Topic: Bitfury - Mining Lighbulb - page 7. (Read 15519 times)

Yeah, what he said!

What about peltier elements, ever messed around with them as a means to dissipate heat? They've become quite inexpensive and could serve as an intermediary to the heat sink and offset some amount of power use?

The project Novak's working on involves signal injection into a power feed sorta like powerline networking, so we might get around to playing with messing with mains one of these days. I was just thinking the other day that one of Philipma's favorite ideas, the oil-radiator spaceheater miner, would be a good thing to have mains networked. Stick a receiver "hub" plugged into the wall at your switch and send signal to two or three heaters around the house without needing any wifi infrastructure (or range limitations). Using a central "controller" with mains signalling to controllerless lightbulb miners might work if the chips are designed to use a basic protocol like UART; cook up a simple transceiver chip that basically converts addressed packets and sends them directly to the chips' data bus. Your receiver hub could enumerate each lightbulb miner as a separate device, like sticks in a USB hub, and pipe it all off a single cgminer instance if you wanted. Most of what you need to run data over mains is a carrier wave modulated with your signal data and a really really good highpass filter to block your 50/60Hz from the transceiver. Not really all that cumbersome.

Not saying it's a particularly efficient idea, but if lightbulb miners are going to happen I'd rather see something like that than I would a separate controller, cgminer instance and wifi transceiver in every single bulb. It makes a whole lot more sense for machines whose existence is to produce heat. Lightbulbs are a stupid idea because all the developments in lighting from the last several decades are designed around making them produce less waste heat, so taking a 60W-equivalent efficient light and making it a 60W light again (with several times the initial cost) seems pretty backward.

I'm probably misinterpreting that, but powerline communication devices are quite readily available.  I don't know how well they work in the U.S. on the typical dirty lines, but in the EU they work fine.  With laptops, tablets and smartphones, wifi is much more popular, though.

Edit now that I remember what term they're typically sold under: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=powerline+adapter

I wondered the same thing.  My pool's light operates by a signal that is sent through the power line.  I'm not aware of any retail networking devices functioning in that scenario though.

Yes if done right you can use electricity wires.  It makes a fun project and I personally was surprised with speed, was much faster then I expected.  Mine seemed good till I put to many on it then slowed down.

I price wise a wifi dongle will beat the electricity parts for over lines by quite a bit.  So I predict wifi.

I wonder if it's possible to send enough information by powerline networking to have the controller hub hooked into a building's wiring, and have all the devices connect to it that way.  Obviously the price of adapters would have to both shrink significantly and come down in price, but it may be more feasible than using wi-fi in all the devices and require controllers in all of them as well.

As has been said, I think the only practical products you could substitute ASIC chips in would be those that already produce heat.  Otherwise even if it is a novelty product, why would you pay MORE for a novelty product and have no regard for ability to ROI when you could just buy stickminers and bulbs and reap all the same rewards of those for less money? Or go buy an old S1 and watch the blinking lights...  This is not designed to be a product for us, this is a product for them, their marketing team's job will be to convince us otherwise.

Has anyone ever experimented with stickminers using peltier elements to use the heat to offset some of the electricity use and boost efficiency (even by a small margin)? *COUGH* sidehack??? *COUGH*

IOT market to triple to $USD 1.7 Trillion by 2020

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/internet-things-market-triple-1-140200967.html

They should make a product for commercial applications too.  You can do some decent mining in that setup vs. home.  Lots of buildings replacing older lights...

100% agree. Its basically a novelty device that doesnt make sense if you are serious about mining a reasonable amount of coins.
even loud hardware can be put in a spare room or a shed, and will be far more cost effective, and not require every lamp in your house being a heating element.

It's coming during 2015!! We can buy one

http://www.coindesk.com/bitfury-light-bulbs-mine-bitcoin/

I think they will be a "niche" fun item so sadly I think it would never turn green .

I've been trying to think of things for light bulb to do.  Best one I have is turn a color when a certain BTC address receives money, or when a pool sends out payout.  Some things like shares accepted would be horrible with light.

Maybe the light starts out as RED, and turns GREEN when it starts to make money? 

All we have seen is those pictures in thread.  I wish bitfury would make a release or more information.  But I doubt they do as I dont think they will want to sell individual's these mining light bulbs.

I really hope someone makes these though.  I just want one to play around with.  Could be fun with multi color have light up different colors for different events. 

I don't equate this to the "stick miner" at all. The USB stick miner has never pretended to be anything but that. It wasn't going to be added to anything that wasn't a Bitcoin miner, so there was no attempt to lure people into thinking that mining was going to be "free". Also at the time their biggest competition was GPU's. They beat them handily in just about every category, except the Block Erupter had no after-market once difficulty and more efficient ASIC's crushed the BE100. GPU's could be sold as just that, or turned to another coin (e.g. Litecoin).

I guess it's possible that ASICminer could have chosen to push their technology into unrelated products, but they didn't. I think they realized all the surrounding infrastructure wouldn't be present (e.g. cooling and Internet access) if they added it to a bunch of other devices.

Has anyone on these forums actually seen one of these device live?

Solomining with cheaper and more efficient hardware is still a better option.


There's no reason a home miner can't be practically dead silent. I replaced the fans on my SP20 and BTCgarden miners and they were so quiet you couldn't here them from more than a few feet away.


A regular miner already gives off heat and can be remotely controlled. Adding a light bulb doesn't change this.

If your goal is to recycle heat (i.e. save money), then it would definitely make sense to go with the cheaper and more efficient miner (option 2).

Can you think of a single benefit that comes from combining a light bulb and a miner?

Let's say home miners have two options (both using the same chips):

Option 1: 60W, 200 GH/s lightbulbs for $80 each (0.3 W/gh and $0.4/gh)

Option 2: 400W, 2000 GH/s blade style miner for $500 (0.2 W/gh and $0.25/gh)

In what scenario would it make sense to go with option 1?

Assuming the bulbs are placed below a large fan. This is not always the case, and running a ceiling fan specifically to cool your light bulb miners adds how much power dissipation to the total?

How much heatsinking and/or airflow is required to keep a 50W device cooled below about 80C? Incandescent light bulbs don't really have that temperature requirement, so can run 100W or more with only ambient air. But what's the added material cost to dissipate 50W passively inside a glass shroud (common on ceiling-fan lighting installations) while maintaining less than 80C internal (chip) temperature?

Are these bulbs gonna run wifi, or have some in-built mains-wiring network interface? What's the added cost (and size) of building wifi or mains-network transceivers for each device? What's the added infrastructure cost of a wifi or mains-network access point for your local network? How are you going to configure all of the individual devices? Will they need another separate central machine to coordinate pool settings and such, or will each one have its own config page to keep track of?

Will it be possible to continue mining even when the light is turned off? By what means do you enable and disable the light without cutting power to the entire bulb? What additional infrastructure (or changes to existing infrastructure) is required to support this?

Considering all that, how is it a better idea (cost-effective, power-efficient, reliable, easier to install, maintain and operate) to build a network interface and additional heatsinking into a dozen independent devices requiring you to run multiple ceiling fans (if that's possible with bulb covers) to cool them, and then rewiring your house or adding additional devices to be able to mine during the 18 hours a day the lights are turned off, than it is to build a compact device with a couple 10W fans and a single ethernet connection that you can tuck in the laundry room and forget about most of the time?

Your bulbs do not emit light?
If they do emit light, what portion of that 60W goes to the lighting solution?  What is the lighting solution?  How much waste energy (read: heat) does the lighting solution + the mining solution produce?  What cooling is required to prevent both the mining and the lighting solution from failing?

LED, for 'white' lighting, is already one of the most efficient forms, and a '60W equivalent' bulb puts out a decent amount of heat; those bulbs aren't primarily heat sinks just because it looks groovy.  Add another 60W in mining power to that, and you most definitely have to cool things actively, if not to keep the mining chip from overheating and throwing out error after error (if not plain dying), then certainly to keep the LED emitter's phosphor from degrading and/or the LED emitter itself from releasing the magic smoke.

Can it be done? Sure.  Does it make sense?  Nah.

wait until all the crude lightbulb jokes people make up with this.......

Why don't we start incorporating asic chips into HUMANS!