Topic: Any solar powered rigs out there? I have an idea for one, check it out! - page 3. (Read 7961 times)

What about rigs using The dedicated Dual FPGA X6500 (https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/custom-fpga-board-for-sale-37904) One would reckon these instead of the 750w GPUs could make the world of alternative energy BitCoin Mining a reality.

This IS a basic mining rig. The 5870's can be bought for £120 if you know where to get them and happen to be the best value for money at that price. I used to have 5830's. They are currently £75 in the UK. But let's get serious here, this is a very basic mining rig. I know people who are running banks of 5970's using 20+ machines in Russia. The 5970's are not value for money (well for me anyway), but depending on your contacts / job etc, it is viable for some people due to how cheaply they can get their hands on the cards. Now each of those machines are pushing 2400 MH . That's serious stuff. Anything less than say 1000MH from a machine is simply playing at it. Let's face it even at that speed you're not going to get much return. So I stand by what I say, a couple (2) of 5870's is simply playing at it and basic.

If it helps, I get 410MH/s on 300W (measured at AC) with a not-green CPU and a few HDDs since it's my gaming rig. If you drop to a low power CPU and minimize the HDD, I'll think 250W should be pretty doable. Personally I would had done this, might had gotten the panels cheap since the company next door sells them. Except my location doesn't give me enough direct sunlight

Large panels are never worth it.  That's a fairly low price but out of my budget.  Also, I don't have room for it I think it has nothing to do with manufacturing price and everything to do with small solar panels only being able to sell for hobbyist price and large ones being able to be sold for super rich pro-green hippie prices I mean yeah thicker gauge cable in the whole system and a more expensive regulator and/or inveter isn't free but it isn't thousands of dollars more either.  They're jacking the prices up.

Btw..."just take a basic mining rig with a couple of 5870's"  Yeeeeeeah, that's a real basic rig *eye roll.* So triple the price on 3 cards and just under triple the mining power...and triple the heat to deal with and a way more than triple the price 3x PCI-E x16 board and a more than triple the price power supply.  That's not really the ideal rig as far as money vs bitcoins goes.  It will create more bitcoins faster but would take longer to pay itself off.  Also, DEFINITELY not for this kind of project.  You want to keep the power as low as possible while maintaining a respectable MH/s.  This rig I have should be able to theoretically push out 300MH/s on 250-300W.  Plus, I don't have enough room to create a device of any sort capable of suppling 750W in a green way.

I was actually considering a turbine based system with wood burning cuz mirrors are a pain and there's lots of geometric math and astronomy and crap involved.  But burning wood is about is green as the dead trees you're burning

I think with my budget, for now, I'm going to attempt the proposed "supplemental power" idea.  That's AC house voltage running everything but a solar panel wired in parallel to the graphics card so it's up to a 50% load reduction.  It's the cost of the panel kit plus $5 in wiring and that's it.  It can't get any simpler.  It's not a 100% free electricity solution but it will definitely take a sizeable chunk out of the electricity costs to operate it.

Ok, this would do what you want (cheapest possible solution).

http://www.aliexpress.com/product-gs/473114247-Free-shipping-10-100w-solar-panel-grid-solar-power-system-800w-wholesalers.html

So just a bit over $2300 for a solution. Is it worth it?

How about this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTvAL7ty53M&feature=related

That's why the voltage regulator is there between the battery and card it should have reverse current protection.


The Radeon cards simply refuse to start if they don't detect the aux power connector. I don't think they are one circuit card or else they wouldn't be able to tell if the aux power was connecter or not since a +12V/gnd connection would be present no matter where it was coming from. But the way it used to be detected was really stupid, the circuit only test for a ground connection and I was able to trick it into working simply with a piece of wire...

Look, there is no way in hell that you are going to be able to run a mining rig on Solar cost effectively. In fact if you just take a basic mining rig with a couple of 5870's in running at full, you would need to probably cater for around 750w continuous drain.

As you would only be able to get any sunlight during the day, you only have around 8 hours max (if you're very lucky) of any usable light. So to power it up you would need (in good conditions) around 20 80w panels. Hmm add that up. Ok, then you would need about 6 40w charge controllers (They're going to set you back around $150 each!!). On top of that, the batteries, the inverter etc,.... There is simply no way that this is worth it,...... Jeez, let's get real here. And if there was another way, then we would already know about it. Better off looking at fuel rods or something.

ooh, that's even smarter cuz then I could eliminate the 12V completely.  If the computer shuts off for some random reason though, there's power coming from the solar panel but no draw so the battery overcharges and blows up. 
Also, I dunno if there's reverse flow controls out the back of the graphics card though.  I would think there is.  Otherwise the battery would charge off the PCI-E 12V line cuz that is typically connected together with the card's supplemental power circuit.  I think the computer would crash due to lack of voltage before that happens though.
All I know is my old Nvidia 8600GTS OC had a cool feature.  You forget to plug in the 6 pin and the computer will boot but the driver will pop up a warning window saying insufficient power is getting to the extra power plugin on the back of the card so it clocked the GPU down to a super low clock speed and is running it off the PCI-E slot power, which caps at like 30W I think.  So when you do plug in the 6 pin, is it running 30W off the slot and maybe 100W off the extra circuit or does it switch to 100% extra power?  Who knows.  And someone said radeon cards just crash the system if you don't plug in supplemental power So maybe those are 1-circuit cards that ignore the available PCI-E wattage completely.  Either way, I'm gonna test this whole system with a less sensitive device than my card I have a molex 36W neon case light/neon inverter kit I can hook up to it first

That's why the battery is always the last step before the voltage regulator and the actual component

In a way the solar panel is charging the battery rather than supplying the gpu. So once the sun goes away, the battery will start draining. The PSU doesn't have to handle 100% of the load suddenly. You could set a schedule to shutdown the GPU miner once it is say 10pm if you estimate the battery will only last say 5 hours after sunset at 6~7pm.

Alternatively have a simple circuit that kicks in an AC connection to the battery once the solar input goes out if you don't want disrupted mining.

oooooooh neat thread!  That guy's awesome.  Of course he's proving my point with his estimation that the cost of supplementing power plant power with solar is fairly cheap but replacing it completely and not even using it as a backup takes the system cost up into the many thousands.  A really good long term storage system and power regulation system puts the price through the roof even if the solar panels and wind and fat guy on a bike with an alternator were free

You should totally grab like 8 of those batteries and buy a couple feet of some 4 to 8 gauge welding or car audio cable.  That's usually like $0.80 USD per foot.  Then just wire up all the batteries in parallel and get a cheap inverter and you've got a nice, almost free energy storage system.  People think that if each battery can output 700 amps then they need thicker and thicker cable as the chain of wire gets closer to the end with the thing drawing power.  That's not true.  Your PC is drawing let's say 300W so the entire chain needs to carry about 21 amps and that's it.  It'll be somewhat evenly across the batteries too.

It's seriously about this complicated


But back to the solar panel supplementing DC current after the power supply idea...yeah, 12V is easily 80% of the total system power.  I certainly could remove the 12V wiring from most devices inside the computer and put it to a solar panel but as soon as the sun goes away, the system crashes.  So what I was thinking is splice in a parallel circuit to the solar panel on a dual molex to 6 pin graphics adapter.  Like basically hook one 4 pin molex into the PSU and the other 4 pin molex into a snipped molex to bare wire connector then run that to the solar panel.  I think power-wise it wouldn't be able to supply more than 50% of the power since it's in parallel BUT if the solar panel suddenly stops supplying voltage, the computer's power supply would jump to 100% without the system crashing.  I'll have to experiment with that idea.

TL;DR...

sorry trying to goto bed, I'll read later.

anyone link to this yet?

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=16377.0;topicseen

my dad used to have ~6 tons of AGM batteries he got from an auction for $1k for various projects, they ended up in some boats, and some guy's basement.  He's also worked on the SoCal's water pump in the middle of nowhere from the Colorado River, its got a backup generator, some batteries inverters and Solar Panels.

For practical purposes, the large battery connected to the solar panel is an UPS

Panel -> Battery -> Voltage Regulator -> direct to Card 6/8 pin or the mainboard's 6/8pin as well


Well, 80% was referring to the amount of current delivered through the +12V line, as compared to the the total from +5V/3.3V

Also, depending on the graphics card and where it connects most of its power pins to, the draw is not the same as a single load drawing from two parallel voltage source.

e.g. if the card has 3 regulators running off the +12V line, 1 is connected to the PCI-E slot, 1 is connected to the 6pin and 1 is connected to the 8pin, theoretically 67% of the draw would come from the now external solar source. This assumes the card distribute the load evenly of course. But if they draw mostly from the aux connectors (most of the high end card won't even boot if they find it disconnected), then it could be as high as 80% I suppose. I don't know enough about graphics card PCB layout to be sure they don't just merge all the incoming inputs though

Well if you're gonna go and use actual real world tests instead of roughly estimated numbers then of course it's not gonna generate enough electricity rofl.  Darn that explains why The Colony bike alternator was shown in like 1 episode for a few minutes followed by a montage of people complaining about it and giving up and getting off the bike lol.  They had one hell of a like $20,000 solar array too which, coincidentally, they also found just laying around lol.

Hmmm so you're saying get a seriously regulated solar panel system that will not under any circumstances go above 12V and then splice it directly into the 6 or 8 pin supplemental power and cut out all that nonsense in the middle and have automatic "who cares what the solar panel wattage is, the computer is still running" handling with no UPS?



Btw, cheezburger is ripping off wordpress's bandwidth for photo hosting on their site?!?

Anyway, that's a good idea.  But how is it 80%?  I thought if the PSU is sending 12.0V and the solar panel is 12.0V then in parallel, they each supply 50% of the current.

Since I know this one is coming, yes, I already considered charging a 2nd battery with a spare 12V line to my car's main circuit while driving around during the day then unhooking it and using its power overnight.  The most basic, undetailed estimate puts that are WAY more expensive gasoline-wise than getting power from the power company and I don't think it's gonna get any prettier if I add more accurate variables.  Oh, and it'll burn out your alternator real fast.

Sounds a bit too many manual operations involved. Why don't you consider hooking things up in parallel, or triple source a cheaper UPS so that it would run off AC, Solar or Battery depending on which is available?

Alternatively, wiring the solar/battery directly to the most demanding +12V (with a regulator of course) auxilliary power inputs of the graphic cards so the solar powered stuff will just drive about 80% of the cards requirements and theoretically easier to expand to more cards simply by adding another set of panel-batter "modules"?

After all, 3 sets of 120W panel +  battery each capable of handling 3KWh is going to be cheaper and more reliable since a single failure doesn't take out your entire setup

Just for math an average man can produce 70-100W, but the idea of the gym is fun

Off-hand without doing the maths and factfinding, I'm going to bet that the average human won't be able to pedal hard/fast enough to drive the alternator to produce significant power. After all, we used to have these things on bikes that powered the lights... took a fair bit of pedalling to get the lamp working bright enough.

Most importantly, conservation of energy. We're going to be converting only as much food energy into electricity as we can absorb (or we'll get another news headline "Man dissipates himself generating power for bitcoin mining") so definitely not going to be enough... unless you run a slimming studio/gym with access to multiple free "workers" to join your "pool"

hmmmm, yeah I hadn't ran the precise math yet but I had a feeling that with 1 medium sized solar panel, you wouldn't be able to run your PC every single night.  And your theoretic machine would require a ballpark figure of 6 small batteries to operate for 10 hours.  That even kills a stepped implementation where you invest a smaller amount up front and use bitcoin profits to fun additional panels over time.  Well that sucks  But the good news is that that panel kit appears to include a voltage regulator, voltage transformer, and voltmeter

But I have another idea, which isn't my idea cuz I saw it on the discovery channel on that faux-post-apocalyptic semi-reality show: The Colony  Okay, so what charges the battery in your car?  Your alternator.  It spins and copper spinning past copper or whatever creates charge and that charges your battery plus runs your car.  Btw your local power plant does the exact same thing but the spinning turbine is a little bigger but this is the ideal way to create power efficiently.

A minimal alternator in a small sedan could do about 90 amps tops @ 14.4V @ 5000RPM and probably has an idling rating around 20-30 amps.  The average home car battery charger maxes at 6 amps and can charge an average battery in just a few hours.  BUT car batteries can obviously take more than 6 amps because in a car, it could be causing the alternator to supply it with like 50-100 amps if it was really low.  I have no idea the max rate they can safely absorb energy at, I just know it's REALLY high.  I mean, you leave your headlights on for a few hours while your car's off and your battery is at like 6V so you hook it up to your friend's truck and have him rev the engine (to create more than those 30 idling amps) for a few minutes and the thing's back up several volts higher already.

Now, an alternator takes less power away from the engine than an average air conditioning unit and even those don't exceed like 50HP.  In fact, you can spin an alternator fairly fast with just your hand.  So here's what I'm thinking and like I said, they actually built this on The Colony and it worked.  They just happened to find a bank of like a dozen brand new batteries, double zero gauge cabling, and fuses laying around but still  Go get an old school stationary excersize bike on a metal plate frame at Goodwill or a garage sale or craigslist for $20.  Buy a small battery or two at Walmart for $30 ea.  Buy two cuts of a couple feet of about 8 gauge cable and some large alligator clamps at your hardware store for about $30.  Call your local junkyard and tell them you want any alternator of any size out of any car that can spin for about $50-75.  Oh and guess what, all modern alternators have voltage regulators built in already Get creative with a drill and a thick metal plate (about $30) and some bolts and mount the alternator a foot or two from your front tire.  Get a car belt matching the alternator's pulley size (about $20) and wrap it around the bike wheel, possibly after removing the back tire, and tension it up.  Then pedaling spins the alternator which you wired up to your battery and tada, it's charging your battery REALLY fast.  Oh and keep an eye on that amp meter and volt meter you hooked up to the circuit ($10 ea) and don't exceed like 50 amps and when the battery is at 14V, stop pedaling.  I'm thinking it would probably take just a couple minutes to charge an entire battery that way.  So tada, FREE ENERGY!

You know what that means? Are you ready to have your mind blown?  Like clear out the back of your head, blown? I hope you're sitting down for this!  You'd be making free energy for your bitcoin rig....to make bitcoins and make money.....while losing weight!  KABOOM! Mind officially blown lol.

The Future Of Bitcoin Mining

Oh trust me, a solar panel - battery - inverter - computer setup is about 10000x less complicated than this whole bitcoin system, which I only about 75% understand it's reeeeeeeeeally simplistic.  Like watch one 20 minutes video I make and you're an expert on it simplistic.

That not a terrible price.  Just to see if my memory was good, I looked up the one I saw in person.  Well...it was $120 on some crazy weekend super blowout price

http://www.harborfreight.com/45-watt-solar-panel-kit-90599.html

$180 now so that sucks but still

I'm no solar specialist but I would think 45W is what it would get on a sunny day in death valley or mounted to a satellite orbiting earth lol.  I'm sure in northern US conditions, it'd be less but I dunno how much less.  But pretending that 45W one generates 45W all the time and an electric bill of $0.12/KWh (somewhat close to average I think), it'd pay for itself after 187 days running just 8 hours per day.  That's not bad.  And if you buy 2 for double the price and they generate double the power for double the combined time, they pay for themselves in 187 days.  And if you buy 10, they pay for themselves in 187 days.  Well you get the idea

I could seriously see people who drop $500-1000 on rigs solely for coin mining spending even an extra $400 on gear that would allow them to operate their rig for free.  And if somehow bitcoins collapse, you can start inverting some nono-fulltime use appliances and lower your electric bill.  It's less convenient but power grid-caliber, power company approved, flow reversing inverters are $2000 on a good day.  Those are the ones people use who have big setups to supplement their own AC power in realtime use and that's the major reason they're not cost effective.