Id also be up for this tbh. Fractal BC's code base is great, but its still not stable! Im sure the community as a whole could donate some to you for testing as so many people bought them and they don't worj properly !

Im guessing no further progress has been made with integrating the AntMiner U1's into the CGMiner core code?

I don't see any updates on Github but just thought id check

Well, I ran mine with 3 ants and 2 Block Eruptors but whilst it worked, it wasn't stable. The BE's kept starting and stopping and the Ant's weren't mining at full speed.

Perhaps BFG miner hands them better but id say to avoid it to be honest., bearing in mind it would take 6.5 BE's to reach the 2GHS that 1 single overclocked Ant can create, you only need 8 Ant's to surpass the speed that 49 BE's can hash at.

Yeah id say theres something wrong there, the ants can do 4 blocks in about 10 seconds id guess.

Also try tightening the U1's Allen key bolts a little. On my 3 ants (that's a total of 6 bolts) 2 of them were fine, 2 needed half a turn and the other 2 were very loose needing over 1 full turn.

I haven't done them up to superhero tightness, just nipped them up. May help with heat & speed issues. Just for ref, my 3x ants in a raspberry pi (with powered hub) tend to average 0.40 or lower HW errors (they do have fans cooling them however).

Most Ant's will experience issues if overclocking to 0A81 (2.2ghs) due to voltage and obviously heat issues. My CGminer takes about 15-20 seconds to initialise and start mining.

Ive now got a watchdog running as I got fed up with the manual morning and evening reboot and the downtime in between!

Looks like I can remove a single line to stop the service and test this customised USB cable. I mean, either way, the cable seems a good idea anyway to be fair.

Great

Ive prepared a USB cable now so il try that first and then the watchdog if not.

It is interesting though as a power issue wouldn't cause high CPU usage which is what your watchdog is rebooting upon... odd indeed.

Il give this a shot tonight. Sure this will work though? Were talking about cutting the red wire (which is the +ve wire) that takes power from the pi's USB ports to the hub, correct? I suppose that's logical really, power can be back syphoned to the RPI through that USB socket so I guess it can also pull it the other way, also, the hub is powered, so you don't need to be sending it another 5V...

Alternatively, il need to look into cron jobs and watchdog services as chadgroover has done, but that's new territory for me. I suspect it is probably power related however as when the mining stops I cannot ping the RPI from my desktop machine. I know the Ethernet is just a USB > Ethernet adaptor so really should have thought about this one before...

Its just so unpredictable! sometimes it can be 5-10 mins, other times its 12+ hrs before it locks up! Im preparing a cable now to test when im back home, fortunately my work has thousands of USB A-B cables.

Hoe did yours go, mine ran until about 4:30AM before crashing, have since restarted the pi and was running all day, still is. CGminer CPU usage was/is a lot lower still but not 100% solid yet.

Maybe your on to something here.

With my fresh built image ive just done (as per the post above) I still saw ~60% cpu usage by CGMiner.

Have just commented out that line in etc/init.d and rebooted and am instead running it with

And im seeing 1% usage. I wonder if its a specific option, or indeed the config file itself that's causing high CPU utilisation....

Gonna leave mine hashing overnight, if its still running tomorrow then il be 95% sure its the config file that's causing issues. Il slowly try removing lines and options until the CPU usage drops to these levels, or I cant remove anymore! I just prefer using the config file as it means the launch code is cleaner

Hey guys,
      Well, i know i said i was just going to deal with it and wait for propper CGMiner support for these, but, i got bored so about 2 hrs later i have a fresh build.
      
Set-up is the same as before with regards to how the system works, but i beleive i may have introduced some instability on my previous image due to me copying the configure file from standard CGMiner, the one on this new image was created by autogen.sh from scratch and is currently mining for me at 6.2GH's.

I have updated my previous post here with the new image link https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=390929.msg4416810#msg4416810 ,but to save you going back, the new link & slightly tweaked instructions are below...

This version ONLY support the AntMiner U1 sticks and NOT BlockEruptors as im sure that wasnt helping.

Instructions
1. Download img file
Open with winrar and extract the img file.

2. Open Win32 Disk Imager & select your device, then the location of the image you downloaded and finally click "Write". Insert the SD back into the Raspberry Pi once complete.

3. Gain access to the device, either by your keyboard & screen directly or use Putty to SSH to it.

4. Run the following command & edit the pool details at the top of the script.
Once done, hit CTRL+x to exit, then y and enter to save the file.

5. Run the following command & check you are happy with the current launched version of CGMiner, as standard, the overclock setting is on which runs the Ant's at ~2GHS. The Option above this runs the sticks at their stock speed, just comment out one line or the other.
Once done, hit CTRL+x to exit, then y and enter to save the file.

6.Lastly, enter the command below
And wait for the pi to come online. You should see your IP address, then "Connecting to CGMiner..." and the finally your Antminers should start blinking and stats show on the screen within 30 seconds

I'm hashing with 3 AntMiner U1 overclockeds at somewhere around 6Ghs, sometimes slightly above, sometimes slightly below.

Oh, and of course this STILL isn't 100% stable even after the further changes. It still crashes sometimes, sometimes after 10 mins, sometimes it can run for 8-9 hrs.

The fault lies with the driver itself but that's BitMains issue, we're all just working with what we have been given and this is by far the most stable one I've tried so far.

Any beer tokens you wish to send my way will of course be hapilly received to "1MA58F5ctQxZuaeaVuSVC2d6SSnKGNbw4f" & of course, thanks to fractalbc for creating the custom version of CGminer.

Thanks.

I tend to get the same, first lock up after around 5-15 mins and the next one after a reboot around 9 hrs later.

Im just gonna deal with it for now until CGMiner fully supports these. I really cant be bothered formatting the SD card, following the adafruit tutorial and getting CGMiner working again.

Just ran PS -ef on mine and also see high CPU useage


Perhaps its due to how I run cgminer. (nohup) is there a better way to spawn a process that keeps running all the time?

Glad its working and you tried my image. Id say its a 50/50 build. To me, fractalbc did all the hard work with the compiling of his version of CGminer, I just installed it on mine where i already set up adafruit LCD support and created the SD card image really

The stability thing is weird, I have remote access to another machine in my house and earlier today I saw on slushs pool that my hash rate had dropped to 0. So I accessed the other box and tried to SSH to the Pi, but no response. Pinged its IP, dead as a doornail. Im not sure HOW it locks up, does CGminer crash and lock up the entire RPI, or does the RPI itself crash, I just know sometimes it does. that said, its been running for about 5 hrs stable now but ive gone back to stock clock speeds on the ant's to see if the overclock was causing issues.

OK, so here it is for anyone that wishes to use it.
This is the image just taken from my Raspberry pi which uses fractalbc's version of CGMiner 3.9.0 compiled to work with BlockEruptors and Antminer U1 USB miners simultaniously. My image runs Raspbian and is fully up to date as of the time of this post.

This version also works with the adafruit 16x2 lcd, correctly showing mining stats as per their PiMiner tutorial.

You need to be using a 4GB (or larger) SD card to fit the image onto it and you need to get hold of Win32 Disk Imager from http://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/ to image the SD card. You also need access to the Pi, either via Putty or direct on the device.

Note: I really struggled to find somewhere that allows uploads of large files for free and that give decent bandwidth. MEGA allowed enough upload, but had a tiny allowance of downloads. If the link below goes down, il TRY to find somewhere else unless someone has an FTP they could put this on. I have no idea how many times the service i've used will allow this file to be downloaded, compression is as good as i can get however, 3.7GB file compressed to under 900MB.

Instructions
1. Download img file
Open with winrar and extract the img file.

2. Open Win32 Disk Imager & select your device, then the location of the image you downloaded and finally click "Write". Insert the SD back into the Raspberry Pi once complete.

3. Gain access to the device, either by your keyboard & screen directly or use Putty to SSH to it.

4. Run the following command & edit the pool details at the top of the script.
Once done, hit CTRL+x to exit, then y and enter to save the file.

5. Run the following command & check you are happy with the current launched version of CGMiner
Option 1 runs the sticks at their stock speed, option 2 overclocks them to ~2ghs and option 3 runs the standard BitMain version of CGminer but you lose support for the Adafruit LCD. Once done, hit CTRL+x to exit, then y and enter to save the file.

6.Lastly, enter the command below
And wait for the pi to come online. You should see your IP address, then "Connecting to CGMiner..." and the finally your Antminers should start blinking and stats show on the screen within 30 seconds

I'm hashing with 3 AntMiner U1 at stock speeds and 2 Block Eruptors at somewhere around 5.4Ghs, sometimes slightly above, sometimes slightly below. With overclocks i could be around 6.5 however you do get many more HW errors with mixed devices. Currently at 1.7% but with just AntMiners i stay well under 0.04%, plus sometimes the BlockEruptors stop and start again. I recommend just using Antminers for now.

Oh, and of course this STILL isn't 100% stable. I've compiled 3-4 different versions of CGminer and tried various methods and CGMiner still crashes sometimes, sometimes after 10 mins, sometimes it can run for 8-9 hrs and then I restarted it to try another version! The fault lies with the driver itself but that's BitMains issue, we're all just working with what we have been given and this is by far the most stable one I've tried so far.

That's it really. If you have any issues just post and hopefully il see it. Any beer tokens you wish to send my way will of course be hapilly received to "1MA58F5ctQxZuaeaVuSVC2d6SSnKGNbw4f" & of course, thanks to fractalbc for creating this custom version of CGminer.

Thanks.

Forgot to say, mine arrived abour 1.5 weeks ago on time as promised.

They arrived however in a regular white envelope which was torn on one side from the corners of one of the Ant's boxes. Any more and one could easily have fallen out so id recommend changing your packaging/posting material

Personally, when I ran ./autogen.sh it moaned there was no configure file therefore I downloaded CGminer 3.9.0 from git and copied this to the place where I had pulled fractalbc's version, then ran it and all was good.

If anyone's bothered, I can see about getting the SD card image uploaded to somewhere (probably MEGA). All you would need to do is use win32 disk imager and then edit the cgminer.config file with your pool details. Its not running minepeon though, its raspbian.

Fractalbc's code base seems about as stable as my previous version was, on the first boot ir runs for about 20,000 shares (around 1.5-2hrs) then crashes, but reboot it and it will run all day no problems. Points to driver issues to me rather than Cgminer but its great to have the screen back.

Brilliant, thanks.

Have done this through the evening and am having at about 1ghs faster with your build. Plus, as a bonus, the LCD works again due to the api.c file being standard. Im still testing for stability obviously but im just running with the 3 ants in here, left my BE's out for now.

This is very interesting.

Can you just clarify what you did when you "merged the bmsc driver"

The bitmain version of cgminer is terribly unstable and doesn't work with the adafruit piminer lcd scripts because of the API changes Bitmain have made so id be keen to replicate what you have done.

yeah I did notice the API change over on Github when I looked at this

https://github.com/bitmaintech/cgminer/commit/bf453120ef7a6a2e9dbe4f0da5f3136c8aaf0cb6

Tried undoing the changes and recompiling but that gavce an error. Im now almost 100% sure that the changes made here have broken the piminer's lcd api as what im seeing on my screen is "MHS av" which is part of the line they removed (line 2111).

Any ideas if I could take the same file from the official version of Cgminer and compile correctly with that?

I don't get stuck there, but the changes Bitmain have made to CGminer break something that adafruits scripts reply on. Guess we will just have to wait until the drivers are merged back into the main Git of CGminer