While I will never buy from Innosilicon again I do have three A4+'s and three A5's.
When they are up and running they actually work reasonably well; however, I've had endless problems with them. All sorts of weird stuff. (For example, one of my A5's right now I can't logon to the web interface with ANY password even if I reset the password file via SSH. It's insanely frustrating.
So this weekend I tried to upgrade them all to the latest firmware. My A5's supposedly needed The "TF Card" method. So I prepared a TF card and attempted to follow the terribly written instructions to upgrade the software. No dice. So next I tried to boot the unit with the TF card in, magically, it was running a later firmware than originally on it. So I then tried to run the latest update.bin on it. It said it worked, but it still booted to the same firmware. So I pulled the power, pulled the TF card, and rebooted. Now the A5 was running an older firmware it started with and would not start mining. Rebooted with the TF card and it continued to function on that firmware (11/24/2017) on it. I ultimately gave up after trying to do a non-TF card update on them too. Frustrated I just left that one A5 running with the TF card in it.
Has anyone figured out a way to successfully upgrade the A4+ and A5? I'm a bit nervous now about bricking them if I keep messing with them. I don't even mind permanently running them on TF/Micro SD cards if that's what it takes.
Any advice or help is much appreciated.
Best,
Chad