Is the Gridseed controller required to run these units or can I run 10 of them from a PC using USB hubs?
You can connect these to a windows PC and run the custom version of cpuminer so no you don't need the controller, but for the extra $ it's worth it considering how many watts a PC uses...that and you'd have to run like 10-MS DOS windows of cpuminer which is just a clutter on your desktop if you're actually also using the computer for non-mining stuff.
My understanding, too, is that if you mine with your PC using the custom cpuminer, the bitcoin cores will stay active and draw power...so if you only want to mine Scrypt coins with them, you'll be paying more in power to run them that way.
I can confirm this.
I ordered 11 miners and didnt get a controller (it wasnt shipped with them). I've had to connect them to a hub then to a PC (a few actually, CPUminer doesnt like double digit com port numbers) and run separate instances of CPU miner to get them working. Clocked at 800 MHz they are just now starting to break 300khs (some of them have been up for almost 12 hours). But, all of them are running in dual mode. How do I know?? I put a Kill-a-Watt on the computers supply before I started any of them.
Miner 1 added 55 watts to the total load, miner 2 added 60 and so on and so on.... They are all getting very warm but none of them have crashed. I have them all powered by a single 850 watt Corsair gold rated supply.
From the sounds of this thread the only way to turn off dual mode is to use the controller they were supposed to come with. It also sounds like the controller connected miners crash or restart quite often....
Gota love the Q/A on these things. Really hoping to get this worked out. The whole point to buying these things was to reduce my power footprint. Yeah, its lower then the equivalent GPU rig but its still not as low as I would like it to be.
That would make it easy to just run it on a raspi, which can probably handle many more units than the TP link device does. For me, it would be best if I could just forget about the TP link as soon as possible.