Topic: LIGHTNINGASIC LA100M,100MHS SCRYPT Miner, USD1999; LA1THS, USD1750.shipped out! - page 80. (Read 309065 times)

My review so far is that I am not happy with my order. I have a LA6M and received one working controller and one broken controller. The broken controller wont even show an IP. Apparently no one is doing quality control checks over there. This means I can only run 10 units while the other 10 are sitting around collecting dust  . I am requesting a replacement controller from jack.

Thank you. Now I won't have to worry about ASICs making my GPU's worthless over the next few months.


On what basis are you saying that the price is not worth "beta" hardware/software? From what I can see, prices are competitive on a per hash basis vs. GPU mining. You are basically trading off stability of GPU's for the lower power of the ASIC. When the ASICs become stable, their "stable" price will initially be higher on a per hash basis than GPU. Only when they can supply all the demand will the per hash price drop below GPU costs.



Just because you don't have a hack doesn't mean it is closed-source. Enough code is posted for you to write your own mining program, or even a Linux version. Have at it, and please post it when you are done. The problem is, getting someone with the know how to do the hacks.

At this point, the ASICs are unstable, but despite that, they still average 350 khs per miner for me. That includes the off-line time of the reboots. So, 2 miners have the hashing power of a R9 280x. I can set up a room full of Asics. Due to power limitations, I can't do the same with R9 280x's.

Not sure if this is because of the controller or not...but when I tried dual-mining I noticed the LTC hashrate dropped down by 25-33% no matter what frequency I tried to use.  The BTC hash rate would bounce between 60-80Ghs...

Also, I had more "restarts" when mining both...not sure if this happens when using a windows computer to control the mining instead of the small TP-Link controller device.

What if you want to preserve mine both algorithms? Is there still a speed drop off or stability issues?

Same experience here, though I use the cpuminer supplied by Gridseed. My unit runs non-stop without issues.
The only exception is on pools that do not push work at least every 120 seconds. Don't know if it's an issue with the pool or cpuminer.

I ran these off of a custom version of minerd that DrFranz & Chirale worked on for their Scripta project (Litecointalk forum)....it seemed to be much more stable..however, that version of minerd doesn't yet support turning off the BTC chip so effectively you trade off stability for a 5x increase in watts.

When running these with just a computer are they more stable? Seems as if most of the problems are buggy controllers...

It may not be open-source, but there is a way to get root access to the miner, and thus people could start looking around to see what they could improve. Look here to see how to get root access:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/howto-get-root-access-to-your-lightningasic-controller-490348

The hash rate reported in the web UI seems to be derived from submitted shares, rather than an "actual" hashrate. The actual hashrate is likely much more stable than it appears.
Shares submitted depends on luck and has built in variance as the shares requires different ammounts of processing. I guess it's closer to WU?

Also, it does appear that they are somewhat limited or sensitive for difficulty. I seem to get the best results with individual workers and a difficulty of 64 or 128. Haven't experimented to much, but 512 seems a bit to high. Since each unit individually has a rather low has rate, shares will be submitted less frequently and are more susceptible to variance. Pair this with what seems to be a setting to reboot everything if no share is submitted for 10 minutes on any individual unit and you're going to have a "bad time".

Mining at multipool.us or a single currency pool with vardiff, my units are pretty stable around 3.2-3.7 or so. They seem to reboot roughly every 40 minutes, but that's way better than the 10 minute intervals people have been reporting which is probably due to to high difficulty on the shares.

I have had a problem with it resetting/rebooting during the night and not coming back up online. But that might have been due to problems with the SHA-256 stratum (which wasn't enabled, but still).

So far I'm quite pleased but look forward to new features and better stability in updated firmware. Anyone got word on when they'll release new firmware? Was said to be ready several days ago.

But the thing is we can't access the controller or modify anything. Only they know how to access it, I read some things about SSH or FTP. But I found nothing on anybody actually succeeding to modify the LA3M unit. I think the source code is only suitable if you use the USB miners. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I would love to improve this stuff. The hardware seems good, but the software makes it bad.

How much was it?

Most of it is open-source; you can check out what gridseed posted at http://github.com/gridseed. I'm pretty sure LightningASIC is just running cpuminer and has built a simple web frontend around it.

As an owner of the 3MH/10-miner set I would agree with your assessment 100%.  I will not be buying anymore of these devices until the new firmware is released and it has been clearly and factually demonstrated as being stable and usable.  At the prices these are currently selling for we should not be getting "beta" hardware/software.  To make matters worse the firmware is all closed-source, so all the really smart guys on this forum can't even help out to fix these problems.  This is perhaps the most disappointing because the community is READY and BEGGING to help out and improve the software, but can't because of closed-source.  This is a real shame in my opinion...

Running all 10 miners, I averaged 3.63 MHs @900.
After running for almost 7 hours @900, the hash rate on 5 miners is 1.46 MHs. The miners rebooted 3 times.

I can't say there is a noticeable improvement.


Hmmm... This was on wafflepool. I will have to try a LTC only pool.


I did. Paid on Feb 12, and received Feb 20.

Did anyone manage to buy from LightningASIC directly? Seems to be way cheaper.

Here are my ASIC findings:

• LA3M miner ordered and paid with BTC on 18 of February. Quick replies from Jack on sales related questions, but poor English. Had no experience with support related questions
• Miner shipped on 24 of February and delivered on 27 February, have to pay 125USD import tax on the package
• Sturdy and solid packaging, unlikely to get damaged in shipping. Hardware feels of decent quality.
• Some power cables are US some are EU, therefore you need some adapters. In total you need 4 sockets and an ethernet cable.
• Easy assembly, takes an hour to get up and running
• You can access the controller via it’s ip-address on your network. I used Angry IP scanner to find it (Mac).
• Software offers you insight in actual hashing speed and setting a pool for both BTC and Scrypt. Make sure you set a BTC pool even if you don’t use it otherwise the software will not start.
• Software is buggy but gets the job done. Offers basic over clock features for scrypt mining.
• With basic over clocking 10 units (which is 1 miner) gives you around 3.5MH/s
• Unit takes around 5 to 10 minutes to boot up before it starts mining
• Heat and noise is low compared to GPU mining

Concerns

• No failover pool can be added, therefore you can only add one pool add a time. This makes it impossible to lease your rig. You have no settings you can tweak except the pool and mining speed.
• The hardware offers the option to mine both BTC and Scrypt at the same time. However, when mining both the speed of scrypt decreases by 50% and becomes unstable. Therefore you only use this product to mine Scrypt.
• The 10 units give different speeds all the time, in general each unit creates 300-400kh (without BTC enabled). Some give you double digit speeds, some triple digit speeds. They do not give you the same speed all the time.
• When mining on coin-switching pools such as Middlecoin or Wafflepool the hash rate drops to 2Mh/s. When mining a single coin, for instance LTC, it goes back up to 4Mh/s

Verdict
In general the product is good as advertised, it get the job done, however at this point I will not invest more. The product is too immature, and the firmware/software is too buggy and lacks features. A lot of problems can be solved by better software but since this is not available of accessible for us we have to wait for this. Only the supplier can update these devices. According to screenshots this new software is already created but not available for us buyers. At this point in time we don’t have any timeframe when the new software will be available, but this would definitely improve the products value.[/list]

I'm very interested to see how this works out!

One other thing, would it be possible to swap controllers?  I'm not sure if the actual round miners themselves have firmware specific to the controller firmware (i.e. Lightening ASIC miners only work with LightingASIC controllers).

@richmke -- Looking forward to how this works out for you.  I'm curious to see if this helps.

Half of what I would get compared to 10 miners, running on Wiibox controller which has 64MB to play with.

What hash rates do you get with 5 miners? I would buy another controller if it made a material difference.

Ok, going to run 5 miners overnight. Let's see if they can average more than 1.7MHs.