Topic: Notes from my journey to Beijing & visiting Canaan Creative in March 10-15, 2018 - page 2. (Read 12580 times)

I concur but with 1 caveat: I would not exactly call it 'certify people to repair machines'. To me 'repair' means able to do component-level diagnosis/replacement by having a fairly deep understanding of the circuits involved. Part of that being knowing locations of test points and voltages/signals to be expected at them. API's may relay a lot of information but hardware test points can present a lot more.

What they are so far offering is the information needed to diagnose problem areas and then do module replacement to get it running again. Certainly works and considering the skills needed to do depot-level board repairs makes it doubtful even a large farm would do in-house board repairs when the miners are modular by-design. As long as Canaan provides timely stocking/delivery of needed modules, with the 2-year warranty I certainly am not going to complain!

We have been in good communication with mods and
after some discussion I've asked if they can locate this thread in the top-level Mining section,
as I was told this doesn't fit in any of the Mining area subforums.

This thread subject is about my journey & visit,
I will open a separate thread for AvalonMiner troubleshooting, repair guide, etc.  later on. 
And same thing applies for the upcoming A841 review.

I vote for this! Only slightly biased opinion as fellow Finn

Anyway the current Bitmain RMA strategy of shipping the whole unit back really makes it barely feasible to go through all that fuzz. Makes one wonder if it's the purpose of the whole thing. It seems ridiculous since the machine could operate without one hashboard perfectly fine in the meantime while everybody could save costs on the shipping. Kind of defeats the purpose of having modular units inside a machine.

Overall working close to your customers is well documented being the winning strategy and goes long way offsetting the other parameters pointing the other direction. If it's close enough I will rather go with Canaan next time for sure.

Once I have accurate stats  on failure rates and modes ( stats iwas one of my side gigs-- field failure on autoparts)
I will start to include free spares on larger orders..

small sample stats is hard..LOL

@ yankees  

yes  an asic company  with  a gpu type repair setup even if it is parts and self service  and not rma.

Or calling me in NJ  and I drive to Maryland but not this black hole style  of rma other asic  companies offer.

This was the biggest reason I pushed hard for gpus  for the last 2 year.

Repairs were good.

@ philipma1957

So the goal is better service plain and simple.  Hopefully Canaan will do this.

There are multiple ways to compete.

When my 741 died last summer Steven fixed issue with fast replacement really fast under a week.

So here is an issue from my order placed for a L3+


Since I posted it here it pretty much show what the problem is

and this is screen shot showing broken website

this is  a front office clerical issue  I posted to show it  here and pretty much  egg on bitmain  via shame to see how fast they fix it.
I have purchased a lot of gear from them.  Used myrig a lot with yoshi and I don't break balls  but I am a 50 to 100 k in gear each year guy  not a 1 million a year

It is a great idea. My repair needs were minimal, but it was nice to have the fan shroud shipped out so I could replace it myself rather than 1) leave it and see if it caused issues, or 2) ship it out for such a minimal repair.

Love seeing Canaans business and service network continue to grow.

Very good writeup of your trip to Canaan!
Again, this kind of open-arms support by Canaan for the BTC community is the major reason why that for over a year now all of my farm miner replacement/expansion has been using Avalons. Between BM's shunning BTC as payment for their miners and my now rather old s9's slowing starting to act up (and aside from using MyRig no hope of hashoard repair/replacement) my moving to the Avalons has been a no-brainer.

Canaan has time and again proven themselves the Gold Standard to me when it comes to openness and customer support. Their superior attention to all aspects of miner design just seals the deal. For what it's worth, this is coming from someone who has been designing industrial laser electronics for over 35 years. I design for decades of operation Synchron Laser Inc > - today just finished re-installing a system originally built in 1983/rebuilt by us in 2003 with 88,800 hours on it into a new home where it should live for another couple decades or more.

Anywho, baring the fans and their fixed max lifetime I can see an Avalon holding up very well for much longer than it would make sense to run them. Last year had to open a 721 to replace a fan and can say very impressed with the construction and heat sink designs. These are built like a tank.

Just to rub it in - Hey Halong! Pay attention to the CORRECT way to garner loyal customers...

The options  would be.

1.  I ship customers the spares they will  need In advance.  basically the in field failure rate is  1%. so I can just ship units with the order.

2.  Stock parts at Distributors.

3. Stock parts at  Certified technicians. ( hey I stole your idea!)

The Key  of course was explaining to people that  its not optimal to send a whole unit back  IF you design a machine  to be  in field repairable.


The key is designing for reliability.  If you design for reliability then the hardest problem is solved. Marketwise we ship about 25% of the hash rate  last year. Every Bitmain customer that comes to me complains about the same thing: reliability. They report failure rates from 5-30%, so i dont know about the "attention to detail". They key is making a device that is so robust that you cant screw up the manufacturing. They also complained about the downtime  from  shipping back products. I guess the kind of untold story is that our product is designed to be  easily assembled and disassambled  with no specialized training. That means I can ramp production  10X with minimal investment and time. The other untold story is that its easy to repair. When matti and Sky are done with the guide, I hope folks will understand. If not I can always send matti to your farms to train you.  No yacht, sorry, all business here.

Right  bitmain  will work with a million dollar a year client.

But leave the 50,000 to 100,000 a year buyer out in the cold.

I have purchased about 260,000 in gear from them last 4 years.  I get okay service from  Yoshi at MyRig, but  simple issues such as the one today won't be addressed

Their website won't generate a BCH address to pay them I used my last coupon
So I am out the order and the coupon.
I will need to send a dozen emails of complaint  for the 200 coupon or just say fuck it.
This will be the third fuckover since dec of 2017   total about 350 in cash
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.32790850

Canaan has been better for the most part with service to me.

This is why buysolar and I will be looking forward to working with them.

We are east coast maybe we could get a west cost person and a middle of the country person involved with this.

Matti would do Europe.  Well we will see what Canaan has in plan for us.

Concur.  My farm has also been Bitmain based, but I placed my first order for Avalons yesterday.  Post like this one go a long way to making me feel like I made the right call - despite the flood of coupons from Bitmain trying to keep us from switching.

Cool report HagssFIN! It seems like Canaan does have a decent sized operation going on there. I've visited a few manufacturing plants in China during recent years for sure they know how to scale the business there. I can just imagine how massive the Bitmain operation must be. As a miner it is probably better not to know, would make me sick calculating the increasing BTC difficulty with each unit out of the door

Respect to Canaan for this kind of open support/marketing initiative. So far our farm is running only Bitmain units for past price / efficiency reasons, but Canaan is generating trust with their way of addressing the market. Lot of things could be improved, but hopefully they will fix the important parameters and push themselves into contention for the next investment we are going to make.

Bitmain is less forthcoming about it, and at the time did not want it known publicly as they had already decided among their customer base who would benefit most from the training. When I send RMAs to bitmain, its usually at least 250-300 units and I am one of their top large scale customers so im pretty sure thats why I was targeted. They even took us out on a yacht!

I know this isnt a really good description of what im trying to say, but from the pictures posted Avalon looks alot more "first world" in their manufacturing and build process than what I saw at bitmain. Much cleaner, nicer facility, much more attention to detail.

I didn't do a full scale disassembly for the A761 unit, but my understanding is that the control board,
PMU board, hash board design etc. is similar to the A741, but there are more A3212 chips in the A761
and it has a built-in power supply unit with thick wires connected directly from the PSU to the PMU boards.
And steel tube case design is ofc different compared to the A741.

I guess there's just been less documentation of Bitmain having some sort of repair training program, I haven't even heard of something like that until now. Is there any information about Bitmain's program out there somewhere? I've never been great with the technical details of miner repair and I happen to be travelling to China this summer (specifically Nanchang and Beijing), I'd be glad to take a detour to Bitmain or Avalon's facility to see how things work.


Thanks for the info, I guess they used the 761 to help develop the 841 or something of the sort. Weird they never seemed to release it to the Western market, I recall seeing an article back near December saying they were only releasing it for Asian markets.

I wish I had known they were looking for people. I have managed literally thousands of Avalons since beginning my career in crypto.

Last year I visted Bitmain for the same reasons. I toured their facilities, learned how to repair s7 and s9 miners, and learned quite a bit about how their business functions. It would really be great to do something similar with Avalon.

Was Qin FengLing (AKA Mike) still there? I worked with him during the Avalon 6 days.


Bitmain has been offering this same type of training for over a year now, so saying they arent concerned really isnt true :/ They are doing things at 10x the scale of everyone else and the company has been suffering growing pains. For example they were out of space in their Beijing offices before the building was even finished due to the rapid expansion of the company.

I love the technician Certification program Canaan are running, great that Avalon's actually being extremely transparent with their machines and they're willing to actually certify people to repair machines instead of a MyRig and Bitmain Warranty repair service (with some people like Lightfoot, of course) on Bitmain's side, and that they're actually concerned about customer satisfaction unlike Bitmain. This only increases my trust in Canaan, and I'm personally interested in how to troubleshoot and possibly repair these things now.  

Little question, is the 761 test model essentially just a 741 but with a PSU attached to it, similar to the 841? I wasn't able to find much information on it. I love your review style, especially this small documentary of your visit to Canaan. It's not often you get to see how miners are made, especially with most manufacturers being extremely closed-off.

I am glad to see the trip worked well for you.

My partner buysolar will be making the trip for training.

Both of us will be doing USA support  if all works out.

I look forward to this trip that  Sky (buysolar)  takes and look forward to a new step into the cryptoworld as a support rep/trainer for Canaan.

Buysolar is due to do trip in early April  and I will also be posting here  with his impressions.

I am hoping Steve  would send us  some spare parts  to cover the USA service needs once we get this fully going.

We have room  at the solar array for parts storage and even actual working on gear.

The goal would be to end the slow asic  rma issues that hurt the industry.

Reserved for questions, answers, etc.

Question 1


I didn't do a full scale disassembly for the A761 unit, but my understanding is that the control board,
PMU board, hash board design etc. is similar to the A741, but there are more A3212 chips in the A761
and it has a built-in power supply unit with thick wires connected directly from the PSU to the PMU boards.
And steel tube case design is ofc different compared to the A741.