Topic: Announcing Mining Visualizer (Read 378 times)

No problem man!

Thanks, @warden, for posting this for me!

Mining Visualizer is a suite of programs for mining Ethereum, with some special features for solo miners.  There are two programs: MVis-ethminer (a fork of Genoil's ethminer), and Mining Visualizer, which is a data collection / relay program that communicates with the miners and drives the desktop widgets and the web application.  The whole package is free / open source software.

Of course, solo mining is not for everyone.  It is generally only feasible for larger mining operations.  For instance, if you only have 1 GPU, at the current level of difficulty the average time to mine a block is somewhere around 750 days!  If that's you, you're best to stick with pool mining.

Larger mining operations, though, should definitely consider it.  There's no mining fees, it helps to make the network more decentralized and secure, and you get the pride of mining your own blocks!

Desktop Widgets

Mining Visualizer comes with 4 desktop widgets that display various data items that let you monitor your mining operation at a glance.  These are powered by Rainmeter for Windows, and GeekTool for the Mac.  (Desktop widgets are also possible under Linux using a program called Conky, but no development work has been done in this regard).  Most of the items are pretty self explanatory, but I will comment on a few.

Miners

• Hash faults: the total number of hash faults that have been reported from your mining farm over the last 24 hours.  This line will display in Yellow if any of your miners has exceeded the user defined hash fault limit.  The miner is a fork of Genoil's ethminer, and it checks for hash faults much more often then Genoil's did (1 hash check per kernel run), so don't be surprised if the numbers seem high.  This will give you an early indication if one of your GPUs is failing, or you're pushing it too hard with overclocking.

Mining Activity

• Last Solution - the last time you mined a block
• Next Solution - an estimate of when you will mine your next block, based on your current hash rate and the network difficulty. Remember,  though, there is no guarantee that you will mine a block by this time.  The generation of hashes (mining) is a completely random process.  It is like rolling a dice.  Variance will affect your mining results.  Sometimes you will mine a block sooner,  sometimes later.
• Target - the upper 64 bits of the current network Target.  If your miner finds a hash value lower than the target, you will become the miner of the next block, and receive the appropriate reward.
• Best Hash: the upper 64 bits of the best hash found by your mining rigs, since you last mined a block. Remember, lower is better.

Network

• Balance - Of course, mining a block is the big, exciting event that every solo miner waits for, so I wanted to make that stand out as much as possible. This line displays the current balance of your mining account.  It will cycle through one of five colors every time you mine a block to give you an easy-to-see, visual indicator of this momentous event.  You can customize the colors, or even disable it if you think it's too tacky.

Close Hits

The idea behind Close Hits is to record instances where you almost mined a block.  The miner keeps track of hashes computed that are within a certain range of the Target value, and reports them as Close Hits. The desktop widget shows the last 5 close hits found by your mining farm, with an accompanying bar graph. Smaller values are better.



Web App

MVis comes with a 3 page web application to display information pertaining to your mining operation.  There is some overlap between this and the desktop widgets, but the web app  generally shows more detail.

Mining Rigs



Graphs

• This shows Solutions, Close Hits and Work Units.
• Work Units are the same idea as Close Hits, except with a much lower level of difficulty.  You could also compare them to shares (from pool mining), except there is no reward when you find one. Their purpose is simply to give you a way to verify that your mining rigs are performing as they should.
• Close Hits are graphed individually, whereas Work Units are grouped into 4 hour intervals and displayed as a histogram.

Hash Plots

• This allows you to see a scatter plot of real-time, selected hash values from your miner.
• The purpose of this feature is part educational (a nice visual representation of what miners actually do), part psychological (provides reassurance that the miner is still working and hasn't locked up or frozen), and also just because I thought it would look pretty cool!
• The hashes are scaled down to values between 0.0 and 1.0.
• The Current Target value (similarly scaled) is shown for reference.

Download

For software downloads, please visit the Github repo. There is full documentation in the wiki. If you find any problems, please report them here, or file an issue on Github.