these days, but my belief is if you actually get to the point where you have 3 dies running at full power, quit while you are ahead :-)

200 watts per cube is a fully running cube. :-) Now to pack these up and work on the next batch. I'm still taking repairs, getting better every day...

C
legendary
Activity: 3164
Merit: 2258
I fix broken miners. And make holes in teeth :-)
where i can found inc cable splitter
i need 4 of these

have anyone have?Huh?
Don't know. People have posted links in the thread in the past, read a few back and if you find it let me know; I'll put it in post 2.

Or just run them a bit slower. Overheating the supplies can cause a supply to fail shorted to the SCL bus, bit pain to find but I'm working on it.

C
legendary
Activity: 3164
Merit: 2258
I fix broken miners. And make holes in teeth :-)
Meantime busy here. This one cube which was totally dead has been interesting: Biggest problem was a short on pin 8, I found that die 2 was shorting the lines to the power supplies, so I pulled the jumpers. That allowed the board to be seen with power off, but not on. Which led me to think it was a problem with a power supply.

So I pulled the two supplies that ran die 2. Still no go. Then tried pulling the supply 1 (on die 0, the one closest to the front). That got the board to respond on the SPI lines, which means it is a short in a supply that can kill the board. Pulled the supply, fired it up, now hashing at 30mh with one fully working die at 325, one at 150 (running on the remaining supply) with a third die down for unknown reasons.

What a pain. Will see if this works for the other board.
legendary
Activity: 2408
Merit: 1004
where i can found inc cable splitter
i need 4 of these

have anyone have?Huh?
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