Topic: [Solved] Avalon 921 Blue Light but no Hashing (Read 742 times)

https://www.cryptouniverse.at/avalonminer-821-841-861-setup-tutorial-troubleshooting-guide/

hi
how did u flash vidtoo controller by sd card? may u explain and give me the link of rom provided by canaan
ty

I have similar problems, would you please pm me? I guess we can talk on the phone.

I've also started this thread about avalon 921 restarting:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5132499.new#new

Flashing an SDCard with the ROM provided by Canaan fixed the VidToo Controller and I am going to replace my RP3 with VidToo especially because I had some issues with one of the AUCs keep disconnecting randomly to see if this fixes the problem. Tried multiple 2.5a and 3a power adapters and no success.

A good thing about the VidToo controller I believe is that it doesn't use a USB Hub (need to double check it to be sure, but the processor used has 4 separate USB duel pins), but RP3B uses a USB Hub internally shared by the ethernet controller and all 4 full sized USB ports; so that might be the reason for my problem. Or maybe 1200ma (max supported USB current in RP3B) is not enough for 3 AUC and I need a powered USB Hub.

As for OrangePi, unfortunately, my OrangePi One didn't boot up with the ROM provided by the Cannan for H2-H3 even tho they are similar. You can still install the OpenWRT and then install the necessary packages manually. But the release ROM is not compatible out of the box.

Cool information, thank you.

If anyone has a Orange Pi, it would be interesting to test the H3-H2+ firmware with it and see if it works.

Obviously the price. This board is way cheaper than an RP3. Smaller RAM, a cheap small internal memory instead of an 8GB SDCard, a slow and cheap chipset and no unnecessary interface like HDMI, GIO Pins, Wifi, etc. I bet this cost them 1/10 of what a RP cost especially as these seems custom made for Canaan.

To be honest; RP3 is way too overpowered for OpenWRT; my PR3 was always under 0.01 load in the past two days. That's what, around 1% of one core?


Didn't expect this. Thanks for informing me.

Weird. Wonder why they went with that controller vs a good old RasPi-3B?
Along that line, if you do pick up another Pi, be aware that (at least in the past) the 3B+ version does NOT work.

Just for the sake of completion and as probably the first one here getting a VidToo controller; following are some pictures of the board and some of my thoughts regarding it. First I should inform you that I am yet to be able to boot it up again due to the fact that I don't have a MicroSD card in hand at the moment and my experiment with Ethernet and the USB stick failed so far (it was a long shot anyway).

A very cheap and simple box is used with this board, but it does the job I suppose:
https://i.imgur.com/sa8N9mn.jpg

This board supposedly has a hardware version 1.3 and software version 1.0 and is created for Avalon A9 series:
https://i.imgur.com/vCjdsYV.jpg

Nothing special going on inside, the board has 4 USB ports and one Ethernet Port along with a MicroUSB port for power and a MicroSD card slot. There is a place for a power adapter connector but it seems they ditched it out in favour of the MicroUSB connection. If you look closely at the left side thereof the board there is a 3pin TTL UART connector operating at 3.3v. I failed to find my TTL UART 2 USB converter to check if anything is going on with this connector. However, I don't expect much. There is also a button next to the MicroUSB port that I don't know what it supposedly does. Pressing it once doesn't change anything but holding it while the board is booting enters in some sort of firmware update or bootloader update I think because the board no longer restarts. However, without an HDMI connector, it is hard to guess what really happens there.
Image: https://i.imgur.com/7fuCBYW.jpg

Nothing at all is going on at the back side of the PCB:
Image: https://i.imgur.com/Tew8r2i.jpg

This board has an Id of ZG834 but I found nothing online:
Image: https://i.imgur.com/HoHbuu7.jpg

There is a Nanya NT5CC64M16GP 128MB (1024Mbit) DDR3 DRAM here:
Image: https://i.imgur.com/KQnfF0G.jpg
Info: https://www.arrow.com/en/products/nt5cc64m16gp-di/nanya-technology

And a GigaDevice GD25Q127CSIG 16MB (128Mbit) flash memory. This is the internal memory of the board:
Image: https://i.imgur.com/P6cP7Ak.jpg
Info: https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/gigadevice-semiconductor-hk-limited/GD25Q127CSIGR/1970-1027-1-ND/9484777
AliExpress: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/50pcs-GD25Q127CSIG-GD25Q127CSIGR-25Q127CSIG-25Q128-25Q127-SOP-8-new-original/32895669867.html
Datasheet: http://www.elm-tech.com/en/products/spi-flash-memory/gd25q127/gd25q127.pdf

No wonder I messed this up. The firmware was like 50mb.

And a TNK BT16B03 ethernet transformer chip for isolation:
Image: https://i.imgur.com/b7j5W3V.jpg
Info: https://lcsc.com/product-detail/RJ45-Transformer_TNK-BT16B03_C216354.html

The main chipset is an AllWinner H2+ ARM Cortex 7 and is hidden behind a heatsink. I didn't try to take the heatsink off as I knew the type of the chipset already from the firmware and the OpenWRT stat page. This chipset is very similar to the AllWinner H3 that is widely used in different devices including the OrangePi boards. I wonder if this means we can use the H3-H2+ ROM provided by Canaan to create a controller with OrangePi boards, they are widely available and a lot cheaper compared to a RasberryPi (1/3 of the price to be exact).
This chipset does have an HDMI output; it's just that with this PCB they didn't expose the pins.
Datasheet: http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/images/0/08/Allwinner_H2%2B_Datasheet_V1.2.pdf
Info: https://docs.armbian.com/Hardware_Allwinner-H3/

Couldn't find much about the VidToo company that designed and created this board except a piece of old news:
https://www.design-reuse.com/news/45322/vidtoo-codasip-bk3-risc-v-processor.html

And the fact that they are close to Canaan:
https://canaan-creative.com/en/ai-blockchain-diedairenleiwenmingawalongmugongsijiananyunzhiabcdzhiyeji-2018-yingban.html

So I can say with a quite high certainty that this board was in fact sent by the Canaan and not by my distributor.

If I fail to boot this with an SDCard I am going to take the flash memory out and try my luck by programming it with a serial connection using the firmware provided by Cannan. If I succeed; you hear about me; otherwise you can consider that I failed to revive the controller. Which means I lost more than 50$ using my RP instead of this. xD Had a lot of plans for that RP.

I too did not receive any reply from Canaan when I recently contacted them to request for a replacement for a failed A921 hash board. Their dedicated email address for RMA requests — [email protected] — apparently no longer exists; my email to that address was returned.

Only when Blokforge contacted Canaan on my behalf — Blokforge took three weeks before responding to my support request — did Lily Han from Canaan inform me that the person in charge of after-sales support had left the company. There is therefore currently no one handling support tickets at Canaan, according to Lily.

Anyone seeking support from Canaan should therefore contact Lily directly at [email protected].

Glad to hear things are now working. Ja, not sure why the A9's are so picky about versions as I never had the problem with the A7 and A8 series.
Merit to ya for keeping us up-to-date on the results and changing the Topic title to show problem solved. Way too many folks fail to do that...

Surprised Canaan has not responded to you yet! In the past they have always been very fast responding to the few issues I and others have ran into.

Got them all working.

First I tried my RP3 with the latest firmware (20190103: https://canaan.io/downloads/software/avalon921/openwrt/20190103/rpi3-modelb/) and this managed to get those 3 miners with newer firmware working, but failed to get other 9 with an older version of firmware to work. So the statement about Avalon miners and controllers being picky about the firmware version is completely right and it happens both ways.

Then I tried updating the Vidtoo H2 to the latest controller firmware and used the 20190103 ext4 SysUpgrade (https://canaan.io/downloads/software/avalon921/openwrt/20190103/h3/) file system but this resulted in controller failing to boot up and stuck in an infinite restart. So my Vidtoo controller is dead at this point. Brought it home to see if I can fix it.

Meanwhile, I used my RP3 to update the other 9 miners to the 9211901-faf6d80 (https://canaan.io/downloads/software/avalon921/mm/2019-01-03/) firmware after disconnecting the 3 miners that are already up to date and each time with 3 of them connected to minimize the risk in case I mess something up. And it went well. RP3 now successfully runs all 12 miners all being on the latest firmware.

One thing to keep in mind is that Vidtoo H2 probably uses SquashFS filesystem so if anyone got a Vidtoo H2 controller you should be extra cautious with upgrading the firmware especially as it seems to have internal memory (along with an SDCard slot) and the default firmware is probably on the internal memory because in my case the SDCard Slot is empty. I need to add that I am not totally sure if it is in fact formatted with SquashFS; what I know is that the 20190103 ext4 SysUpgrade, when applied without removing old settings, will fail. It might be also because I missed something.


I got my devices from a local distributor; I also failed to find any information about this board. In fact, even Canaan only provides roms for this device in their latest firmware and there is no mention of this device with their older firmwares. My distributor mentioned that these controllers are new so my guess is either Canaan is sending this controller instead of RP with their 2019 batches or that my distributor just jumped on the opportunity to buy a cheaper board as soon as Canaan added support. However, with the controller having a private firmware (a version not available anywhere publicly) there is more chance that this was what Canaan sent to them.

Thank you all guys, specially Steamtyme and NotFuzzyWarm; your suggestions were priceless. Also everyone else for taking the time reading the log file; I know it wasn't easy to follow things and it probably took a lot of time. I am yet to receive a response from Canaan btw.

Ja. Be aware that when you flash MM firmware ALL miners on that controller get the update.
Any miners you do not want to change must first be disconnected from the controller.

It's convenient you already have a rpi3 ready to go. I hadn't heard of anyone using other controllers, where did you order  your gear from

You should try at the moment just swapping your controller for the rpi and see if you still have the issue with the 3.

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As a side note do they run any risk at the moment if they were to load the 3 machines with the same MM version as the others.

I only ask because if they did not have a pi available, that would be the fastest option for trying to get all machines hashing.

I would setup it with a RPi and do as frodocooper said in his post.

The thing is that the controller I got with the miners is a Vidtoo H2 and there is no older firmware for it; only the latest version. And I can't check the firmware on the controller as I don't know where to look in to see the version inside the OpenWRT control panel (there is only one version for OpenWRT itself); therefore I have a feeling maybe controller is the latest version and in that case I might need to downgrade those 3 miners instead of upgrading the other 9. Canaan is yet to respond to my ticket and I am little scared to change anything before getting an ok from them; however, I am going to try some of your suggestions this evening guys anyway to see if I can get them all working. Have my RP3 ready with the latest firmware to see if I can get those 3 to work with the new controller before trying to upgrade the main controller and then all miners. A lot of confusions here.

If the firmware is, in fact, the number I get at the top of CGMiner API Log, then it is 20180929 which is, two versions old; but this version is not even available in their download repository (nearest being 20180926).

It's most likely the case that your Controller's older OpenWrt firmware is not communicating properly with the newer MM firmware of your three non-functioning A921s. Canaan made some changes and added some new parameters post-20180929 that may cause communication issues between the older Controller firmware and the newer MM firmware. I do not see any other apparent issues in your logs.

I therefore suggest a clean install of version 20190103 of the Controller firmware and then a reflash of all of your A921s to version 2019-01-03 of the MM firmware.

Well, based on this page: https://github.com/Canaan-Creative/avalon9-docs/wiki/AvalonMiner-921-firmware-downloads

There is no 9211901-faf6d80 firmware version at all (latest being the one already installed on the other 9 miners) and if number here means anything, the version installed on these 3 is newer.

The thing is, this is my first batch of Avalons and I have no prior experience with them. I only had S9 to this point. Do I need to use the "MM Upgrade" option in the control panel? Does it matter that this controller is not even fully compatible with these devices? Should I worry about this fact that the faulty MM version seems higher? and do I need to disconnect other miners before updating the firmware?

Avalons are both good (less Lan cable, no software needed to change settings globally, easier reporting and settings when working with one WebUI) and a pain in the a**; mixed feelings already. xD

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Edit:

Just as I expected, the firmware installed on these 3 miners are in fact newer. Github page is outdated, but the firmware is available to download from their download directory: https://canaan.io/downloads/software/avalon921/mm/2019-01-03/

If this is, in fact, the case, I need to update my controller firmware to this version which is released on the same day as the MM firmware: https://canaan.io/downloads/software/avalon921/openwrt/20190103/

I might need to upgrade my other 9 miners to the newer firmware before moving on with the controller as I have only one controller at the time.

I think you nailed it. I was trying to track the same thing but kept getting lost in the log, that's one of the reasons I was gonna get you to group things together, it would be easier to compare them.

I don't have any past the 841's, and I haven't updated anything in a while. Best to confirm with Canaan/or someone here. I think you'll need to just set up the 3 miners having problems and then upgrade the other version that is working across the board. This way everything will be the same. Not sure if there's benefits to one over the other, but once everything is the same, you can make changes in one broad stroke moving forward.

Thanks for replying.

I also suspected a problem with cables and even maybe AUCs having a problem with not supporting more than 3 miners (I know it might be silly, but at first I got one faulty miner per each AUC, so that was a valid guess) However cables should be alright as miners further the line get the signal and work alright; I also tried changing cables, trying with one miner directly connected to and AUC again directly connected to the controller and in summery, every combination I thought might be useful to isolate the problem. No success tho.

I am using the same adapter provided by the controller in my case; don't know the specifications tho; I might try to find a 3A adapter I know I have lying around somewhere that I used for my RP3 plex setup to see if it changes anything. But I doubt it is an undervoltage problem with USB ports as all three AUC are powered and each has 3 miners connected to them working alright.

At this stage, considering the fact that all faulty miners have the same MM version, I think it might be a firmware or a hardware problem. I am now going to open a ticket with Canaan; but does anyone here used a miner with MM Version 9211901-faf6d80 before? Couldn't find anything about it by googling it.

That could be part of the problem -- a while back someone mentioned that the 921 is very picky about which controller firmware version and which miner firmware versions are used. They sort of had to be matched up as I recall.

As said before, put all 3 on 1 controller to make it easier to troubleshoot without losing hash rate from the ones that are working.