Post
Topic
Board Hardware
Re: Black Arrow 28nm 100Ghash Bitcoin ASIC from $0.49/GH/s
by
Ren13B
on 19/08/2014, 23:53:16 UTC
So they lied about part quality and used shit components.  I can't say I'm surprised at this point.  It's also possible this is proof that they were mining with customer equipment because they either have a huge design flaw or that miner has been running for months.  Even cheap capacitors don't start failing after 2 weeks.

I've received no human response yet from BA to my support ticket requesting a PSU replacement for my failed unit.  It's been about 45 hours now.

Since the unit is offline anyway I thought I'd take it apart and see if I could find another way to get power into it.  No luck on that front yet, but I did find something else.

I saw that there are 10 decent-sized electrolytic caps on the backplane, and I scanned the tops of them out of habit for signs of bulging, and guess what...out of the 10 caps, 5 had bulging tops, 2 of them to the point where the electrolyte was leaking out.  That's after just 13 days of use.

They're labeled as Sanyo brand caps, rated for 16V 1500uf, 105c.

I guess I should think about ordering up some replacements.  I wonder what kind of shape those caps are in in the still-operating miner...