Topic: USB BLOCK ERUPTER (repair and tricks) (Read 11973 times)

I would like to add, I had to do the serial numbering for XP usage.
W7 "virtualizes" ports just fine even if all devices have the same serial device numbers.

I also needed to remove all hubs and miners from machine to run the utility without errors, on XP.
Insert One USB Miner on XPmachine at a time and run utility.

ANT U1 & U2 also.

This seems to be a XP only issue.

thank you THANK you, THANK YOU

The Information and Utility is quite helpful, thank you.

freddy

Did I miss this response causing neglect. After using this utility everything began to work beautifully. They are all labeled in an organized many. Nice little, fool proof utility I might add...

I finally got cgminer 3.4.3 to work doing a hot install of each USB miner one at a time.

yes, i have a jovy proffessional hotair station in my work, but i use a cheap 80€ aoia hotairstation from ebay since 7 years... this cheap hotair works since 7 years pefectly till today...
i have 2 other cheap hotairs from china, this two didnt work good since day 1.
but the first one is doing its job realy good.
i like it more then the expensive jovy system.

sometimes i use irda station too, but i dont like it... i have a better feeling with the hotair station.

i solder with it mostly micro usb connectors of phones, bga's, other connectors, smd parts...
i also repaired many ati hd5970 grafikcards with it.
mostly the volterra vrm's getting demaged over time caused by overclocking and heat.
but for that you need a preheater too, you cant desolder vrm's without a preheater.

if you work with elektronics, especialy with smd parts, buy a cheap (not the cheapest) hotairstation.
you get it from 50€ to some tausends euros...
look for aoya hotairstations, arround 80€, they seems to be realy good for the money.
its realy worth and makes the work mutch more easy.
but you need to get a feeling for it (air, temp, time), you need to get some skills to handle it correctly
without demaging your targets, better learn on old motherboards first.

you cant solder big chips like nvida grafik chips or cpus, but you can solder most connectors, bga's in
size of gsm phones chips.

for bigger chips you need a realy big irda station with pre-heater.

exactly!
it was my mistake.. for some reasons in hurry i plugged it in and looked how it smoke up!

same could happend if you have connected to mutch on one hub.
when the supply is overloaded it is possible when it burns that too mutch current flows to the devices and kill all of them.

i was lucky, i got demaged usb erupters from other members of this forum and was able to make from all demaged, some working once.

True story....

Just so you know, USB works on 5v, not 12v. If your USB hub's power brick is rated for 12 volts, it is because your USB hub has internal power circuitry that brings the 12v down to 5v. If you connect a 12v power source to a hub that does not have this circuitry, you will fry everything, including the USB port on your motherboard since the power 12v power will backlash into the 5v and ruin everything. Byebye hard drive and integrated circuits.

I know the feeling. I lost a weekend of time and mining time because of this. What did you end up doing?

Thank you for this keyword. Learned something else new today! Not a bad tool to add to the lab one day. Your right, an iron would never do it. You'd butcher it.

Ditto! It was almost too easy! Surprised this issue was not brought up sooner or at least im surprised the discussion is not widespread!
 

Wow. Wish I had known about that a month ago!

Thank you for the info regarding the USB serial numbers and how to reprogram, I was able to get 5 USB miners running today on an old XP machine.

He's almost certainly using a hot air rework station. An iron could never do it. IR rework station is a possibility too, but most folks don't have one just laying around.

Hats off to you and many congrats on taking this project to the max and reviving your BE's. I have to ask what Solder iron do you have? That must of been a tedious task to solder the chip properly to the board. WOW! I have experience with soldering but not with such small components. Anyways...good post, link and pictures. Will be downloading the referenced serial programming software. Cheers.

i think i found someone how sell me his demaged erupters, with luck the asics are working.
well see when i have it in hands..

Well I hate to hear you killed them , but I am glad to see a photo with all the parts off, kind of what I thought was going on under the chips and since I have been lucky and not tore mine up yet I have not had a need to remove the parts yet. Yes I wish you could but the BE100s, I am sure you can most likely more than the whole stick would be my luck.

if you connect your usb miner with 2 different usb ports and asap when you connect the 2nd miner into your usb port
and you see in device manager that yellow "!" and you dont get 2 usb miners and no comport, then its because all
usb miners have same serial, causing a conflict.

if you whant to solve this problem, then you need to write your own serial into the silabs EEPROM chip.

with this tool: http://jau.cc/asic/CP210x_Manufacturing.zip

at beginning standart config of the usb miner looks like this:


so now goto "Serial Number" and write your own serial into it:


and press "Programm Device".
it will write your own new serial into the eeprom and now you can connect 2 usb block erupters without any problem.

if you have more, you need to repeat this step with every device, but you need to use different serials!

NEVER PRESS "Custom Data Lock" to LOCKED, cause this will permanent LOCK this data and you can never change it back!


i killed 4 block erupters by connecting a jalapeon power supply to my usb hup.
it had 13 volt and 6 ampere.. i had connected a big fan and 4 block erupters, but asap when i connected the jalapeno power supply,
it burned the silabs CP2102 chip!

i ordered brand new CP2102 chips and soldered it in, but the only thing that happens was that the silabs chip got very very hot.

i desoldered every part and checked it, and all parts seemed to be ok, i even soldered the components from bad usb miner
into a working usb miner, and it still was working...

so i started to desolder every part on the usb miner, exept the silabs chip and the asic...



but still, the silabs chip is getting very hot and the computer dont detected it!

so at least i desoldered the BE100 asic chip and TATAAAA!  the asic miner is detected again...

but that also means, the WORST CASE for me!  
cause every part would be changeable... we could repair or change every other part, but not the asic itself..

so i soldered all back, and my computer is still detecting it, but without a working asic....


SO NEVER CONNECT MORE THEN 5 VOLT TO YOUR USB HUB!
AND DONT CONNECT MORE ERUPTERS TO YOUR HUB AS YOUR PSU CAN SUPPLY!