Technician Reference
Look up a concept or procedure when you need it. Select a subject below to see its guides.
Rescue a bricked or boot-looping miner by reflashing its control board from an SD card - the field recovery every tech needs.
Five firmware families a Miner Technician may encounter, what each one costs and changes, and why a fresh flash ramps instead of jumping to full hashrate.
How to actually use the tools: Braiins Toolbox, APMinerTool, WhatsMinerTool, BTC Tools, and the big fleet platforms.
A miner that isn't on the network makes zero money, and a fleet you can't see is a fleet you can't fix. This section covers how ASICs get an address, how they're found, how monitoring tools talk to them over the cgminer API, how pools and worker names are wired, and the platforms that manage thousands of machines at once.
At scale you don't babysit miners one at a time — you watch the whole fleet from a monitoring tool. Foreman is a common one: it shows every miner's status, groups the failures by cause, maps them to physical locations, and can even act on them automatically.
How liquid-cooled miners work, the loop components, coolant rules, and the water/fluid faults air techs never see.
The staged defense a miner runs before it faults, and the two numbers that pin down where the heat is.
A hash chip only makes hashes while it stays cool enough. Whether your fleet is air-cooled, hydro, or immersion changes everything about how you rack, service, and troubleshoot it. This section walks each method end to end and calls out the per-maker specifics you'll actually meet on the floor.
Why miners want 240V not 110V, breaker math, plug types, and the IP/VLAN/DNS scheme that keeps a fleet reachable.
Three failure states techs mix up - dead, offline, no-pool - and how to isolate each by layer instead of swapping good hardware.
The brick that feeds the miner: which model goes on which unit, why APW12 and APW17 don't swap, and the two-match rule that stops no-boots.
The field runbook to take a miner from the pallet to hashing at nameplate: receive and inspect, rack and power, cable and boot, find the IP, lock down the login, point it at the pool, and confirm it ramps. Every major maker finds its IP a little differently, so the per-maker steps are called out where they matter.
Miners live and die by the power feeding them. This covers what a tech needs to know about voltage, phases, PDUs and whips, breaker headroom, inrush, real draw vs. nameplate, power profiles, curtailment, and staying alive around energized gear.
Understand documented supply results and hand electrical testing to the qualified team before diagnosing a dark miner.
Most air-cooled fleets live in shipping-container-style units that pull outside air across the miners and exhaust the heat. Knowing how the container is powered, cooled, and networked turns a 'whole rack is down' call from a mystery into a two-minute check.
Decode the live status dashboard field by field - the first screen on every service call - and read board-down, throttle, and fan-loss at a glance.
A repeatable method that stops the two classic wastes: swapping a good board and RMAing a unit that only needed a reflash.