Post
Topic
Board Mining support
Merits 3 from 1 user
Re: T17/S17 malfunction: cases, solutions, remedies, RMA history
by
wndsnb
on 02/11/2020, 14:44:08 UTC
⭐ Merited by frodocooper (3)
The 2nd board is still not coming up after moving heatsinks back into position. Looks like an issue with the pic microcontroller on the board not enabling power so I ordered a pic ISD (pickit 4) to investigate that further. Hoping that Bitmain did not set the read protection on the pic flash so I can read out the firmware to be able to program a replacement chip if necessary, but I'm thinking chances of that are close to 0. If not, it looks like zeusbtc sells a download for pic firmware for all Bitmain's miners.

Well, the problem with this board was not the pic microcontroller. Turns out I was just not looking for its enable signal at the right time. The test jig I have only runs the board for about 1.5 seconds when it doesn't detect any ASICs, and I was measuring the pic outputs after the board had already powered down.

I was able to connect to the pic with the pickit4 and read the pic firmware out of a known good board and use it to verify the firmware in the bad board. So it does not look like there is a need to buy a download... a little sketchy that Zuesbtc is trying to sell it when you can read it yourself with the tools needed to program the chip. I haven't actually programmed a chip with the firmware I read out, so maybe there is some issue with doing that that I'm not seeing. Or maybe some boards do have the read protection bit set and I got lucky.