Topic: The Chili – 30+GH/s BFL based Bitcoin Miner Assembly - page 15. (Read 137939 times)

Out of curiosity are there any plans to make boards that have more than 9 BFL chips, or do the BFL chips get too hot to effectively make a larger board?

Thanks for the advice I'll find someone on Monday to do it.

Edit: ChipGeek got in touch with me he is going to take care this for me.

I cannot recommend this, if you have no experience. The boards are so good the heat of your iron will heat the most of the pcb before the solder will melt.

If you find someone in your near (austin looks like not so a small village you should do this by them. Best is to repair them on local shop which also repairs tv's and so on, if there any. It should not costs more than some $.

For your information, for the outer capacity + is in the inner side. That means the blue mark must shown to the outer side. On my post above you can have a look how it should not be mounted.

Cheers...

Yep, I did this with a little help from my air solder gun I found an 1500 µF 16 V type (the only which have had more then 12 V) capacity from an old defect pc main board. I used it as a replacement so the board is hashing now (hopefully longer than before.) The 160 mm x 100 mm x 10 mm backplate heat sink is a little bit expensive with costs of 6€ , but it helps to cool the bfl chips and the power dist chips

And all these only for a few month :/

Cheers...

Hey Mr.Teal I have several caps that broke off of my boards from Lucko from a rough delivery. I have little to no soldering experience but am willing to buy an iron and get some. Can you please give a little more instruction on how to solder them back on. Also I'm here in Austin so if you think it would be better to take them in somewhere do you have any recommendations?

Oh also in the image above his cap has the blue side on the inside I thought it was supposed to be on the outside.

Edit: You know after posting this I'm realizing I'm asking you to hold my hand again, so with that said any pointers would be appreciated but I'll start reading up on soldering. Thx

Wow, I can't believe that happened, or that it wouldn't have shorted out sooner.
The best way to solder the new one on is to use an iron, and either solder paste or flux. Clean the pad off, and apply the paste to the pads. Put the new cap down, and just heat the pad and lead until the solder paste flows.

Hi,

now I understand why one of my boards begins hashing but fails with a short on 12V after 30 minutes:



I will replace them. I hope I find one in one of my boxes. It will hard to replace them with the the backplate heatsink which is melted by thermal activated bonding foil... I will use my pre heater with low temperature (100 °C) and leaded solder.

Demounting was easy (twist left-right some times). After demontage the chilly works again and has not further an short circuit on the 12V rail any more. So I hope I get it back this evening ;-)

Cheers...

Try sending a PM to ChipGeek. I've never seen anything like that, but I don't use a Pi.

Ok this is just flat confusing. 

I Hanover one miner that exhibits the following symptoms

1) if it is turned on before my raspberry ip combiner doesn't see it. Then ten minutes later or so the pi will crash!!

2) if it's on after the pi, the pi crashes almost instantly

3) if I connect it to my PC and turn it on there. Then unplug the USB and plug it into my pi it runs fine for hours.

4) when "doing nothing" before crashing the miner the next to last led will be solid on. Nothing else.

* I have tried multiple pis and multiple USB hubs.

Thoughts?  Should I be using bfgminer instead?

I would re check your cooler contact on that board, then add some secondary cooling UNDER the power modules.  58c seems low on a 36Gh board, possibly why the error rate is high.

I would be expecting ( with a good cooler contact and secondary cooling)  68-70c       38Gh    Hw 5% or less

is low temp + high hash rate + high hardware error rate just bad luck during the self test or a sign of something else (uneven cooling perhaps?).

I have a card running at 58degrees, 36gh but 11% or 12% error rate.

voltage is 1.08v using the 1.1v limited firmware

Thanks
~Hands

@MrTeal: Thanks for the sentiment.  What might help IMO is a much slower voltage ramp, like waiting 30 seconds in between each 0.1V step, to give the chips time to heat themselves up from the load.

So this weekend I actually saw a card "over heat" wait till it hit 30C and then come back to life...

Now to figure out why some cards when they idle just won't get cooler than 32C ~39C

So they CAN self heal..

I plan to rebuild the cooling on all my cards over the week because the error rates are higher than I would like so hopefully that will help.

I apologize for this. Obviously this wasn't how we wanted this to turn out when we agreed to license out the design. I'm still working with Lucko and while it's not likely that we'll be able to solve the underlying issue with the board, there are a couple options we're looking at to at least get them stable for you. It's been slow going since we're had to be working at a distance with me analyzing the results and proposing new tests and Lucko running them and reporting back, but I think we're getting closer for those of you with these affected boards.

It took some doing and the use of a heat gun, but I got them going now:


For some reason the first one shown never raises its voltage.

There was another one that had some pnp errors where a couple of the 0402 caps (C80 and C69) came standing on their ends, only affixed to one solder pad.  I left them on-end and installed some wire bridges to connect them to their other pads.

There's another one that won't always start up.  Sometimes when I connect the power the one LED just flashes forever, and it never starts flashing the second LED.  I have to keep cycling it until it starts.

So they're kinda ornery, but for now at least they're all running.

These are the ones from Technobit.  I'm expecting another 12 from Lucko soon.  I'll see how they do.

I hope you're not talking about my post but just in case. 

I have a "box o heatsinks" and you can see in the pictures I plucked and stuck without any real attempt at alignment....

TIM: http://www.frozencpu.com/products/16875/thr-161/Fujipoly_Extreme_System_Builder_Thermal_Pad_-_Full_Sheet_-_300_x_200_x_05_-_Thermal_Conductivity_110_WmK.html?tl=g8c487s1730

Copper: http://www.amazon.com/Cosmos-Copper-Cooling-Heatsinks-cooler/dp/B00637X42A these are self stick.  I order a pack a week since they get used up quick.

Small aluminum sinks are from this package which is also the primary cooler used: http://www.amazon.com/ARCTIC-Accelero-Mono-Plus-Cooler/dp/B006DAD8HS

The main chips use AC5 thermal paste, I start with an extremely thin (proper) layer, lay the heatsink on the chips, check the contact points on the copper heatsink, then repeat with a thicker layer where needed until I get full contact with the paste on all chips.

The two on the back are from the grab box and were ripped off graphics cards/ motherboards/etc before they went into the trash.  That Fuji-Poly pad will stick heatsinks to just about anything.

To date every asic I have ever received has had extremely horrible thermal interface and inadequate cooling for primary and secondary chips.

This is impressive. What models of heat sinks did you use and what kind of fastening tools?

One of my chilis got angry and went to 26Ghash from 33.

So instead of smashing it with a hammer... 

Hmm, tried flashing it again (several times actually) - no joy.  In a cold room it still craps out and often reboots itself (it seemed to behave a bit better during the day as it was warmer while I was at work but not totally fixed).  Unfortunately when it comes back up the miner doesn't automatically find it (bfgminer - I think cgminer does the same thing), so I have to manually restart the miner.  Not optimal, for obvious reasons.  Occasionally, I have to power cycle it to get it to come back, which I can do remotely since I have a USB-controlled powerstrip (thanks to tiebing's suggestions at an old blog, works great!  http://tiebing.blogspot.com/2011/01/use-linux-to-control-outlet.html )

I've also invoked with --cmd-sick to try to get it to restart the miner but that doesn't seem to do the trick since the miner is happy just letting it send error messages and misreading the temperature ("Received unexpected queue result reponse:" and "Error: temp returned empty string/timed out" and "Failed to send queue").  It seems to do this at 1.102 V and higher whereas the other one runs relatively rock solid at 1.107 V.  Sometimes the bad one will creep up to 1.15 V or so before crapping out, sometimes a bit below 1.1 V.  When it throws these errors hashing just slowly drops to 0GH/s, no increased errors, no increased rejects, no accept (of course), until I SBY restart or kill and restart, after which only the good chili comes up and is recognized unless I wait some number of minutes and the bad one can reboot.

Anything else I can try?

Here are some of the errors:

8-32s should also (barely) fit, and 4-40s would also work though you might need washers.