Yes all your points are good ones to think about and my estimates are not great but even punching in continuous 30% diff increases for the next 12 months I'm still coming out well ahead.
As to the efforts to maintain the miner, they're basically zero now due to my hardware watchdog that automatically reboots the pi if it stops mining, I'll be releasing that soon once I finish my thermistor code
Topic: Some BFL Jalapeno Power Numbers (Read 7565 times)
Here's some interesting numbers to think about:
Electricity at $0.12/KWh (my approx power cost)
Electricity cost per YEAR: $38.00
Assuming current BTC price, the Jalapeno would need to mine less than 0.30 BTC per YEAR to be unprofitable
Profitable Until Difficulty >2 BILLION (>166x current diff)
ETA of break-even at my silly purchase price of 23 BTC cause I'm impatient and wanted hardware now (assuming 75% profitability decline per year): 112 days
Estimated net profit in 1 year time frame: 5168.44 USD
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1181169/P1010168.jpg
Electricity at $0.12/KWh (my approx power cost)
Electricity cost per YEAR: $38.00
Assuming current BTC price, the Jalapeno would need to mine less than 0.30 BTC per YEAR to be unprofitable
Profitable Until Difficulty >2 BILLION (>166x current diff)
ETA of break-even at my silly purchase price of 23 BTC cause I'm impatient and wanted hardware now (assuming 75% profitability decline per year): 112 days
Estimated net profit in 1 year time frame: 5168.44 USD
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1181169/P1010168.jpg
On the unprofitable point. Are you really will to only make pennies or even just a few dollars a month for your time an hassle to maintain the miner?
Most miners seem to only be willing to run a miner if it is making at least double what the power cost is, if not more. (Another point a lot of people don't seem to take into account when talking about power usage with Asics is the power to remove the heat generated by the miner. This essentially means any power cost calculated from the draw from the wall needs to be doubled at least. Yes their is some situation where cooling/power usage is not a issue, but these people are the minority). Just wanted to point this out as I can't recall the last time this was mentioned, I'm sure it will get lost with most other post that point out important factors to making a ASIC purchase, but eh, at least I tried.
BTW, not sure how you came up with that BTC total for 1 year. But all I will say is good luck with that. <-Last sentence was sarcasm.
This may be a silly question but I don't think I have seen anybody on this forum try it. Have you mined any other coins than bitcoins?
They can only mine bitcoin.Well I've been using 4 Jalapeños to play games, does that count?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmpasmzP1B4
This may be a silly question but I don't think I have seen anybody on this forum try it. Have you mined any other coins than bitcoins?
They can only mine bitcoin.Freicoin, Peer2PeerCoin and Teracoin... major ones without merged mining.
Namecoin, Devcoin, IXcoin... are a few that you can merge mine I think if you can find a pool.
Missing any?
This may be a silly question but I don't think I have seen anybody on this forum try it. Have you mined any other coins than bitcoins?
They can only mine bitcoin.This may be a silly question but I don't think I have seen anybody on this forum try it. Have you mined any other coins than bitcoins?
They can only mine bitcoin. 
This may be a silly question but I don't think I have seen anybody on this forum try it. Have you mined any other coins than bitcoins?
When sadpandatech messed with it originally he kinda killed the original thermal pad but he used white thermal grease to replace it.
I cleaned off all of that and it now only has the MX-2, seems to be running fine, quite cool actually.
I'm used to mounting heatsinks on bare silicon, I used to do it all the time with my AMD AthlonXP system.
I cleaned off all of that and it now only has the MX-2, seems to be running fine, quite cool actually.
I'm used to mounting heatsinks on bare silicon, I used to do it all the time with my AMD AthlonXP system.
Cooling notes:
The unit ran fine in the original housing but I prefer to have my hardware running as cool as possible. It was originally running around 40-45C but removing it from the housing, I changed the thermal compound to Arctic Cooling M-2 and installed the better fan. It dropped temps to the 30-35C range. Now that it's hashing away in my basement temps are even lower, bfgminer reporting 22/29C right now.
The unit ran fine in the original housing but I prefer to have my hardware running as cool as possible. It was originally running around 40-45C but removing it from the housing, I changed the thermal compound to Arctic Cooling M-2 and installed the better fan. It dropped temps to the 30-35C range. Now that it's hashing away in my basement temps are even lower, bfgminer reporting 22/29C right now.
I also run caseless, original fan blowing down, 140 mm fan aimed at it. 21 C ambient, 33 C hashing.
I pulled the heatsink and added some MX2 but left the thermal pad pieces on as I was worried about thermal expansion cracking a hashing chip as they are bare chips. are you still using the thermal pads or just the mx2?
EDIT my killowatt at the wall says 15 idle, 34 hashing, 5.51 ghs 3.1 v 33 C with cgminer
I find that minepeon can be a little slower than an up to date bfgminer build on the pi.
I found a watchdog script for bfgminer which I altered to take care of my modminer quads as bfgminer crashes periodically on my one pi for some reason.
I found a watchdog script for bfgminer which I altered to take care of my modminer quads as bfgminer crashes periodically on my one pi for some reason.
I had terrible uptime running Raspian with bfgminer compiled from source, I missed probably 0.25 BTC of mining revenue this past week from it crashing when I was at work. Very annoying hence the construction of the hardware watchdog.
The Jalapeno wasn't the problem, bfgminer would just die and clog up the pi. I'm running minepeon now but the watchdog has rebooted it a few times already.
I plan on adding some more features to it then making a separate thread with the source code.
The Jalapeno wasn't the problem, bfgminer would just die and clog up the pi. I'm running minepeon now but the watchdog has rebooted it a few times already.
I plan on adding some more features to it then making a separate thread with the source code.
Mine is running from a raspi as well, and to prevent errant crashes and lockups I built an arduino watchdog that will reboot the pi if the jalapeno goes idle for more than 5 minutes
Share! Share! (And should I anticipate daily or weekly crashes and lockups?)
Thanks for the "in the field" reports guys.
Interesting to note that the PSU efficiency is 88% at load, thanks for that, makes me a lot less concerned about buying ATX supplies to run my BFL hardware on when it gets here. Especially considering you have to pay quite a wad to get 80% on an ATX and that likewise would be a fully loaded figure, so if you want efficiency, can't go overboard on size.
Interesting to note that the PSU efficiency is 88% at load, thanks for that, makes me a lot less concerned about buying ATX supplies to run my BFL hardware on when it gets here. Especially considering you have to pay quite a wad to get 80% on an ATX and that likewise would be a fully loaded figure, so if you want efficiency, can't go overboard on size.
Yeah I was really surprised at how efficient the power brick is, their larger units probably won't pull those kinds of numbers though.
Mine is running from a raspi as well, and to prevent errant crashes and lockups I built an arduino watchdog that will reboot the pi if the jalapeno goes idle for more than 5 minutes
Got the Jalapeño running off of Raspberry Pi using MinePeon. 36 Watts total. Woot!
Thanks for the "in the field" reports guys.
Interesting to note that the PSU efficiency is 88% at load, thanks for that, makes me a lot less concerned about buying ATX supplies to run my BFL hardware on when it gets here. Especially considering you have to pay quite a wad to get 80% on an ATX and that likewise would be a fully loaded figure, so if you want efficiency, can't go overboard on size.
Interesting to note that the PSU efficiency is 88% at load, thanks for that, makes me a lot less concerned about buying ATX supplies to run my BFL hardware on when it gets here. Especially considering you have to pay quite a wad to get 80% on an ATX and that likewise would be a fully loaded figure, so if you want efficiency, can't go overboard on size.
Quote
P1010168.jpg
If I hadn't been standing at my desk I would have fallen out of my chair laughing at this wonderful photo. The lava lamp is just the tip of the iceberg (and I will generously assume that the lava lamp is used for random number generation when generating crypto keys, a venerable practice if you google for it.) Mostly i like the blue pneumatic tubing that is obviously used to send ping pong balls flying into servo-switches that trigger those MIDI ports I see in the picture. The white coffee pot driven by Fleischmann–Pons cold fusion is an especially nice touch.
Cross-posting from another thread here, but here are my Jalapeño specs:
Idle: 14W
Active: 33W
Typical Hashrate: 5.7 GH/s
Temperature (as reported by BitMinter client, anyway) around 46-50 C.
I'm pleased with everything except the noise (hadn't anticipated a fan at all based on the "coffee warmer" marketing back in june 2012) and the power consumption (because I can't quite run it off my hobby solar array which would have handled a raspberry pi + 5W jalapeño just fine.)
Here's how it's installed right now, adjacent to the PowerBook G4 running Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.5 which I *hope* to use for mining once I can figure out how to compile a compatible miner... The exposed hardware you see behind the Jalapeño is my wife's Nexus 7 which she dropped in the bathtub today. I figured the Jalapeño's hot air output would do a nice job drying out the Nexus circuits over the next couple days:
Love the LAVA LAMP! 
Happy Mining.
Happy Mining.
Here's some interesting numbers to think about:
Electricity at $0.12/KWh (my approx power cost)
Electricity cost per YEAR: $38.00
Assuming current BTC price, the Jalapeno would need to mine less than 0.30 BTC per YEAR to be unprofitable
Profitable Until Difficulty >2 BILLION (>166x current diff)
ETA of break-even at my silly purchase price of 23 BTC cause I'm impatient and wanted hardware now (assuming 75% profitability decline per year): 112 days
Estimated net profit in 1 year time frame: 5168.44 USD
Electricity at $0.12/KWh (my approx power cost)
Electricity cost per YEAR: $38.00
Assuming current BTC price, the Jalapeno would need to mine less than 0.30 BTC per YEAR to be unprofitable
Profitable Until Difficulty >2 BILLION (>166x current diff)
ETA of break-even at my silly purchase price of 23 BTC cause I'm impatient and wanted hardware now (assuming 75% profitability decline per year): 112 days
Estimated net profit in 1 year time frame: 5168.44 USD
Sorry to those who wanted sound measurements, the guy I bought this unit from snapped a blade off the fan. He glued it back on and it worked fine for a while until I was working on it and snapped the blade off again.
So I just tossed the fan in the garbage and put on the nice Panaflo ball bearing fan that's on there now. The original fan was a low profile 92mm fan of unknown origin (black label, no ID information) but hey, at least the original was ball bearing so props to BFL on that one.
The original fan was fairly noisy but more of a woosh of air than an annoying whine. If you hate fan noise you probably wouldn't want it right on your desk but would probably be fine on the other side of the room.
Cooling notes:
The unit ran fine in the original housing but I prefer to have my hardware running as cool as possible. It was originally running around 40-45C but removing it from the housing, I changed the thermal compound to Arctic Cooling M-2 and installed the better fan. It dropped temps to the 30-35C range. Now that it's hashing away in my basement temps are even lower, bfgminer reporting 22/29C right now.
So I just tossed the fan in the garbage and put on the nice Panaflo ball bearing fan that's on there now. The original fan was a low profile 92mm fan of unknown origin (black label, no ID information) but hey, at least the original was ball bearing so props to BFL on that one.
The original fan was fairly noisy but more of a woosh of air than an annoying whine. If you hate fan noise you probably wouldn't want it right on your desk but would probably be fine on the other side of the room.
Cooling notes:
The unit ran fine in the original housing but I prefer to have my hardware running as cool as possible. It was originally running around 40-45C but removing it from the housing, I changed the thermal compound to Arctic Cooling M-2 and installed the better fan. It dropped temps to the 30-35C range. Now that it's hashing away in my basement temps are even lower, bfgminer reporting 22/29C right now.
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