Quote from: philipma1957 on December 31, 2018, 01:03:37 AM

Quote from: whiteogre on December 31, 2018, 12:55:13 AM

Got my unit few days ago and here are some findings/comments/observations that could be of use to someone.

First of, the unit itself was intact so not broken side panels. However, I did notice that it didn't sit flat on the table and appeared to have a tendency of rocking between two opposite corner (more on that later). Many have claimed the fan to be quiet but that's not something I can really agree with since at least my unit has clear bearing noise/rumble coming from it on low fan speeds until the air noise takes over on higher fan speeds. Additionally, there was a clear resonance audible from the case itself which led me to disassemble the casing is it didn't sound normal. It turned out that the fan had been screwed with too much force to the heatsink causing two of the corners of the fan to look visibly bent. The fan install had also forced two of the aluminium ring spacers(?) to get partially embedded in the heatsink resulting in the fan not sitting straight and most likely making contact with the side panel as a result. Fixing those issues removed the resonance noise and made the unit also sit flat on the table.

Then more software related things (not in any order):

it would be nice for the Lockscreen to automatically focus the input field instead of having to click it first
for some reason the raw data (bfgminer json) doesn't show the MH/s value anywhere correctly, values are in the 3-6 MH/s range, something to do we the current beta driver?
auto fan settings isn't really that usable (as has been discussed already in previous comments)
touching the fan setting on the page causes the slider to jump down due to the save dialog appearing on the top of the page
the manual fan setting could be an input box or have more than 5% resolution as manipulating the filesystem side files show that 1-2% resolution is usable
even with fan speed set manually, there's some audible repeating variance in the the rpm (unstable pwm generation? don't have scope to check)
the mcu appears to be jumping mostly between maximum and minimum frequency depending if the UI is displayed or not, lowering the maximum frequency could make the mcu colder since it isn't being actively cooled and there's not much space for a heatsink either
hwmon is writing /var/local/apollo/hwmon/fan_rpm and /var/local/apollo/hwmon/pcb_temp every 2 seconds and that directory isn't on tmpfs, this will most likely reduce the life expectancy of the sd card
some sort of read only json api endpoint for getting stats from the unit is missing, the bfgminer api could do (if it would provide usable values) but it's still missing the fan rpm and temperatures

As a side note, if someone is looking for passive power supply for a single unit in eco mode then the Dell DA-2 (12V 18A) is one possible option worth looking. I happened to have one without use and it only needed an adapter to be made for the power connector. I have no idea what the official efficiency of that brick is but the meter says 130-133W @ 102 MH/s which appears to be in line with other comments in this thread.

that is a good 1 unit eco power solution. 12 x 18 = 216 and 133/216 = 61.5% of the brick

https://www.trcelectronics.com/

carries a lot of 12 volt psu's

https://www.trcelectronics.com/ecomm/pdf/hrp300.pdf

this one does 300 watts so 1 unit would work it is 88% eff.

it is about 73 dollars it can be found elsewhere.

here is a lower cost model 32 usd and 85% eff

https://www.trcelectronics.com/ecomm/pdf/lrs350.pdf

lastly this one has a nice look to it.

https://www.trcelectronics.com/ecomm/pdf/enp360.pdf

it is 91% eff and power can adjust 11.5 to 13.8 volts dc

it is fanless and only 79 bucks . Never used it but I may buy it to test with these units

FYI the 92-94% Platinum efficient 200 watt brick I am building will cost 40-60 USD range..it will probably be ready end of next month.