Topic: Modular Python Bitcoin Miner - Official Thread - page 9. (Read 74196 times)

Highly depends on if you use p2pool or a pool.

I had 7 boards connected at maximum. This resultet in ~ 55% CPU for the Gumstix  and ~12 % on the Panda.

Running a p2pool server seems limited to the Pandaboard but is also highly influenced by SD card I/O performance.
It then uses something like 40% CPU.

The Gumstix uses 4W maximum on the wall and could be plugged on top of a modular board. (Measueres something like 50 by 20 mm)
But the panda board is easier to develop for and uses 7,5 W. In additionis has a dual core so paralelising threads is easier.
Therefore i would recommend The panda baord for bigger setups with USB connectors and the Gumstix for modular board approaches.

How many FPGA boards do you have connected, which ones, and how about CPU load etc?
If you'd build a bigger cluster, what would you use?

I am running mpbm, p2pool and the bitcoin clients on ARM boards for some time now very sucessfull.

There is the Gumstix, the Panda board and other.

I just dint get a rasberry yet.
I will offer a system for it too as soon as i get one.

Defently possible and yes buing new hardware is my hobby

Since im not home all day we have to work sonething out. Maybe in the evenings ?
I work at a restaurant atm. so it could get late .....

If i get a new job in some weeks that shouldnt be a problem anymore.



I ordered a rasberry pi for the ztex boards yesterday. I will try to run the Ztex boards with it.... hope to get this thing soon. For 30€ its worth a try

Did you try it?  Is it impossible to run this boards with an arm powered device? What are the sideffects?

He mentioned up to 100% for mining software on his forum thread at some point.


This is why MPBM 100% replicates ztex's clocking behavior.


That's very well possible, but not with ztex boards, those cause too much host CPU usage due to offloading the error rate measurement and clock adjustment to the host.
With Icarus or BFL boards MPBM should easily handle two figure board numbers on ARM platforms. It might need quite a bit of RAM, but not all that much CPU.

Buying new tech toys is way more fun!

Another option might be the low tech version: hang out on IRC with TheSeven and he can initiate a power cycle by typing:

 

I checked their price list. New price Euro 399. The one on eBay costs Euro 150 and is 4 port. But I get your point. Probably overdoing it for a home setup with a few FPGA boards. If you control servers you need something robust, that's why they are still in business even with those prices.

(The allnet thing is 8A max, the Leunig one 16A continues and 120A tops).

there is something similar from allnet (or other companies) thats far cheaper than this (i can't afford to pay 600€ for one purpose, if i had that money i could buy two and send one to TheSeven; but I'm out of money since i invested in 5 Ztex Boards last month).

Had one at my old workplace and its was controllable via Browser IP. I remember it costs a blot 60 -100€ or even less.

BROKK, Remote Power Switch made in Germany (retail price Euro 399.00, I had a few of their 8 port a few years ago in a server cabinet):
http://www.ebay.de/itm/Leunig-Remote-Power-Switch-4G-/160772462474?pt=DE_Computer_Peripherie_Netzwerk&hash=item256ec9178a

This one is also cool (but probably dodgy and low quality). Control your power socket with a SIM card via a mobile phone.

http://www.ebay.de/itm/New-Fashion-Cellphone-Phone-PDA-GSM-RC-Remote-Control-Socket-Power-Switch-DD-/150764040585?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_77&hash=item231a3cb189

It's kind of universal, but it doesn't show what kind of male plugs it has on the back, so you may need to use a travel adapter to make the setup even more dodgy and the risk of burning down your house even higher.

PS: Although I am not from Germany and actually far far away, I am another native German speaker

The BountyChest effort to get a ztex board for Con in Australia fr cgminer development didn't go anywhere. They are going to "refund" the people at one point as far as I know from mjt (bountychest dev).

If I didn't understand this wrong, with ztex's discount program you would have to buy your ztex board, then write the software, and then once done he would decide how much credit you get in form of a refund to your bank account.

http://www.ztex.de/os_discount_program.e.html

You will get the money refunded (via bank wire transfer to a European EUR account or via Paypal) after the project is published and rated.

You'd also have to publish it on his wiki etc and link back to ztex on the MPBM website/thread to qualify.

And the way his discount program sounds, a "simple" miner (which effectively duplicates functionality that's already there with his own open source project) wouldn't score very high on his 15% to >50% discount table IMHO.

I have to be absolutely honest here, if I would only have ztex boards I would probably never have tried MPBM. Now that I am using it, I see a couple of great and unique features (ie the way it handles work sources/blockchains). But I can also understand ztex for discouraging third party miner use, he has to cover his ass for the 2 years warranty and if somebody fries the FPGA chips it will be very costly to replace the boards.

The main advantage (to me) in having a third party miner would actually be to get it to work on platforms with a very low resource/power footprint. But I don't know enough about Python to say if that would be possible. I always liked xiangfu's approach of running his cgminer with 40+ Icarus in a mini dlink router that's not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes. This won't happen with Java. But would this be possible with python for instance?

Remote Access its easy to give but the remote shutdown isn't. I currently do not own an IP - switchable power plug (IP Steckdose). Maybe i can find something the next time i'm at saturn or mediamarkt?. Couldn't be that expensive?

My Setup is somewhat complicated (Mac --> Parallels 7 --> Windows 7). I hope that won't have an effect on your programing? (I only have a windows VM, but i could install a Linux for that?).

Doing it directly on the mac isn't possible because mac osx LION does have some wierd problems with teamviewer 7 beta (all the other versions i've tried are not working properly to) and i literally lack any experience with UNIX or linux at all.


Tell me where u are from with a pm. Maybe we can work something out

I'm trying to get a new board soon (or more if i could raise the money)......

 

I still don't quite understand why he doesn't give me a free one for this, because he once stated he would offer free boards to mining software developers, but apparently he has changed his mind and tries to even prevent third party software support these days.

And yes, remote access would help, but I'll probably need some kind of a "board power cycling agent" at the other end of the tunnel to test the bitstream upload part.


Someone actually tried to raise a non-negligible bounty for cgminer ztex support, but as of now I don't know of any efforts to do that for MPBM. cgminer is just much more popular.

Hm Ztex won't give u one for free for this ..... Would at least remote access to one help u?

May be Somerset of us Ztex owners could provide a board for testing? Kickstarter ?

Also mein VM Miner leuft 24/7 Und ich have Zugriff via teamviewer darauf. Wenns hilft kann ich dich drauf lassen?  

From exactly that

The Seven where do you come from? Not from Germany or somewhere near that?

I just pulled the latest code and tried it with the .bit file in the MPBM directory and the path (not filename, since the fn is set automatically it seems) set in the hotplug manager. Got this error (in addition to the "Can not open the specified device, possibly because it is already in use"):

Well, it's a workaround. A fix would be if I'd finally get a board from ztex to test this kind of stuff properly.

BR0KK, before starting MPBM, fire up BTCMiner via command line and wait till all the boards are configured and it starts mining.

Then press Control-C to exit. Now start MPBM. This should fix the problem.

That's the result of a typo in the ztex bitstream upload code. Apparently nobody has ever tested this before, and I can't do it myself because I don't have a board and ztex doesn't want to cooperate with me.
I have pushed a fix for that particular bug to the testing branch, however I'm not sure if this was the only problem with that code. There's likely more to it, if this indeed was never tested before.

If you haven't done that yet, you'll probably need to extract the bitstream files from BTCMiner and put them into the directory that you specified as the firmware path for that worker.

As a workaround, you can let another miner software upload the bitstream for now, and then switch to MPBM. This will be neccessary after every power cycle of the boards.