Hey friend, the LED display is pretty much useless.  what you really want to know is if the BBB controller is successfully booting from it's SD card.

-take off the lid
-turn it on
-does a really bright blue LED light up on the BBB? (beagle bone black - the mini pc controller in the center board)
  YES - good, it's booting.  now figure out the IP address and log into the web interface
  NO - might be back luck (try 2-3 times).  still no blue light?  remove the SD card and re-image it.

where do you live?  if you're near Toronto, i can help in person.

i just finished pulling the heatsink on one card and taking pictures of the poor thermal paste job.  not going to bother posting them now.  wow, some of those are a joke!  mine had a couple of chips without paste.  some of yours have a couple with paste.....

can you post what you feel is the ideal amount of paste?

i used one 4ml tube of paste for one board.  little dab on each chip.  hope it's enough.

will reinstall tomorrow.

Are you serious - popping boards in and out of a running system doesn't make the whole thing blow up?  sounds very risky, no?

FYI, I'm driving from toronto to chicago to attend.  leaving this friday morning, july 18, returning monday july 21.  Anyone care to share the costs and tag along?

I tried an SD card with the bitmaintech firmware flashed on it and it booted successfully.  i could access the web config for the miner and watch as it hashed at 0 ghs due to no asic's installed.

i have NOT tried replacing the BBB from bitmaintech with this one, though, so i can't really confirm that it works.

If anyone does, i too would love to hear about it.  Like to know if my spare parts are usable as spares or not.

Anyone have an accurate number for the CFM that the stock fans move through the box of an S2?  Need it to construct a hot aisle / cold aisle in the server room.  Thanks.

For anyone who's flown in the back of a plane, or sat in the back of the school bus knows - bumpy rides are VERY bumpy in the back.  The front - not so much.  I keep reading about how UPS must be treating their packages poorly, resulting in damage while in transit.  I'm sure there are some cases of this, but the real problem, which is 100% out of UPS's control, is turbulence during flight.

Do you really think the captain of a UPS flight from china to anchorage flies around turbulence, in a effort to find some nice smooth air for all the boxes in the back of the plane?  I imagine he just plows through it.  It's not that bumpy up front.  

Bitmaintech should either find a way to secure the cards SECURELY, without putting any stress on the PCI slots (pc case manufactures figured this out decades ago - they screw the boards to the case, not the motherboard), OR, ship miners with boards not installed.  

You should be able to put an S2 in a paint shaker at your local hardware store and not cause any damage.  You can with any other pc or server (ok, only if you remove the hard drive first...).

One S2 draws about 1000 watts, so 1000w / 115 volts = 8.7 amps.  So yes, a single 15 amp circuit can run one S2, but be careful what else is on that circuit... most household circuits have other outlets on them.

208v is better.  240 is better still.  the closer to 250v, the better, i believe.

Am I the only one who's noticed the new PDF on Bitmaintech's website with step-by-step instructions on how to solder capacitors directly to each hashing board....

"Guideline for soldering Capacitors to S2 hash board to fix chip disabling issue"

eek.... happy long weekend to me...

Don't give up yet.  i've had the same thing.  try removing all the boards (power off first, of course), then power on.  watch the controller board for blue lights.  they mean the controller has found a usable boot partition on the SD card and booted from it.  if you get it to boot, and can connect to the web page of the controller, then the problem may have been a connection to one of the currently-removed boards.  you have to put them back in, but there's a good chance that shutting the system off "hot" will botch the SD image, so you have to ssh into it and shut it down gracefully...

shutdown -h now

wait for it to do so, then power off.

keep us posted.

And also to be clear, even though August or September is a lifetime away in this game....

are you planning on allowing 1.8 or 2 TH using the same 1000 watts of power, or 1800-2000 watts of power?

Attention Canadian Miners

A datacenter dedicated to modern mining equipment (Bitmain S2, Cointerra, Dragon, etc) is now open in the Toronto, Ontario Canada area.  We're accepting applications from those who seek space to host their mining servers.

Please PM with the following information:

-number and model of your mining rigs, to determine electrical usage
-timing (are you looking for hosting space now, or in the near future)
-contact info

Attention Canadian Miners

A datacenter dedicated to modern mining equipment (Bitmain S2, Cointerra, Dragon, etc) is now open in the Toronto, Ontario Canada area.  We're accepting applications from those who seek space to host their mining servers.

Please PM with the following information:

-number and model of your mining rigs, to determine electrical usage
-timing (are you looking for hosting space now, or in the near future)
-contact info

Hey all, servers have been relocated to a new datacenter.  If you're renting now, and it shows "offline", well, it's not.  it just shows that way in lease rig until i update the DNS on my end.

but please check your pool status - you should see that it's hashing away as it should be.

for those affected, i've extended your lease time.

cheers!

you might just be the only batch 1 owner who has not yet had to deal with this issue.  I think everyone deals with it sooner or later.
don't try to RMA your miners - they are not busted.

read back 20 pages or so, and you'll see discussions of these two problems:

-power supply stuck off.  it happens because the power supply has a piece of wire shorting two pins to force it to turn on and stay on all the time.  when you kill the power, it refuses to power on again for about 5 minutes.  just wait.

-SD card corrupt.  this one is more of a pain in the ass.  you have to remove it, reflash it and reinstall it.  again, detailed directions on how to do so further back in this thread.  but don't bother resorting to this until you've tried turning it off and on again (with 5 mins in between) at least 5 times.  it might just boot up on it's own.

The S2 has a total of 5 fans, but the motherboard has 6 places to connect a fan.  Only fans 1-4 are monitored by the Web GUI.  So, when the factory banged out hundreds of S2's in a short period of time, guess what happens....

All 3 of my S2's have their fans connected differently.  I don't have the problem you describe, but perhaps it happens if two of your main fans are connected to plugs 5 and 6 rather than 1-4?

can you clarify the steps to do that please?  i'd like to try it.  thx.

Several people seem to be concluding that their power supplies are "dead" or malfunctioning based on them refusing to turn on for several minutes after turning the S2 off.  FYI, all three of my batch 1 S2's act this way - when you turn one of them off, you have to wait at least 10 minutes (haven't timed it, but it's more than 5 minutes and less than 20 minutes...) before they will agree to turn back on again.  disconnecting power cord, swearing, etc have all proven ineffective. 

I don't think this is a malfunction - i think it must be a design "feature" of this particular power supply.  Or perhaps it's the way they are powering off... typically, you would not shut off a server by flipping the switch on it's power supply.  you'd issue a shutdown command in the OS and have it gracefully shut the system down.  I don't think that is possible with the S2 as the ATX motherboard cable is not utilized.  it's really unfortunate that the BBB board was not powered by the ATX motherboard cable - that would have gotten rid of the "paperclip" mod and perhaps made it possible to gracefully power on and off with a soft button the front of the case. 

But the way it's designed, when you flip the power supply off while the case is open, i see the system power off then, after about .5 sec, it powers on for just a fraction of a second.  a little blip. 

Perhaps this blip is causing two problems - corrupts the SD card, and trips something in the power supply that stops it from powering back on for several minutes.

I'm very interested in hearing if replacing the power supply solves the corrupt SD card issue.  that would be great!

once you get it updated to the current firmware dated april 10, theres a DIAGNOSTICS tab in the Network config that lets you ping, traceroute, and nslookup. 

Wow, nice work.  How the hell did you figure that out?  that's great news.
I don't currently have this problem, but it's probably coming, so it's sure nice to have this solution on deck.

If you figure out an explanation, please do share.