Topic: Problem with Ztex 1.15y boards on CgMiner (Read 3334 times)

i've encountered a strange problem with my quad fpga. it never gets any accepted shares, just constant hardware errors. frequency is at 200 mhz. i couldn't figure out how to install the ztex drivers so i just straight up installed the winusb. my block erupters are working fine but i can't get the ztex to work? help please!

Nope, I put 4 120MM fans, one on top of each, and everything is running much cooler and the smell is gone.  Cables are not hot, and neither are the connectors.  I can even touch the heatsinks and leave my finger on their without burning it.

That has allowed the frequency to get higher (224 to 228 range), but I am still getting a large amount of HW errors.  But they only start when it hits a certain frequency, is it possible to specify what frequency to run at?

I thought the HW errors would go away when it got cooler?

Any cables getting hot?

Any connectors getting hot?

The boards themselves? Got thermal compound between the 4 little fans and the spartans?

Ähhm: 12V x 20Amps (not quite, but I play safe) would be 240 Watts. Something should ought to be getting warm, consider an electric heater, weak one, 1000W to heat a room. So 250Watts or only 200Watts, you should be able to get some warmth out of that. Where does it go? Make some airflow over the whole setup.

1.15y came in two Versions: V1 No Temp Sensor. V2 has a temp sensor.

Any "compatible" ones, dunno if sensor or no.

As far as I have seen, the current libztex module source code shows no support for a temperature sensor, but don't shoot me if I am wrong.

Your two black cables. Yes, that's what I meant. But that needs to go back all the way to the PSU in Terms of "wire strands". No use to have 4 times 2 cables merging into one small one.

Hot plastic smell. Depends on what is getting hot, doesn't it?

I have 2 black and 1 yellow wire into each board, is that what you mean by double grounding?

Are there temperature sensors on the board?  I am not seeing a temp gauge in cgminer for each one, is there another way to tell?

Is the slight smell of hot plastic normal?

I was unsatisfied with the HW Error rates of cgminer and converted back to BTCMINER. The problem with that: Much more bad handling of backup pools on pool failures. I prefer cgminer over all else actually, but for ZTEX, I am not so happy untuil I do more checking.

But checking costs me hashes, so.....

Currently I prefer the ZTEX BTCMINER on my 1.15y's, although I prefer cgminer on all else.

The reason might be that the libztex code in cgminer is taken from an older version of the current BTCMINER source, but since I have not checked that in any detail, I do not want to insinuate anything and prefer to VERY careful making any statements about that. You need to perhaps check into that yourself by experiment or more research.

Happy to hear that you are hashing away there now and have fun...

Ok. That PSU is rated at 12V 20Amps.

But you are at the Limit, in my opinion, especially since many of the ratings are lies, probably.

Should be ok, maybe. Test it carefully.

But cabling is very important, not just because of fire hazard.

Bear in mind, some PSU (but maybe not this one) are happier if there is a minimum load on 3.3V and on 5V (not much, maybe 200mA). Easy to verify - if problems go away after connecting a DVD drive or a hard disk, it might be the case.

Remember cabling, though, ALWAYS.

See the ZTEX Wiki concerning using PC PSUs, he mentions DOUBLE ground lines.

The benefit of using big black many many ground lines cannot be overemphasized.

The frequency changes are part of the libztex, which is adapted by the cgminer dev team from the ZTEX original Software.

It tries to optimize HW Errors against submitted Shares.

So some HW Errors are to be considered "desirable".

In this forum there is considerable uncertainty as to the actual principle behind this.

The software does not use the temperature sensor. It judges high temperature by the HW error rate.

Cool them well and the frequency might well go higher before the HW errors become to much.

A HW error is a hash by the FPGA that does not match the same hash by the CPU. It will not be accepted. There should not be too many.

I do not use PC PSUs, I have bought one each 12V 20A closed frame industrial PSU per three 1.15y boards and used 4mm² Speaker-Monster cable to connect ground/12V to the terminals of boards.

Ok, I changed around the connectors per board and it seems to be running stably with all 4 connected.  Booting up each time with no problems.

How do I go about optimizing it so the frequency starts correctly?  That seems to be the only thing left if I am not mistaken?

Given what you reported, that one of them at least is wokring, you now have confirmation that the software config is getting close to being ok.

check out each single board ALONE.

then check in pairs.

then check three, and then four.

For four, in my opinion, that's 20Amps at 12V, you need to be good at what you are doing in terms of cabling.

If your grounds (black cable) is small/weak/thin then you are getting a problem on the current returns and some will be getting an alternate route through the ground line of the usb cables = NOT GOOD.

This is my power supply
http://www.evga.com/Products/Product.aspx?pn=120-PG-0750-GR
But, I have one 6 pin connector connected to all 4 boards, could that be it?

2 questions,

1. There are supposed to be hardware errors correct, thats normal for FPGA"s right?
2. What is the Frequency change that it keeps doing?  It seems to improve the speed, but what is it doing?

Time to check something:

Each one 1.15y Needs 4-5 Amps at 12V

While downloading, current goes up 1.5 Amps per Spartan that starts churning, step by step.

If the power supply is too weak, collapse.....

So 2 did the same thing, but when I plugged 3 in it worked!!!! Do i dare try for that 4th though? lol, dude your amazing, tip jar address please.

Ähhm. Don't give up, your nearly there...

High Speed config failed. Low Speed config failed.

Time to check the cabling and overall setup.

Consider trying the ZTEX Software first to see if that has the same problems.

If so, maybe noise on the ground line of the USB connectors due to unsuitable cabling of the 12V supply to the 1.15y module(s).

Well that gets the device to be recognized. and it says found ztex board (only tried it one at a time so far, just trying to do 2 to make sure it works) but after saying it found it then it says
ztex 0005-03-12-1: HS FPGA configuration failed: DONE pin does not go high
and it alternates between that and
same thing but instead of "HS" it is "LS"
then it disables it.

Any idea?

Let's start at the beginning.

If you plug in the ZTEX Boards for the first time and you have not got ANY software from ZTEX on your machine, the system should initially not be able to assign a driver to this USB device. Making it unusable for now.

Or

If you have played around with the BTCMINER software from ZTEX and according to those instructions have made libusb (of ZTEX) available, the ZTEX Module will show up and have that driver associated with it. In this case, and if you have JAVA (sdk or rdk) on your machine, you could run BTCMINER as instructed by ZTEX and verify that the boards are ok.

In EITHER case, getting zadig.exe will allow you to assign a sort of "default" driver to the ZTEX module, either by assigning it or replacing the libusb of ZTEX, depending on the case described above. This default driver is the one that cgminer is happy with. The ZTEX BTCMINER, if you had ever used it, is then no longer happy, it needs the old one.

Use zadig "Options" "List all Devices". In my case, in the list I found ZTEX Module, because I had previously run BTCMINER (Case #2 above).

I then told zadig to change the existing Driver to WinUSB (see the place on the menu with the green arrow and the button to press).

After the confirmation success, I was able to run cgminer but no longer BTCMINER.


Consider zadig.exe to be a sort of quick and dirty way to change USB Drivers on the fly. Without zadig, you need the whole rigmarole of uninstalling, resinstalling etc. of the drivers in the system, which can be very tedious.

To verify that your zadig experiment was succesful, consider executing cgminer thusly before attempting full scale mining, this will save some time:

cgminer --ndevs

you should see:


Before doing the zadig thing, I was getting:

Ok, I will try it when I get home from work.  So basically what I should do is...
Get the drivers from the Ztex website
Install them through the device manager
Run that program and convert it to the windows drivers
and that is it?  It should run after that?  Do I have to do anything else besides hit that button like load them back through device manager or anything?

Ok.
Mine is a 1.15d Spartan 6 LX 90 Board. No big difference...
I had it running fine on WIN 7 in a CMD window (DOS Box) using the Software supplied by ZTEX (BTCMINER).
Whenever I tried to run cgminer, I got the error as you described.
I found out in this Forum, that you should get the zadig usb Driver Manager.
I googled zadig and got to
http://sourceforge.net/projects/libwdi/files/zadig/zadig_v2.0.1.160.7z/download
I downloaded it, unzipped it, and found the zadig.exe, which I executed. played around with the Settings an Buttons and suddenly realised, I can scan the USB, I can see the ZTEX Module, I can replace the original ZTEX Driver with the WINUSB Driver, which without zadig.exe would be a hassle to do, and after doing that, lo and behold, cgminer started working.
To get back to the normal ZTEX BTCMINER you must again use zadig.exe to RESET the USB Driver back to the previous one. You can't have both "worlds" at the same time.

Try it and Report back.

Oh, and yes, as stated above, bfgminer detects the ZTEX modules correctly even without zadig. Can't remember why I didn't like it, though...

Did this end up making it work for you?  Any chance you would want to teamviewer into my machine and do it in about 2 hours and ill pay you .5 bitcoins if you can get it to mine?  I am getting pretty desperate.

I had the same error message.

Get zadig.exe and change the USB Driver from the one for ZTEX (as supplied by ZTEX) to the normal winusb.

i use bfgminer with them, with no problems , cgminer wotn detect them