Things here have been busy, been fixing some miners from time to time, mostly Antminers. They are a pain to work on sometimes, most issues are either:
- extremely simple (faulty fans, FETs shorting out)
- moderately simple (burned power connectors)
- annoying (blown chips, heatsinks falling off and burning chips)
- Odd: (control chips failing on boards)
For awhile I was using an S9 board and logging into it to check status, but I finally broke down and bought one of these:
An Antminer tester. It has a USB cable that can hook up to a PC using Putty serial (which is nice) but to be honest 99% of the time the display will tell you what's up.
An Antminer S9 board under test, light means the SPI bus is communicating. Also nice you can do a quick test outside of the assembly and not have to wait forever for the board/system to initialize.
Board connected and ready to test.
Board under test
And of course one can cross-check it with the Power Meter to make sure it's pulling current.
Overall a pretty handy tool to have. I've got an S17 coming in for repair later this week, I think I'll start a separate thread with some pictures and documentation as there doesn't seem to be a lot of data out there on them....