Topic: Which USB hub to use with Block Erupters | NanoFury NF1 | BPMC Red Fury | Ant U1 - page 12. (Read 128597 times)

I noticed that some of the poweradapters I use for the usb hubs (2x Dlink DUB H7, 3x Rosewill 10 ports) are getting pretty warm. Not extreme but do you think it would help to put a fan on/blow towards the poweradapters? just to cool them a little..

can you fit extension cords in the other slots?

Has anyone found a good Anker style hub that fits the depth of the Bitfury USBs?

Right now I have 4 Red Fury USBs in a 7 port aluminum Anker hub and they fit perfectly but it kills me to not be able to use the other 3 slots, lol.

I'd really like something with a similar style to the aluminum, squarish Ankers... no plastic or sleek design. 

The 3WAC per BE was derived from an actual benchmark result of a hub populated with 7 BEs that were hashing and measured at the wall (120V AC) with a Kill-A-Watt.  The setup drew 21W, hence 21W over 7 = 3W/BE.  This was helpful while I was adding units to the setup.  This also showed that the PSUs are about 83% efficient (2.5WDC over 3WAC) at that particular load and most likely at 85% at 50% load.

Thanks.  I guess cable management is just a carry-over habbit from building gaming rigs.

I'm so sorry about the demise of some of your BEs.  On the bright side, they're not that expensive anymore to replace nowadays.  Excellent idea for the heatsink plates.

Thanks.  Yes, it's the same generic made-in-China-special 7-port hub that's all over the interweb just like the 10-port variety.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Bitcoin-mining-special-design-10-port-usb-hub-Dual-power-Bitcoin-Miner-USB-hub-/121184279151?pt=US_USB_Cables_Hubs_Adapters&hash=item1c37255a6f

Check out this E-Bay ling for a new USB hub

Dual psu and 10 ports

I see you calculate 0.6A per BE, which is indeed closer to the truth. When I calculated power consumption using 0.5A USB 2.0 standard, I always came up seeing power shortage on some BEs, resulting in 2-3 BEs eventually lighting solid green.

And congrats on a really clean cable layout. Mine can be best described as "cable chaos", though I try hard to organise them. I actually paid dearly for the chaos the other day, when I unintentionally reduced the total network hashrate by 1.2GHs  

I always take great care in disconnecting USB cables before the power, but this time one splitter got accidentally pulled out while the units were hashing, resulting in two hubs loosing aux power. A short burst of magic smoke followed and 2 BEs on each hub (the so-called charger connections on D-Links) were no longer lit. I first hoped that it was only the ports that died, but, after connecting the BEs to various ports on various machines, I saw that BEs themselves were gone. Two of them would light up solid green, but would not get recognised by either Windows or Linux (Pi). Two other would not light at all in the resistor closest to the USB connector would quickly get impossibly hot to the touch.

I've now unscrewed the heatsink plates, which would make nice keyring dongles. The rest will be discarded with honours.

That's a nice setup.  Is this the same hub you used?  Looks like it.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/270993842142

That would be 3W*70BEs=210W + netbook=11W + USB fan=2.8W for a grand total of 223.8W at the wall (120V AC).

What is your total power draw including the netbook, USB's and fan?

Thanks!

A+ for neatness!  Well done!

My BEs have evolved to this:



The array consists of 70 devices with daisy-chained hubs hosted by a single USB 2.0 port on an old netbook that's running Windows 7 x86.  A BFL device is also in the mix (the netbook didn't like hosting it separately on its remaining available USB ports) and works just fine.  I decided to populate each hub with only 5 BEs, loading their respective 4A power bricks (which theoretically supports up to 8 BEs) at about 62.5% in an attempt to be within the peak efficiency envelope (around 50% load).  The array is mounted and fits nicely on a 9"x12" clear plastic clipboard.  The netbook draws 11W off the wall (120V AC) while mining.

Thanks for the info. I'm not concerned about being cost effective, this is just more practice designing and assembling PCBs. If I happen to be even remotely close to commercial offerings then great, otherwise I'll have fun building these and powering up my Block Eruptors on an overbuilt USB hub.

I don't have any Dlink hubs, but if you can pop the cover on one and post a picture I can probably tell you what you're dealing with

@Gomeler: If you decide to go for it, this post might be of interest: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2863038

@Photon939: Thanks for the additional info on Rosewill. Do you know if D-Link 7-port has backfeed protection? It appears it does not from my empiric experience, but I have not opened it.

Maybe you got a slightly different version? Mine had 3 separate 4 port chips and 3 separate crystals for said chips. It had a few itty bitty bypass capacitors on the hub chips but that obviously wasn't enough for a device that has significant inrush current.



You will definitely need the higher current capacity if you plan on overclocking them, they push the USB spec envelope a bit at the stock frequency and when overclocked can consume 1A or more.

The hubs I've seen so far haven't bothered with individual port OCP, or any OCP at all. The Rosewill 7 and 10 port hubs had spots on the PCB for picofuses on each port but they were all soldered with 0 ohm resistors. The 7 port however did have backfeed protection via four 1A schottky diodes. The 10 port Rosewill did not have any host power passthrough at all) The cheapo $10 10 port china hub I just got had wimpy wiring, cheap board design, no electrolytic capacitors, questionable soldering quality and the host PC USB +5v rail was tied directly to the barrel jack for power input.

Making your own hub could be rewarding but hardly cost effective. The amount of time spent designing and having board designs sent off for fabricating would cost quite a bit when the $25 rosewill hubs are built quite well otherwise.

Before I dive down a potentially deep rabbit hole, has anyone considered building their own USB hubs? I spent an hour last night reading up on USB.org's design guides for USB2.0 design and looking into TI's 7-port USB chip schematics and it all looks very simple. From what I can tell, it sounds like most of the USB hubs are integrating overcurrent protection ganged across all the ports, rather than a per-port OCP.

I'm thinking to start using TI's 7-port USB2.0 hub chip, provide 500ma OCP per port, and have a Molex 8981 header to power the hub + ports. I'm doing this mostly as I just received some BEs and want to immersion cool them in mineral oil after I replace their oscillators. My only concern is current consumption of modded BEs and whether 500ma is sufficient or if I should step up to 1a and configure the hub for charging downstream ports.

edit: Screw it, going with 1.5 amp per port as per the charging downstream port requirements.

@Rishodi: Added your find to the OP table.

@Photon939: Added your hub to the "Beware" table with an explanation and a link to your instructions.


Yes, that is correct.
I actually use 3 PSUs: one AT from an early Pentium (5V @ 18A), and 2 AXT from Pentium III (5V @ 30A) and Core 2 (5V @ 25A) machines that I once had. Was going to throw away those PSUs, but something stopped me each time: what if I would need them one day. And now that "one day" has come.

The splitters are powering D-Links, which with their 7 BEs should draw around 3.5A-4A. So each connector would draw 8A. A Molex contact is rated to handle 11A, so I am within limits.
ST-Lab, with its 10 BEs should draw around 5A-6A, and I spliced it onto the motherboard ATX connector as the sole cable.

I plug only 1 splitter per Molex string:

18A AT has one Molex splitter connected and draws ~8A
25A ATX has 2 Molex splitters connected, one per sting and draws ~16A
30A ATx has 2 Molex splitter + main plug connected and draws ~22A

I can add one more D-Link hub to the 30A ATX once I get the Blue Furies.

As you can see, the 5V rail has not been ramped up since tose olden days when 5V was more important than 12V, so the old ~280W PSUs have the same 5V capability as you 1500W one. 

The barrel plugs are actually part of the supplies which followed with the hubs. I just cut the cables off (leaving a bit of a cable on the AC adapter side intact in case I need to re-attach to those later).
3 PSUs is an improvement over 11 AC adapters, which were barely squeezable into 2 power strips, and were running very hot, resulting in one burnt out AC adapter an me finally splicing all the cables.

Does this peculiar topology have any advantages over the more common one?