CyberBlockMember
Posts: 13 · Reputation: 142
#1Aug 13, 2024, 07:49 PM
Hey everyone,
This is my first post here and I wanna share a little trick I stumbled upon to bring some of my Antminer S3+ controller boards back to life after they got bricked from a power cycle.
I run a small mining setup (80kWh) and I've been in the Bitcoin game since the GPU days. Since October, I've been running a farm with over 100 Antminers S3 that are powered by my turbine. Out of all of them, only three had issues after a power cycle. They just sat there with a blinking red LED and a faint green light on the Ethernet port. Couldn’t get them to mine again or even access them via SSH or web. I tried restarting them tons of times but no luck, so I figured the controller boards were toast.
While searching for a fix on the forums, I attempted to follow Taugeran's Antminer S1 / S3 recovery guide using the serial TX/RX pins from my Raspberry Pi. Here's where it got interesting: when I connected the serial controller board TX pins to my Raspberry, I accidentally bridged it with the controller ground. Then, when I powered up the miner bam! It came back to life! I did the same with the other two S3s, and they fired up too!
So, if you’ve got faulty boards showing the same signs (blinking red LED and dim Ethernet light), give this a shot:
1. Take off the top cover.
2. With the Antminer powered off, connect a bridge between GND and TX as shown.