- The hashboard performes exactly as advertised: ECO mode (~125 watts 2TH/S), Turbo mode (~200 watts 3TH/s).
Their miner isn't efficient. You barely earn profit even with $0.05/kWh and i don't even consider other overhead (cost of this hardware, pool fee, tx fee, etc.).
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..
- jstefanop recommends not to update the operating system (sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade), because it may break stuff. This is pretty unacceptable to me, as the easiest way that hackers get into a network / system is looking for outdated packages and misconfigurations. It's definitely easier than looking for 0-days yourself!
- Using the built in system update function will brick your system DO NOT UPDATE USING THE SYSTEM UPDATE we will periodically post updated images that have the latest system updates
I wonder what their OS based on? I don't expect stuff break easily if it's based on conservative OS (such as Debian and Rocky Linux).
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 I think it's even the latest LTS version, but just a lot of packages are outdated.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.
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
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.
but I guess you could make custom mod that fits anything, and bigger fans are usually more quiet and they cool better.
To fit a larger fan
inside the chassis, you would need to cut the chassis, though..
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.
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:
If you don't mind the size and higher energy consumption, I'd probably recommend to spend those $100 on a used x86 machine of some kind (desktop or laptop), but if you insist on SBC, I prefer the Raspberry stuff.
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).
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.