Topic: [Review] Apollo BTC - Full Node + Miner in a box (Read 622 times)

Thank you for this detailed review and the other related threads, my laptop is aching with all the open tabs that I want to read and use later on!

However, there is at least one difference to the Orange Pi4 board which I spotted while trying to move the WiFi antenna to outside of the metal container:

The 5VDC outlet is missing and there are cables soldered and glued instead of it, going to the hashboard instead of to the outside of the metal container.
I wonder why the hole is in the container and why it is labelled 5VDC OUT.
I think the board design was changed after the housing design was finished and so the hole was left in the box.

This former 5VDC outlet hole come in handy for routing the WiFi antenna to the outside. A rubber grommet helps to prevent chafing against the metal edges.

Just saw this thread, thanks for the honest review. I do want to provide transparency whenever I can especially when it comes to comments like above when most people have no idea costs/development involved with a product like this.

We call it "our" controller because it truly is, and there is nothing else on the market that even comes close to its performance for a Pi sized computer and thats mostly from the innovation with our custom SSD controller. AFAIK its the only SBC on the market that has 1TB R/W speeds which is why its so much faster than a PI when syncing. Sure the base board is off the shelf (we have custom changes to this as well), but we put in a lot of work to the overall system with the SSD components.

Pricing, here is the our overall bulk costs we paid for Batch 2 and 3 for these components
SBC:95
SSD:90
SD Card: 9
Custom SSD card: 19
Heatsinks/Fans/Wire harnesses and other small components: 25

Thats 240 and does not include imports costs/shipping costs/assembly/R&D etc etc.

When all that is factored in we actually make a net loss on the full node units in relation to its price premium. The little profit we make is from the hashing unit itself. 300 is a steal for what you get, especially when compared to other full node only competitors.

FYI most of the other issues especially around upgrade the base OS and security issues have been fixed in the latest image release.

My last information was that it is technically a preorder, but there's a relatively guaranteed lead time of just 1 month, which is very reasonable in the ASIC market.

The issue with used devices is that users are usually able to overclock and / or under-cool the ASICs through manual controls and there's no way of knowing whether that happened.
But if you do want to get one from Europe and trust me more than other sellers (I always used Futurebit presets), you can always send me a DM, dkbit - I'd make an exception for you and sell the device online..

I think it's currently out of stock so you could only preorder it, and you would probably have to wait for months to receive it, if you ever receive it.
Just finished talking with one tech guy from China, and he told me that situation with chip supply shortage is not getting any better.
They can't even make simple boards now and it's unclear when situation will get better, maybe next month but nobody knows exactly.
That is why I think that purchasing used stuff is good option in this case, if devices are in good condition.

I have no idea; they gave no price and I'm not sure I trust many users in here for $1000 or more - especially newbie accounts.
I'm looking to sell my full unit myself fairly soon, but will most probably do so in P2P fashion without shipping.

Since you can get the miner new from Futurebit, I'd personally do that instead of buying used.

You have to ask this in Mining speculation, my friend..

Is there any point in going into mining now? I only see news about miners surrendering and selling their equipment

For anyone who is interested... I just saw someone selling Futurebit Apollo BTC devices in Goods/Computer hardware section.
It's newbie member without any reputation, but if deal is good and if seller is real, maybe someone can get a decent price, instead of paying full price and wait many months for delivery.
n0nce what do you think about this?

On their website[1], they advertise Apollo as ready to use device though. It's more fair to compare it with product such as myNode One[2].


FYI, i just checked Lenovo M72e[3] and it's closer to Intel NUC rather than SBC. It use Intel processor.

[1] https://www.futurebit.io/
[2] https://mynodebtc.com/products/one
[3] https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/withdrawnbook/M72e.pdf

Absolutely; a SBC gives you the advantage of size and power consumption, but I'm a big fan of x86 nodes.

You may be aware of it; but I encourage to build such nodes, especially on used hardware, in [Guide] How to run a Bitcoin Core full node for under 50 bucks!.

Forgetting the mining part, if someone would like to have own node, electrum server, rcp browser and even maybe something like btcpay server, why not to buy „tiny dektop computer” like for example Lenovo M72e? I see you may get one on ebay for around $50 (+ probably better disk).
I think I will try to buy one and to configure as a personal node.

Sure; there are all sorts of ways to run insecure software in a 'it's probably fine' way - sandboxing, virtualization, dockerization -- with the assumption that it will even work in such a restricted scenario, as it will need access to the different files and processes to pull the information to be displayed.

Yeah; I'll try my best with another attempt at running it on updated nodeJS versions, but honestly it's just fine without the UI and all the benefits you get from the custom Linux install heavily outweigh missing out on the web GUI.

That's a sensible guess; in any case I'll try to compile the UI again with 14.x, but honestly it's really not needed. I used to check it regularly but now that I run the Apollo without web GUI, I don't really miss it either.
It was also sometimes dodgy; like not saving a changed pool config. If you just SSH into the device instead, make your changes to the service file and issue a quick sudo service miner restart, such issues don't happen.

Yeah, I also noticed michelem09 in the webui repo. My guess is that jstefanop hired him to create the Apollo Web UI. He created minera, a popular miner dashboard that is now deprecated.

Thanks for your time reading it and for your comments! I really consider selling it due to current market conditions and buying a 'miner only' unit later when Bitcoin is at a higher price. If that works out, I won't have paid much (if anything for it).. But it was definitely an investment, almost 1000 bucks and waiting 6 months is not something I often do.

Yes, that was pretty much my TL;DR. And a very compact all-in-one; compare to the CD in this picture.

Okay, maybe this should be clarified; I didn't explain this in detail indeed. The hashboard is a custom creation by jstefanop and uses 44 Bitfury ASIC chips.
You can neither buy these chips directly from Bitfury, nor can you get this hashboard from anyone stand-alone. Well, you basically get just the hashboard (with the casing and heatsink around it) if you get the 'miner only' unit from Futurebit.

If you want to get a cheaper ASIC, the only route is industrial miners; but those are not suited for the home.
Basically:

• Highest efficiency, totally silent (but expensive in $/TH/s): Compac F (for same efficiency, but loud: top-of-the-line industrial miners S17 to S19 category)
  
• Middle ground (a bit expensive, a bit inefficient, pretty quiet): Futurebit Apollo
  
• Best price per TH/s (but lowest efficiency and loud): classic industrial ASICs like Bitmain S9
  

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For me there is also a bit of a philosophical aspect. This one little tiny box combines all of the integral parts of the Bitcoin network (if you do the custom install); what sets it apart from any other node-in-a-box is that it has a capable hashboard. It won't really ROI, but it gets you satoshi at basically market value, without KYC.

Also keep in mind: if enough people ran such hardware and there were sudden mining bans, these little guys could take up some of the slack while the industrial miners are relocated. In case the 'powerful gear' were to be banned (confiscated?) altogether, these home miners could effectively keep the whole thing running in a super decentralized manner. So more people running Apollos (or other home miners) would be extremely helpful for Bitcoin.

I had seen that the thread had some activity, but didn't get involved into the discussion. Nice review! I'm glad you have the time, money and passion to buy these and show them to us.

So, to summarize, it's a full node, lightning node and ASIC miner, all-in-one? It, sure, looks cool, but is there an essential benefit I don't see? If you want to mine, which is required otherwise you wouldn't buy such thing, doesn't it get cheaper if you purchase the ASICs directly from the company that makes them?

I do like my silence, but usually just buy devices or computers that are pretty quiet as they come out of the box.. But you can surely tinker with this, if that's your thing. As I said though, there's only so much you can do when facing 200-300W and trying to cool it with a single fan. Just consider gaming PCs (at least a few years ago) pulled barely more than that; often shipping with 500W PSUs, and using chunky tower coolers and multiple fans in the system.

Sure; totally agree! Especially fast compile times make it much easier to try different software, install / uninstall / reinstall; whatever you need to do when setting up a whole new system. I just don't have the time to sit around a whole afternoon waiting for e.g. 30 minute compile time of Bitcoin Core, 30 minutes for electrs, even more time C-Lightning and all the other stuff.

I don't know the place you are holding this Apollo device in your house, some different room or basement, and maybe you don't have problem with noise that is creating.
For my devices I am always trying to reduce noise by doing some modification, but I am silence freak and I don't recommend this to anyone else.
If you are ok with setup you have now, don't cut or change anything

I am not sure about Orange Pi, but I know that I can overclock Pi400 and it would still run cool and stable.
It might be different story with Orange Pi especially if GPU is used for anything.
Interesting thing is that they are working on their new OS that is Arch-based Linux distribution, unlike Raspberry that is using modified Debian based linux OS.

My point was that I can use those laptops for multiple use cases, for anything related with Bitcoin.
I am much more limited with Rpi devices.

Sure, so on my custom install, I used the latest available Armbian:

It ships with outdated nodeJS, interestingly. It had EOL in April, but since I have no nodeJS services running on the custom install anyway, it should be fine. In any case, as soon as you install something that runs on node, all install guides tell you to update nodeJS, so it will be fine.

But if I boot the latest Futurebit OS - released over half a year ago (12/17/21) - I get this login screen. It's 5 releases behind on the Linux kernel and behind by one major Debian version.


Interestingly, it comes with nodeJS v14, but then I don't understand why on GitHub, I was told that

Compilation on the latest nodeJS version didn't work; hence I went on GitHub to ask.
I will try again with nodeJS 14, which is by the way the oldest LTS version of node ('Maintenance LTS' phase) and will be updated for just another 10 months.
It would be much preferred to have ApolloUI be able to run on 16.x or 18.x, though.

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I'm not very familiar with Ubuntu, but this version history page suggests that 21.04 with Linux kernel 5.11 is EOL since 2022-01-20. The system says it's 21.05 with a 5.10 kernel.

Yes, it's not very efficient by today's standards. If my math checks out, in Eco mode it should have an efficiency of 62.5J/TH and in Turbo it's 66.67J/TH.
For example, an Antminer S19 Pro (110Th) is roughly twice as efficient, only requiring 29.5J/TH (since it pulls 3250W and achieves 110TH/s).

That's what I like about the Compac F: It uses an S17 chip. The S17 Pro sits at around 40J/TH and the Compac F, overclocked to 0.3TH/s at just below 15W, of course means a similar efficiency of ~45J/TH. Unfortunately since it's a single chip on a stick, you pay more 'overhead' (board, circuitry, packaging, shipping) than if it was a pod miner like the Apollo. I'm still eagerly waiting for a pod miner by sidehack..

No need to wonder! It's Armbian. I will boot my 'stock microSD' later to check again what exact version it is and add it in the original post. I think it's even the latest LTS version, but just a lot of packages are outdated.
I would guess that maybe if you do a full system upgrade, the device tree will be reset. As we can see in the custom install guide, to get the internal GPIO connection to the hashboard working, there are some custom tweaks to the device tree.

Actually, now that you mention it, it could be 92mm. I only roughly measured and don't believe 95mm is a standard fan size. 92mm with 2500 RPM sounds like it should fit. But then again, you'll be looking at sinking even more money into an already expensive and not really ROI'ing device.

To fit a larger fan inside the chassis, you would need to cut the chassis, though..

That only works if the SoC is efficient / produces limited amounts of heat. I don't think the Orange Pi 4 can be passively cooled like that; from what I can tell it is rated to 5V, 4A input, while the Raspberry is sold with a 3A power supply

This page also suggests it pulls much less power in typical workloads:
Coreboot is a great addition to a trust-minimized node setup. It's questionable if that's needed for someone installing nodeJS 9 and a proprietary miner binary, though..
As you mention the 400: it sounds like a cool idea for a standalone node. I'm still dreaming of an off-grid full node that uses some sort of long-range wireless network, a solar panel, battery and maybe even a small hashboard for times of excess solar power. The 400 would be perfect in that scenario since it wouldn't have an internet connection to SSH into it, and of course it uses little power. Argh. I digress!

Little extra nugget of information for you guys: the miner binary I found in the OS is the same one provided in the download section in the Apollo's forum topic.

Furthermore, the binary is not stripped, so some basic security analysis can be done - just in case someone is into binary analysis (for finding exploits or verifying it's safe to use). Anyhow, in my custom linux install guide, I tried to sandbox the process a little bit through systemd, though I'll be the first to admit that it could be much better and if you recommend some improvements, let me know. Keep in mind I need hardware access to /dev/ to access the hashboard and internet access for receiving block templates and submitting shares.

I know that not all Noctua fans are that quiet like people think, but they are still representing synonym for quiet fans.
I think they don't have 95mm fans, only 92mm and bigger 120mm fans, but I guess you could make custom mod that fits anything, and bigger fans are usually more quiet and they cool better.
They have one industrial 92mm fan with 2500 RPM and two 1200mm fans with 300 RPM's, but I think there ae other manufacturers like Gelid and Zalman.

Best thing you can do to cool them down is to use something like Raspberry Pi 400 is doing with massive passive metallic heatsink cooler.
It's totally silent and temperatures are reduced a lot, they are even better than regular Rpi with fan.



Yeah I know.
I could buy very good used Thinkpad T series laptop for $50 to $100 and it would be much faster than Raspberry Pi or Orange Pi.  
Some of them can even run Coreboot open source firmware, instead of stock BIOS, and can be used to ran Mac OS in them.
What I like about Rpi 400 is total silence element, and very low energy spending (only few wats).

This looks interesting, and I didn't find it before when I looked for other Rpi alternatives.
I still would never install wiNd0ws OS in device like this.