Topic: [Review] Apollo BTC - Full Node + Miner in a box - page 2. (Read 622 times)

That looks interesting; kind of like a laptop motherboard without the laptop around it, and the price seems incredibly cheap for what it offers.
On the other hand, it seems like ARM chips are somewhat on the rise with the new Apple stuff; however those are much more powerful ARM chips than what we get in SBCs. So maybe it's not the architecture's fault, but just that these little experimentation boards are not meant to be used as high-uptime mini-servers and / or 'Desktop replacements' (looking at you, Futurebit advertising.. ).

That was my experience too; these units are solid and run for months without hitching. No arguing about that.

If, and that's a big if they can really get these stateside for $99

https://www.gaminghunt.net/2022/06/04/n6000-x86-single-board-computer/

I think it's going to be very interesting to see how many things that are now RPi based will go in this direction. Yes it's more then a Pi and you still have to add memory, but it's got a lot more power to do a lot more things. AND it's a lot more expandable.

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Just checked on my Apollo, now been running for close to 5 months. I took it down the end of January when I was stuck at home after surgery to clean it been running ever since I started it again.

-Dave

Totally fair call. As I said: if you don't yet have a node and you're looking for a decent, compact hardware bundle that doesn't look or feel hacked together; this is not only the only option available, but a very good one, too.

However:
[1] If you're not ready to do a custom install, don't get it due to security issues and limited capabilities out of the box. Get the miner one instead and hook it up to any PC.
[2] If you're not ready to spend at least $100 more for getting it all in one box, and especially if you already have a Bitcoin full node and just don't need a second one, a 'only miner' unit will make much more sense, too.

I did, I did! I should mention that my latest information was that the waiting time should be reduced to around 30 days by now. Don't quote me on that though; better ask jstefanop.

I don't think Noctua has a quiet 95mm fan. I've had great results with Noctua products in the past, but some of them are less silent than people think. For instance, their industrial fans have good static pressure and whatnot, but they're not nearly as quiet as the consumer stuff and actually pretty loud.
Keep in mind the Apollo comes with a high-pressure fan that revs up to over 3,000 RPM.

Also, honestly just putting another fan on top did wonders, without putting yourself or your home at risk (e.g. by a bad replacement fan or bad installation of it). Since if that secondary fan fails, you still have the one that the unit ships with and which can cool it well enough (just louder).

I haven't done any research on the topic, but it sounds plausible. It has a pretty large (and pretty loud - when it's not overshadowed by the miner's fan) 40mm fan on a heatsink, whereas passive cooling cases exist for the Raspberry Pi 4. My biggest complaint is that there is little to no real online community around it and you just get Armbian as a precompiled OS; so very limited software support.

It doesn't feel very fast either; since it's slower than all of my computers, nodes, and servers (even the laptop node upgraded to 8GB of DDR3 RAM and upgraded SATA SSD), I feel the claim of it being 'comparable to a desktop computer' (or even higher claims) questionable and misleading. It overheated when building Bitcoin Core (probably still had some heat from the hashboard which was just shut down).
All in all, it doesn't feel like a significant upgrade in speed over a Raspberry Pi 4, it costs more and has less support.

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.

It will be much more profitable flipping it; usually you can get a bit more than what you paid for in the 'ASIC miner' market due to limited availability. But it's possible, yes.

One thing I don't like about preorders is possible long waiting time and uncertain delivery date, but I guess you used to it with Apollo and Passport hardware wallet  

I think it can be done even without clocking it down.
Maybe replacing fan with some Noctua quiet alternative (I think someone managed to do it with Apollo), and adding additional layer of isolation box would do wonders, for people who love DIY stuff.

I am interested to know whats your opinion and experience with Orange Pi 4 compared to Raspbnerry Pi 4?
I heard they are usually stronger and faster than Rpi's but they are also heating more.
Good thing is that you can always use most components for some other projects, if one day you decide not to use it for Bitcoin full node anymore.

I had a batch 1 full node and sold it on eBay last year for a very nice profit. I was going to keep it but the inability to update it and running outdated software (even back then) just made me skittish.
Like you I never had any issues running it, but leaving that many gaping security holes on 1 little box was not something I wanted. I have picked up the base unit since then and have a nice USB cable running to it from a machine that is up to date.

NOW, I also know that the old bitmain gear I have running here is also running possibly vulnerable OSs
BUT the old versions of Node and Armbian have known vulnerabilities. I have not seen that much about the bitmain stuff.

Had you put out the how to guide last year I might have tried it. But since there are other ways to run it, that is how I went.

-Dave

Reserved

More technical and in-depth information:

Controller
As I found out when making my [Custom Linux install guide for the Futurebit Apollo], it was hard to find OS binaries for this SBC. It comes with Debian Armbian, and that's what I ended up using for my custom install (see below), as well. It's not OrangePi's fault, but the community support is also much worse than anything from RaspberryPi (less discussions, forums, and support sections), so if you're a newbie and want to tinker with it, you can't really find ready-made instructions for anything online. Well, of course now, there are mine.

I do have to say I find it a bit dishonest (as I alluded to earlier) how Futurebit claim it's their controller, purposefully cease to mention the SBC used and even claim it's as fast as any(!!!) desktop computer. Such a claim can be refuted by pointing out a single desktop computer that is faster, so I'd be very careful with absolute claims. Even if they claimed it was as fast as a desktop computer, it would be wrong. They probably refer to the chip having 6 cores, which is not too shabby by today's home computing standards, but core count alone doesn't paint the whole picture.

In my experience, it feels around as fast as a Raspberry Pi 4, and definitely much slower than any of my nodes, even easily beat by an upgraded laptop node. I think I paid around $150 for that whole node since I upgraded to a 1TB SATA (NVMe has no real-world performance benefit for a node) SSD and 8GB of RAM. But the processor is a super old Celeron dual-core.
Compile times on the Orange Pi are so long that I resorted to pulling a compiled binary for Bitcoin Core.
The CPU even overheated after a while and I had to reboot and retry. After two attempts, I just got the binary release.

It's important to point out (as seen in the pictures), that the fan cooling the SBC is pulling in air from below the hashboard. It works fine in normal operation, but I would personally have turned it upside down so it can get fresh air instead. The fan is also not silent - it's a 40mm, pretty cheap looking fan and for silence I'd replace it. Especially when it's not mining (more on noise later).

All the critiques out of the way though, the controller does run the 'whole Bitcoin software stack' that it's advertised to run, even though you have to manually install everything and there's been no offical guide, until I made my own, even after repeated questions in the support thread ........
This message is around 13 months old now; there is no block explorer, LN or solo mining so far and since it's included in the quote I'd like to point out that batch 1 and 2 shipped with a 500GB drive, which was obviously too small and did not have a 1-2 year buffer at all. I recently switched a node from 500GB to 1TB, even though I already had pulled indexes and chainstate off the 500 gig drive. So I'd say the time where 500GB was enough for a full node, has passed less than 1 year after that message.

Of course, the blockchain is not yet over 500GB, but with chainstate and additional files, the Bitcoin directory is now at almost (or over) 500GB. It's good that they now ship these devices with 1TB drives; that's enough headroom for all the extra software, too.
[Theoretical blockchain size: 385GB]

[Practical Bitcoin blockchain folder size: 442GB]

Noise / is it quiet?
The subject of noise is pretty important to me. It is my main motivation for getting pod and stick miners instead of industrial ones. I like the cooling design of the hashboard. But if you've got some experience with CPU wattages and what heatsinks are required to cool 200 or even 300 Watts, it will be no big surprise to you that a single 95mm fan can't silently cool off +200W of energy.

• There is a large heatsink on top of the 44 ASIC chips with slender poles sticking upwards. On top we have a static-pressure fan that pulls air through the heatsink and ejects it up top. It wasn't clear to me prior to buying it and it makes a lot of sense.
  
• If you run the unit in ECO mode, it's pretty quiet and you can have it in the same room you're working in, without really noticing. However I don't like the idea of 'leaving performance on the table'.
• Even in balanced mode, it's pretty loud (to me). I tried to sit it on something rubbery and even sound-absorbing foam, to no avail.
• The way I managed to run it silently (!) in balanced and quiet in turbo mode was to sit the whole unit on top of a 140mm PC fan, blowing air upwards, as well as a 120mm PC fan just sitting on top of the unit, blowing upwards as well. I hooked them up to one of the Pi's USB ports (5V), so these 12V DC fans run at just below half speed. They are really quiet at this speed and help the builtin fan so much that it tunes itself down automatically. It's easy, cheap and quick to do (if you already have the components) and in case your solder job is bad or for something catches those external fans, the internal one can still rev up and cool the unit down, so not to melt your place. I'd be very cautious about other modifications, such as changing the internal fan's fan curve or replacing it. This way you always have a potent fallback.
  

Software

• The web GUI works fine. It was easy to get up and running quickly.
• I noticed that even though I changed the GUI and SSH passwords, somehow I couldn't log back in after a few months; it was back on the default (futurebit123). No idea why, but a little scary.
  
• As mentioned above, you get Bitcoin Core and the miner + web GUI - that's it. I really miss Electrum and Lightning on this, because that's what I use daily and gives me a tangible, real-world benefit. If you just want to mine, get the 'only miner' option (you can 'help the Bitcoin network' for $50 if that's what you're after).
  
• 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!
  Quote from: jstefanop on May 26, 2021, 12:28:15 AM
  • 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
• That's why I recently made some time and threw together a full install guide on how to install stock (up-to-date!!) Armbian yourself. Right now, it runs the miner (even through the internal GPIO pins ), Core, electrs and Core Lightning. The web GUI had some issues building and I don't think I recommend using it, as it requires nodeJS 9.x (very outdated!).
  Quote from: cd1177 on February 25, 2022, 04:14:37 PM
  Quote from: Biffa on February 25, 2022, 04:12:47 PM

  Quote from: cd1177 on February 25, 2022, 03:26:08 PM

  update on my end.    i thought i had it figured out.   but i woke up this morning and was wrong.....   so i reflashed, setup a totally different vlan than it was on, added it on a totally different wifi network instead of the same ether connection it was on before, setup the pool and password on startup, clicked on settings and users and changed the main password to one that is different from default and different than my dashboard login, fired it up, working great, temps around 45 and 62, ran great for 5-8 hours, woke up, changed back to slushpool and topminer01.........(i have tried using multiple pools, keeps reverting back to topminer01 on slushpool)    is there something i'm missing?  is there a different system password that someone could be accessing to get into it and change everything?  i'm at a loss at this point.....  
  

  
  Where did you buy it?
  

  
  from futurebit.  one full node and 3 standard units.  
  

Profitability
As noted earlier, I mostly mined on https://kano.is/. It's a PPLNS pool, so you only get paid if the pool finds a block and you get rewarded for the last 3 days of shares.

At the time of writing, Kano's last block was #706643; just shy of 236 days ago. Therefore I got no payouts from Kano.

CoinWarz estimates a 3TH/s miner to get roughly 0.00001246BTC per day, so just over 1,000 satoshis. This is roughly the performance I got on NiceHash, as well. It's not much, and therefore I don't think running this device on any level below Turbo (3TH/s) makes any sense. At that point (if you don't care about a somewhat meaningful hashrate), USB stick miners might be more interesting. I own some Compac F sticks and they can give you a silent operation, less upfront cost and better efficiency than the Apollo hashboard.

Custom Linux
There's a reason this point is the last one and follows directly the 'profitability' topic. A big selling point for the Apollo BTC (especially in conjunction with the price) is that it's not just a pod miner, but that you get a full node and can run a 'full Bitcoin stack'.
As mentioned earlier; having this unit mine on kano pool with the stock OS, feels like a bit of a paperweight. No daily payouts, no Electrum server for your SPV wallets and no Lightning. The good news is that it it can run those things. It's just that there are no OS images or instructions provided by jstefanop.

Ever since I went through the whole manual install process myself (honestly I procrastinated that for a couple months), it instantly became so much more useful. We talked about this in the support thread and assumed that a custom install will require a short USB cable going from the hashboard to the Pi, but I'm pretty glad I got it working through the internal GPIO; so there's no external / visible changes at all.

In case anyone's still looking for it, here's the link to my guide. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/guide-futurebit-apollo-btc-custom-linux-install-base-5401729

Unfortunately, I couldn't get openSUSE to run on the Orange Pi, so I resorted to the most reasonable, officially supported OS which was DebianArmbian.

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I'm generally quite worried about the security of the stock OS. I honestly see it as just a of proof-of-concept and to check that the hardware works right; other than that it's pretty risky to use it as-is; the Armbian version is outdated, the software packages are outdated and you have to keep nodeJS 9 on it to have the web UI, which people will inevitably port-forward it to the internet to be able to access it remotely. Just a disaster waiting to happen.

The web GUI, which is admittedly pretty useful, doesn't work without installing outdated nodeJS. I did install it though, and it gave me angry warnings.

I left instructions for installing it in my guide, but opted out of doing so myself. On the miner side, you honestly don't really need more insights than what the pool website tells you, i.e.: 'is my hashrate where it's supposed to be?'. The Bitcoin Core node you can easily check on using bitcoin-cli getblockchaininfo and for your Lightning Node there's no web GUI provided by Futurebit anyway, so you'll use Ride-The-Lightning for that.

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There's no real conclusion since that's in the TL;DR already, but I again do think it's a potent, little machine, with a tiny size and it can run everything you need at a reasonable noise level. I'd just repeat that it's infinitely more useful once you do install that stuff yourself, onto a fresh, up-to-date, secure Linux distribution. And remember you pay $100 premium on the off-the-shelf parts; so do consider buying those separately and connecting via USB to a 'hashboard-only' Apollo unit.

Apollo BTC (full package) review

	Futurebit Apollo BTC		The built-in controller (Orange Pi 4), 1TB SSD and microSD card

What is it? (TL;DR)

• It's a very, very compact 'node in a box' with a hashboard.
• The hardware can power a full Bitcoin node, Electrum server, Core Lightning and the ASICs, but it's not going to break even quickly.
• The creator's forum topic about this device is here; and jstefanop has a support thread here.
  

What is it not?

• It's not a money printing machine.
• It's not the cheapest node you can build and you do overpay on the Orange Pi 4 & SSD.
• It's not a supercomputer (or Desktop computer).
• It's not really quiet unless you clock it down (which I don't think makes a lot of sense - more later) or add more fans.

Hardware:

• Orange Pi 4 (Rockchip RK3399, 6 cores, 64-bit; 4GB DDR4 RAM).
• 1TB Kingston NV1 NVMe SSD.
• 16GB SanDisk Industrial microSD card.
• Hashboard with 44 ASIC chips and beefy heatsink + industrial fan.

	The Pi and SSD are cooled by air coming in through the open bottom.

	Orange Pi 4 back IO, hashboard microUSB and PCIe 6-pin connectors.

	CD for size reference		Arduino Uno for size reference

Backstory and price:
I preordered this Apollo BTC (batch 3) 'full unit' late summer 2021, paid it in full and received it pretty exactly 6 months later. I got the 'full unit' that includes the Orange Pi 4, compared to the 'only hashboard' option that looks the same, but has void in that spot. The price difference (right now) is $300 and for that you get the Orange Pi 4 and the 1TB SSD. I'll purposefully repeat the SBC's model name often here since until I got it I wasn't sure what it was. Their webpage always just speaks of 'our controller' and that it's faster than a Raspberry Pi 4, but never mentions that it's not 'theirs', but rather an off-the-shelf Pi 4 alternative.

In terms of profits (more on that later); I've mined a bit on NiceHash, which thanks to Lightning integration lets you withdraw starting from 0.00002BTC (right now ~$0.40USD) with no fees.

Quote from: https://www.nicehash.com/support/general-help/nicehash-service/fees

|	Coin / Token / Currency	|	Withdrawal option	|	Amount to withdraw	|	FEE	|
|	Bitcoin (BTC)	|	Lightning Network	|	0.00002 BTC (min)	|	FREE (*)	|

Most of the time though, I pointed the miner to https://kano.is/ and unfortunately this little pool found no block in this time; so I got no payouts from there. I'm fine with it though, since the consumed electricity, when running 200W is just 144kW per month, which costs me around 30-40 bucks on expensive EU power. If you pay 5cents per kWh, it's going to be less than $10 or 10€. I'm not saying you should do this, but in some offices you can surely run an Apollo without anyone noticing a dent (or actually uptick) on the power bill. It's just that I happen to know people who do this (with permission). It may have something to do with offices paying flat rates on power until a certain limit.

All in all, it's a pleasant companion; it doesn't take up a lot of space, doesn't make too much noise (*more later) or draw too much power. However: it's pretty useless if you use it the way it ships. It has no real daily utility. All the applications they claim you could or can run on the Apollo, do run, but you have to do it yourself and there are no instructions. Out of the box, it has no local block explorer (not even that useful for me), no Electrum and no Lightning on it. Add the fact that it's recommended against updating (or installing) anything, because it may break stuff; it's kind of a paperweight (if you use it as it comes out-of-the-box). More on the software below.