Quote from: boomin on February 02, 2017, 09:50:44 PM

I am so furious with this R4 situation. I ordered 2 R4's B6 and out of 2 I have 3/4 boards running. I had my brother that works for a huge company that ships BOOKS worldwide get me a quote to send back the r4. OVER 300$ now let us not forget down time. They expect us to PAY for return shipping of the defective unit? NEVER in my life have I dealt with a company that would expect you to pay 300$ for shipping a 24hr defective product back to china! There has to be a better way. I am reading the beginning of this thread again and again thinking I am missing something, but the only thing that comes to play is the fact that these machines take a long time to come up anyway. Is there any truth to the fact that the unit could "self heal" by reprogramming it's own Pic chip? It sounds a little far fetched to me. However, being a team player, I will waste 2 hours AGAIN on my machine to see if there is any truth to that. I also read that someone copied the pic from a working board and duplicated it to a non working board. That is all fine an dandy, however I can't imagine Bitmain being that ignorant as to not copy protect the data on the pic. I do have a pic programmer *being an old PlayStation 1 mod chip installer! LOL

If anyone has ANY insight in to this situation feel free to message me and discuss. I also have a friend that has 3/6 bad R4 B5 This is FAR from acceptable.

Thanks for tolerating my RANT!

Boomin

Yes, you can clone the data from one good PIC to another, but it only solves some problems with the boards. If it's a genuine hardware fault you're out of luck unless you have the equipment and experience to diagnose it.

I saved 1 out of 3 failed boards by copying the pic data. The other two boards have hardware faults that that didn't fix. And no the PIC won't self heal if it's munged up badly enough, but manually copying the data did work once at least. And no additional harm done to the other two busted ones.

Using a pickit3 reading from a good board and writing to a bad board seems to fix the boards that don't show up or communicate at all with the control board. Beyond that it's not so easy. Although you have to remove the little worthless warranty sticker to get to the pic header, so don't expect to get a worthless warranty after you try to fix it yourself.

Also it might be cheaper to send things to bitmainwarranty.com instead of for the warranty in Hong Kong. Not only is the full service cheaper than shipping back to China, but the turnaround is supposedly faster. As a caution I have one S9 board that's been out to them for almost a month now with no reply, so I haven't yet had a successful transaction with them. I still don't know if I trust them, but I certainly can't justify shipping back for a warranty repair.