Topic: Asteroid -- a new Mac mining client (0.9.7) (Read 46464 times)

It depends what you're mining.  Most serious mining is done with fairly high-end graphics cards, but you may still find it fun to play around in what are called "altcoins", or basically anything that isn't bitcoin / litecoin.  A website like CoinWarz is a great resource for finding what may be profitable and/or worthwhile

Thanks for the advice! On my screen, the intensity defaulted to 10 and I've bumped it up to 12 or 13 and still get a bit shy of 14 kh/s. At this point I do not try to use my machine for anything else. Should I give up on mining until I have a more powerful machine and card?

Thanks again!

According to the scrypt database on the Asteroid site, people are generally getting around 21kh/s with that device.  You may just need to increase the intensity you are mining at, which you can do from the small triangle seen here:



If you increase your intensity too high your computer will bog down and may feel less responsive.  Too low and you may not be getting the best hashrate. 

Hi there. Excuse my absolute noob-ness. I have a Macbook Pro with an Intel 4000 card and have tried to run Asteriod to mine Litecoins and Dogecoins. The max rate I can seem to get is 13 or 14 kh/s. Is this the limit of my card/laptop or is it possible to get a better rate? I am in the US on US pool servers.

Thanks!

They haven't yet released the source code they're using (possibly contravening the software license), but I've sent them an email and we'll see what they say.  Thanks for the feedback via PM too, it's good to hear this is a real device.

Can you add support for my DualMiner ASIC with all mining modes (BTC only,LTC only and BTC/LTC combo mining) asap as I really want to try this out/get started quickly/reliably on my mac?

Thanks

Asteroid 0.9.7 is now out
Download here or run "Check for updates..." from the in-app Asteroid menu

Among the biggest changes is the addition of live coin balances!  Enter the API key from your pool's webpage and you'll see live balances in Asteroid of what you have currently mined.  Also changed is the switch to sgminer for all scrypt mining.  sgminer seems to be the spiritual successor to cgminer 3.7.2 insofar as scrypt mining, and it has already seen a number of bug fixes and improvements -- one of which is the ability to choose between 5 different kernels.  The Asteroid website will track these kernels for you, and as always, recommend the best kernel and other settings for you to use based on the contributions of other users (16,000 scrypt setting submissions to date).

Redesigned pool setup sheet:

Change log is as follows:

• Live coin balance monitoring
• Added new mining engine, sgminer, for scrypt mining
• Can now pick which kernel to use for scrypt mining
• Improvements and bugfixes to community scrypt settings
• Full support for multiple GPUs
• Mac OS X Notification Center support
• Updated mining engine to cgminer 3.12.3
• Devices remember on/off state between launches
• Redesigned pool editing sheet
• Added a command-line options window
• Added international support for non-US number formats
• Reduced CPU usage when Asteroid window is closed
• Added checkbox to turn off autostarting mining
• Added Asteroid log to console window
• Fixes for "Initializing miner..." and more
• Countless bugfixes and tweaks

Please remember that Asteroid does not need any extra drivers or installs of any kind, nor any knowledge of the command-line!  True plug-and-play.  And one of my favourite new features?



Asteroid is one of the few pieces of bitcoin software written in an interpreted language, meaning the code you read on your screen is the code that your computer executes -- there are no fully compiled intermediaries apart from the mining engines themselves (cgminer, sgminer, etc) which are also open-source.  So if you wonder how Asteroid does something, just go to "View source code" from the Asteroid menu and it will pop up.  Feel free to edit it, save it, and re-run Asteroid to see your coding changes.

Hey cytron, my guess is that you are using a non-US locale, which confuses Asteroid when it tries to read "7,00 kh/s" for example (versus "7.00 kh/s").  This is my fault and better international support will be coming in an upcoming version.

If I'm wrong though please let me know and we'll look at other possibilities.

Hello there, i'm new to asteroid, and I seem to have a problem with it..

The app is telling me i'm mining at 7MH/s, while my pool indicates a hashrate of 12kh/s... I don't understand what's my problem..

No dice on that, I'm afraid.  It did find the device and it did start to hash (better than before unloading the drivers), but it was throwing a lot of errors (unhandled operation, mainly type 12, I believe) and complaining "device disappeared".  When I killed it, it reported on HFB0, HFB1, and HFB2.  Apparently it kept finding and losing the BJ?

Controller is a Mac Mini Core2, last generation of the ones in the old-style plastic box, "Late 2009", I believe. running OS X 10.9

(BFGminer doesn't work either.  It finds the device, the fans spin up and it apparently starts to hash, but you completely lose control of the process.  Terminal is dead to any inputs, stuck on the add device screen. Only way to kill it is to quit out of Terminal altogether.)

The BJ is good.  It hashes on 3.11 PC version.

Yes, it is a driver issue.  Without knowing more about your particular setup, just copy/paste this into Terminal before you launch cgminer 3.11.0 and it will disable all the known present conflicting drivers:


It may give a few errors but it's not a problem, it'll just complain that some of the drivers you tried to disable aren't installed (which we know), but others likely are installed.

The above is also temporary.  Either logout and in again, or restart your machine, or replace every "kextunload" with "kextload" and run it again.  Any of those will put your drivers back to how they were.

No luck here, so far, getting the BabyJet to hash with 3.11.  

Getting a "Hashfast detect (6:3) failed to initialize (incorrect device?)" message.

Update:  It hashes using the PC build of 3.11.  Is this a driver or permissions issue?

Thanks Karin! Excellent work

Hey Forzendiablo, I can assure you I do care   You can contact me by text message, email, twitter, the Asteroid forums, these forums, and the in-app Send Feedback in Asteroid.  Which method did you use?  I apologize if it got lost somewhere.

Yep!  It must have came out while I was asleep, but it's compiling now.  I noticed that 3.11.0 will actually lower hashrates for nanofury devices without additional command line arguments, so I'm going to throw some code together to allow the user to reset it if they want.

i wrote many times that i cannot run this tool on 1 of my macs - i mean it runs but never mines yet dev doesnt care

Get SMC-FanControl. It's a menubar item with which you can max out all your fans.

Hi Karin -

HF hardware is finally in hand, although it arrived while I was out of town (groan).  Am still planning to use cgminer for mac to control the first babyjet and more that are on the way.  Hopefully we'll see 3.11 compiled on your site soon?  Willing to be a guinea pig here if you create a version of asteroid that will support HF hardware, with the 3.11 mods.  Plan to try to get up and running Sunday evening, North America time. Thanks!

Congratulations on the new release! That screen alone looks fantastic 

Asteroid 0.9.6 is now out
Download here or run "Check for updates..." from the in-app Asteroid menu

Absolutely countless bug fixes and improvements.  Asteroid can now use multiple mining engines simultaneously, meaning you get the latest version of scrypt-mining software, the latest version of bitcoin (sha-256) mining software, and any other specialized forks of cgminer, thus guaranteeing you the latest driver support.  Yet you'd never know the difference -- everything is integrated into a single, consistent UI.


Change log is as follows:

• Adds support for new ASICs (including bitfury, nanofury, and yes, Antminer U1)
• Updated to latest cgminer engine (still supporting GPU mining though!)
• New device detection and display code
• USB driver conflicts are resolved when detected and relevant
• Fixed scrypt settings recommendations
• Detects previous crashes and offers to send diagnostic logs
• New default intensity values for quicker first-time mining
• Added menu option to semi-permanently disable conflicting drivers
• Fixed bug preventing adding more than one custom pool
• Fixed apparent spike in scrypt hashrates due to a logging bug
• Countless bugs fixed
• Numerous UI tweaks to improve user experience
• Removed BTC value monitoring in preparation for a new, better, feature to debut in 0.9.7
• CPU usage of Asteroid reduced by 60%

Please remember that Asteroid does not need any extra drivers or installs of any kind, nor any knowledge of the command-line!  True plug-and-play.

Here's the new MobileMiner login screen, which provides instant feedback on your login details.  Login information is also stored in the Mac OS X keychain, so they are remembered with each new version of Asteroid without ever needing to re-enter them.