Topic: Building Your Own ASIC Miner? Yes You Can! (Read 1237 times)

Hi there!
Recently i bought two S19 Pros and ended up blowing the PSU on one of them which lead me to open it up and replace some mosfets to fix it.
While i was at it i decided to give the rest of the miner a clean so i dove in and began doing that. While in the process of cleaning i took a note of the components inside on the main hash boards and the control board.

I have a friend in china who used to be a business partner of my cousin and she now works for a ASIC miner distributor company via alibaba. I got in touch with her to talk about the making of these machines to get some more insight.
Now in the two hour long conversation i learned quite a bit about it and i will be sharing a few of the things i learned.

The reason its almost impossible to buy miners straight from bitmain or other mining companies is because they look for high profits rather than customer satisfaction, there are underground bids which take place between large distributors and the highest bidding company gets the cake. This happens weeks before the miners are released on their website for purchase.

Cutting to the chase. The distributor company that my friend works in used to be a PCB manufacturing company. They buy BM1398BB hashing chips straight from bitmain and manufacture their own hashing pcb's by cloning one of the original ones and end up oil cooling them. Now to me, all of it makes sense since all an ASIC miner has is a control board, a power supply and a few hashing boards. None of the components are tied to one another when it comes to the hardware.

Now while its possible to clone the control board and the information on it is as follows, it looks like its quite a tedious task considering that the actual board is quite cheap to buy straight from bitmain.
CPU :  XC7Z007S-1CLG225C
DRAM : M15T2G16128A (2L)
NAND Flash Memory : MT29F2G08ABAEAWP 2GB
Network Chip : PPT PM44-11BP
The linux based firmware that is stored on the flash memory is later witten to the DRAM at runtime and is available to download on bitmain's website and can be flashed using the sd card slot on the control board.

Anyhoo, oil cooling being a whole different story, I was told that each hashing chip costs about $2 and some select few companies can hook you up with the original ones. Which leaves me with needing a control board which costs around $200 and wiring which costs around $50 including the power cords which are not included with the power supply or miner purchase. A generic 12v 20a power supply that s19 pro needs costs a mere $60 where i live. The power supply costs around $240 to $300.

Now of course i did not include the small components like heat sinks, housing, tax and shipping costs and such.
But in hindsight if i were to build the whole thing on my own, it would cost a considerably less amount of money considering that these machines are going for around $10,000 if not more, per unit, at the time of writing this post.

I've been interested in this since i learned about it a few months back, but i lack the ability to clone boards and funds to get access to a board.
My point of writing this post is to learn more about things that i might have missed or gotten wrong and/or to maybe try out this project with someone who thinks they can help or have experience in pcb cloning/manufacturing without a schematic and finds this interesting.

Another member(he can reveal himself if he wants to) and I were contacted by a Chinese manufacturer who did something almost identical to what you are trying to archive, they made their own hash boards which were more efficient than the regular S9 hash boards, and their own firmware which you had to deploy on the default controller of the S9 (the hash boards won't work with the default firmware).

The company wanted economical consultation in terms of pricing, I contacted a few major resellers in China, Russia, and the U.S, and sadly the final sale price was not tempting enough to convince anyone to get those hash boards, mind you the company that did this is located in china, and they paid us just for the consultation, they clearly had the money and the manpower needed for that job, and the results were not so great.

I am not aware of where did they go wrong or how difficult it was, but I am certain they had more skills, money, and resources than you do, which is one of the main reasons why I told you in my first comment that this "won't work", it wasn't a blind baseless statement, I hope the above information will be beneficial to you oneway or the other.

Good luck.

Hi there!
Recently i bought two S19 Pros and ended up blowing the PSU on one of them which lead me to open it up and replace some mosfets to fix it.
While i was at it i decided to give the rest of the miner a clean so i dove in and began doing that. While in the process of cleaning i took a note of the components inside on the main hash boards and the control board.

I have a friend in china who used to be a business partner of my cousin and she now works for a ASIC miner distributor company via alibaba. I got in touch with her to talk about the making of these machines to get some more insight.
Now in the two hour long conversation i learned quite a bit about it and i will be sharing a few of the things i learned.

The reason its almost impossible to buy miners straight from bitmain or other mining companies is because they look for high profits rather than customer satisfaction, there are underground bids which take place between large distributors and the highest bidding company gets the cake. This happens weeks before the miners are released on their website for purchase.

Cutting to the chase. The distributor company that my friend works in used to be a PCB manufacturing company. They buy BM1398BB hashing chips straight from bitmain and manufacture their own hashing pcb's by cloning one of the original ones and end up oil cooling them. Now to me, all of it makes sense since all an ASIC miner has is a control board, a power supply and a few hashing boards. None of the components are tied to one another when it comes to the hardware.

Now while its possible to clone the control board and the information on it is as follows, it looks like its quite a tedious task considering that the actual board is quite cheap to buy straight from bitmain.
CPU :  XC7Z007S-1CLG225C
DRAM : M15T2G16128A (2L)
NAND Flash Memory : MT29F2G08ABAEAWP 2GB
Network Chip : PPT PM44-11BP
The linux based firmware that is stored on the flash memory is later witten to the DRAM at runtime and is available to download on bitmain's website and can be flashed using the sd card slot on the control board.

Anyhoo, oil cooling being a whole different story, I was told that each hashing chip costs about $2 and some select few companies can hook you up with the original ones. Which leaves me with needing a control board which costs around $200 and wiring which costs around $50 including the power cords which are not included with the power supply or miner purchase. A generic 12v 20a power supply that s19 pro needs costs a mere $60 where i live. The power supply costs around $240 to $300.

Now of course i did not include the small components like heat sinks, housing, tax and shipping costs and such.
But in hindsight if i were to build the whole thing on my own, it would cost a considerably less amount of money considering that these machines are going for around $10,000 if not more, per unit, at the time of writing this post.

I've been interested in this since i learned about it a few months back, but i lack the ability to clone boards and funds to get access to a board.
My point of writing this post is to learn more about things that i might have missed or gotten wrong and/or to maybe try out this project with someone who thinks they can help or have experience in pcb cloning/manufacturing without a schematic and finds this interesting.

I would like to build my own Bitcoin Mining system with AMD .   : )

It would have to be at least some light modifications made to the PCB because I don't think companies can get away with making a token change to some circuit. Which makes me wonder if the cloned PCBs you get from this will be as efficient as the original, since chances are the design houses will not make a perfect clone of the PCB. Maybe they'll do stuff like making some path longer (I think I'm a developer, not an electrician or circuit designer) that makes some part of operation less efficient, to avoid infringing on some random company's IP.

If you thought i was making this post because i wanted to mass produce cloned hash boards and sell them for a profit because i claim to be able to produce them for cheap, then no, thats far from what i meant. I am aware thats not going to be at all profitable and moreover theres always a legal caveat to the story (which is why the companies tend to "modify" their clones instead of making a copy). I was more of planning to get back the ROI from the boards themselves by using them, if they worked of course.

Another member(he can reveal himself if he wants to) and I were contacted by a Chinese manufacturer who did something almost identical to what you are trying to archive, they made their own hash boards which were more efficient than the regular S9 hash boards, and their own firmware which you had to deploy on the default controller of the S9 (the hash boards won't work with the default firmware).

The company wanted economical consultation in terms of pricing, I contacted a few major resellers in China, Russia, and the U.S, and sadly the final sale price was not tempting enough to convince anyone to get those hash boards, mind you the company that did this is located in china, and they paid us just for the consultation, they clearly had the money and the manpower needed for that job, and the results were not so great.

I am not aware of where did they go wrong or how difficult it was, but I am certain they had more skills, money, and resources than you do, which is one of the main reasons why I told you in my first comment that this "won't work", it wasn't a blind baseless statement, I hope the above information will be beneficial to you oneway or the other.

Good luck.

Another member(he can reveal himself if he wants to) and I were contacted by a Chinese manufacturer who did something almost identical to what you are trying to archive, they made their own hash boards which were more efficient than the regular S9 hash boards, and their own firmware which you had to deploy on the default controller of the S9 (the hash boards won't work with the default firmware).

The company wanted economical consultation in terms of pricing, I contacted a few major resellers in China, Russia, and the U.S, and sadly the final sale price was not tempting enough to convince anyone to get those hash boards, mind you the company that did this is located in china, and they paid us just for the consultation, they clearly had the money and the manpower needed for that job, and the results were not so great.

I am not aware of where did they go wrong or how difficult it was, but I am certain they had more skills, money, and resources than you do, which is one of the main reasons why I told you in my first comment that this "won't work", it wasn't a blind baseless statement, I hope the above information will be beneficial to you oneway or the other.

Good luck.

But this, indeed, is quite an expensive endeavour so i definitely should try it out with an older model first. I am gonna keep searching for someone who could help me copy the PCB in the meantime and i'll update this if i find any useful information on it. Thanks!

I don't why but I think you are under the impression that I am trying to make you change your mind as if I own a huge chunk of the mining industry, it is actually the exact opposite, I am a buyer I would most certainly love to see the likes of your idea get implemented so I can buy cheaper gears.

But I know for a fact that it won't make any economical sense, ignore the little details and just look at the big picture, you are trying to compete with multi-billion dollar companies, if Bitmain, MicroBT, Canaan or Inno had a way of making an S19 equivalent for less than the market price they would have done just that, they won't leave this money making opportunity to the average joe.

This means there are some hidden and unknown costs that you don't seem to be aware of (I am not aware of them either), you seem to be simplifying the matter way too much, this is either overconfidence or pure misunderstanding of how things are.
 
You claim that you can make a mining gear that goes for 14k for just under 6k + the PCB cost, then my words hold no meaning at all, go ahead and do it, meanwhile, you might want to test on a cheaper gear like the S17 or S9 given that the success rate of this operation isn't too high.

Good luck

I read every single bit of it, twice, and I have no changed my mind, this will NOT work out as far as the economy is concerned.


This does not make sense, there is chip shortage and high demand, your "someone" can sell the chips for a large profit if they are indeed getting them near or at cost price, so no, nobody is going to give you cheap chips, and then even if that was the case, you are better of reselling the chips for a premium than trying to reinvent the wheel.


That is not a fact, it's an assumption, there is a technology edge you seem to miss here, just by accruing the parts needed to make something does not mean you can "assemble" it cheaper than the manufacturer if this was the case, everyone would be making their own cars, TVs, phones and whatnot, your theory is only partially valid if you had nothing else to do, in other words, your time is worthless and thus there is no loss of opportunity cost.



I highly doubt that, they just don't know the latest prices and don't even bother asking their sources, try to make an order and you will be hit by the real prices, but then really the exact number does not matter, the price will be a reflection of the whole market, and the important part is that the total cost of the gear you are going to assemble is not going to be lower than the market price, be it $20 per chip of 20 chips for $1.


This does not make sense, if the profit margin is as HUGE as you think, then nobody would have enough resources to run all those gears, someone would have made tens of thousands of them and fully utilized every bit of power they have and will eventually have to start selling, also there are no-name gears coming online, we are watching the hashrate very closely, everything points to a massive shortage in gear making across all the major manufacturers, I hate to break it to you but, NO, nobody is assembling S19s for a fraction of they go for.



And I did not disagree with this, my whole point was economical, I know the technical part will be workable somehow, everyone can manufacturer almost everything, it all boils down to the cost and quality of the end product, there is no way on planet earth that a single person like you or I can beat the market, do you have the slightest clue how long it is going to take you to solder 342 chips which is probably the easiest part of your experiment?

I don't want to sound rude, but it's funny that you think you found a glitch in the game or a money printing machine which ONLY you know about, it's crazy because it sounds just like perpetual motion.

With that being said, if this is to be done for the sole purpose of learning or having fun, I'd go for it, but if you think you will assemble a miner at a reasonably lower price than the current markets, well, good luck.

Would really appreciate if you at least read

My whole point of writing the post was the fact that i personally know someone and i can maybe get my hands on at least some chips for near cost price

and the fact that assembling the miner on your own from parts is somehow costing much much less than what its going for.

Moreover that aside, checking with other sellers on alibaba at the time of writing this message, the chips are going for around $10 to $14 maximum

As for the market not getting flooded with no-name miners, if the company is able to self-assemble the miner at less than half the amount of what it costs then the ROI is so quick that its not worth the risk to lose money by putting it up on the market.

All i am saying is that, In theory there is no reason why it wouldnt work and i might put some funds into this in the coming months and it would be great if someone with pcb manufacturing ability is willing to help.

That's far from accurate, the  BM1398BB chips which are used on the S19 cost over $20 (ignore prices on Alibaba/Aliexpress because those are either scammer or failed to update the price list).

So for an S19 pro you going to need 114*3*20 = $8,640 in Chips alone, you might find them a bit cheaper, but nothing remotely close to the 2$ mark.


I disagree, and I am certain that it will cost you above $10k, you are trying to beat bitmain into making a "cheaper" gear is daydreaming at best, honestly, I think any rational thoughts should be based on the fact that ALL markets on planet earth eventually get to an equilibrium, whereby the "arbitrage" profit becomes too small.

So with that in mind, you have to keep in mind that there are a dozen of businesses there, including some Chinese BILLIONAIRES who have access to more resources than you do, they have hundreds if not thousands of staff and robots, if "cloning" an S19 pro today costs less than 10k, everyone and their grandmother in China would be doing that, the S19 pro sells for 14-15k in China, and it's selling HOT.

That 14-15k isn't a random number that Chines sellers decide over their wechat chat-room, it's a perfect mix of supply and demand, NOBODY was able to increase the supply and that's why the price hasn't dropped if what you think is true, the markets would be flooded with a no-name 110TH miners or so, but why aren't there any? unless you think you know things that nobody else does, which is unlikely.

I really admire your ambition, but what you are trying to do is worse than reinventing the wheel.