Archive for the ‘Tests and Reviews’ Category

1 Month With a Bobcat Miner 300 Running on the Helium (HNT) Network

29, Nov 2022

The Helium (HNT) project is something quite interesting with a lot of potential in the future. It is an effort to create a global wireless network by utilizing Proof-of-Coverage as a work algorithm with dedicated Hotspots (miners) that are providing legitimate wireless coverage to expand the network. Helium’s LongFi combines the LoRaWAN wireless protocol with Helium blockchain so any LoRaWAN device can transfer data on the Helium Network. Helium’s Technology allows anyone to build out massive, cost-effective wireless infrastructures in an entirely new business model that benefits everyone. It opens the doors to many new ideas for low power devices with long battery life and network connectivity regardless of their location. The network relies on people to build and maintain the wireless coverage and as a result the participants are being rewarded the native HNT token of Heli and the company behind the project is already working on building a 5G network as well.

Helium started very strong, creating a big demand for Helium Hotspots or miners, and with price of the HNT token peaking at about $44 USD during the last crypto bull run it is no wonder it got very quick growth worldwide with users buying and installing compatible hotspot devices all over the world. Since this happened at the beginning of 2022 the price of the HNT token has been going down and it is currently at just around $2.5 USD and the big question is now if it is worth joining in now by getting a Helium hotspot and installing it at home? There are a lot of second-hand Helium “miners” on the second-hand market (even unused devices) at a significantly lower prices and manufacturers are also not having trouble keeping supply as the demand has significantly subdued from the peak demand earlier this year.

We got a great deal on a brand-new Bobcat Miner 300 and decided to give it a try and see what it can earn in a month. So, we just plugged in the Bobcat and connected it to the Helium network, placing the device near the window and the antenna on the window so that it has better signal coverage. We do that in a densely populated area in Los Angeles with a quite a few other hotspots around, so the transmit scale is far from optimal (0.19 to 0.38)) and our earnings are not the maximum that is possible. However most home users are not very flexible on where they can put a Helium miner and if you get the device to use at home, then it is highly likely that your transmit scale will not be 1.0, so your earnings will be lower as well. The Bobcat Miner 300 is one of the most popular Helium hostpots out there and while it may be better than most other cheaper alternatives, it does not come cheap at $429 USD at the official website, although you can probably pick it up elsewhere for half that price. Just make sure that you either get an unopened device that has not yet been initialized, or one that the seller used but can and will transfer to you once you purchase it, otherwise you will not be able to use it!

So, after a month of use our humble LA Bobcat Miner 300 has managed to earn just 1.059 HNT or about $2.62 USD at the current exchange price. Not much for sure, but more than enough to cover the power cost of the device at just around 5W on average (rated at 12V 1A maximum), but also will take quite a while to even pay back for the hardware investment before starting to make actual profit. Of course, the crypto market is not great at the moment, near its current bottom, so there is a lot of room for the price of HNT to grow back up in the future. Not to mention that here you are helping build something useful in the longer term and there is not much that the Helium hotspot needs besides a little power and internet connectivity and you can just forget about it for a couple of months or a year. Give it a go if you are interested as now it will be easier to get into Helium (HNT) mining than when the next bull run starts and the demand for Helium hotspots picks up once more with the growth of the price of the HNT token. You can also use the Helium explorer linked below to look around you and see how many competing hotspots are available and also how much HNT they are earning daily, weekly and monthly to get a decent idea on what to expect.

– Explore Helium hotspots and see how much they are earning…

How Much Does a Goldshell Mini-DOGE Miner Earn a Day Currently

27, Nov 2022

The Goldshell Mini-DOGE ASIC miners for mining Scrypt-based crypto coins such as Litecoin (LTC) and DogeCoin (DOGE) are quite popular topic among the home miners with the recent spike in the price of both mentioned coins. The miner has the DOGE in its name, but you can mine any Scrypt-based crypto coin and there is actually no point in mining only DogeCoin with it as DOGE is merge-mined with Litecoin, so you are essentially mining Litecoin and DogeCoin together and not only one or the other. Of course, there are quite a few other crypto coins out there that use the Scrypt algorithm, it has been one of the earliest alternatives to Bitcoin’s SHA-256 algorithm, though probably mining for LTC and DOGE is the most popular way these are being used.

It is interesting to note that the Goldshell Mini-DOGE Miner is no longer available for sale by Goldshell as it has been replaced by a slightly faster in terms of hashrate and better in terms of power usage Pro version (205 MH/s at 220 Watts or about 1.1 Watt per Megahash), however you can easily find the non-pro version on the second-hand miner market. And you will be surprised to see that these small home miners do not come very cheap, even though they are not that profitable at the moment. And if you are buying one, just make sure you get the WiFi version as it makes it much easier for home use as there is also a non-WiFi equipped earlier model apparently. If you manage to get a good deal on a Mini-DOGE Pro miner (they come with black cases, so they are easy to differentiate) you better go for that one, though it is not that much of a difference to justify a big price difference.

The official specifications of these small miners are 185 MH/s Scrypt mining hashrate and 233 Watts of power usage, or with other words about 1.26 Watts per Megahash as power efficiency. Just as a reference the quite old already and still quite popular Bitmain L3 Scrypt ASIC miner offers around 1.6W per Megahash and can be optimized to work with around 1.3 Watts per Megahash which is very similar to the Mini-DOGE. So, if you are looking at buying a Goldshell Mini-DOGE you might also check out the options for a Bitmain AntMiner L3 with a custom firmware, it might come cheaper with higher hashrate, but also a bit bulkier and noisier and no WiFi option on that one.

But let us get back to the main question and it is how much do these Goldshell Mini-DOGE Scrypt ASIC miners able to currently mine in terms of LTC and DOGE coins doing merged mining. We did a quick test using the F2Pool as one of the large Litecoin mining pools that does support merged mining with DogeCoin and you can see the actual results for the last 7 full days. Do note that there is a slight increase and then a slight drop in the number of mined coins as there has been a difficulty adjustment on two occasions during the test period. The first one on 21st of November with 1.4% drop and the second one on 24th of November with 5.3% increase.

So, the amount mined Litecoin coins is around 0.0023-0.0024 LTC per day with is roughly around $0.17 USD at the current exchange rate. This is not much really considering that the miner uses around 5.6 kW of power per day and depending on your electricity cost this may be enough to just cover roughly maybe 1/5 of the electricity bill. But wait, there is also the DogeCoin that you mine with it at the same time and you get around 3-4 DOGE per day with it. That is another 30-40 US cents per day with the current exchange rate of the coin. Essentially at the moment you will be kind of covering the electricity used by the miner, depending on where you live, with what you are able to mine with the Mini-DOGE miner.

While the Goldshell Mini-DOGE Scrypt ASIC miners may not be very profitable at the moment, don’t forget that we are in a bear market at the moment and pretty much everything is down in terms of price in the crypto world and there is not much profitability regardless of what you mine. So, mining and keeping the mined coins is the wiser idea the moment, waiting for the bull run cycle to start and the prices to go up and, in the meantime, you can just pick a couple of Mini-DOGE miners if you manage to score a good deal on the price and use them as space heaters during the cold winter days. They are quite compact and operate pretty silent and thanks to the WiFi module you can place them easily in different places around your home. A single device with its 233 Watts of power usage won’t be able to heat up much space that well, but a few of these devices might do the job better. We are soon going to be sharing a more detailed review of the Mini-DOGE ASIC miner here on the blog, so stay tuned if you are interested in learning more about the device.

Silencing the iPollo V1 Mini Ethash/ETChash ASIC Miner Among Other Things

21, Nov 2022

A few days ago, we have shared our First Impressions from the iPollo V1 Mini Ethash/ETChash ASIC Miner and now it is time to dig a little bit deeper into this compact and pretty powerful home-oriented miner. One of the first things that came to mind when we have opened this 300 MH/s Ethash/ETChash ASIC miner was how to try and make it silent while working. Nano Labs have made very good job in making this a very compact and sturdy device that is well built and works under even more adverse conditions. However due to the small size they made a lot of custom things inside the miner which makes it a bit of a problem to work around them trying to modify the device like when trying to make it silent yet cool.

We’ve already discussed the server style heatsink that is used that unfortunately is not any standard size for mounting on the ASIC chip and for cooling fans. The small and powerful 60mm cooling fans found inside are managing to keep the device cool, but making it a bit noisy even when they are running at sub 5000 RPM (they can go up to 7000 if needed). And if you want to use this at home in your living room or any other room where people will be present the noise level with the fans running at automatic mode keeping the miner at around 50 degrees Celsius will be noisy. So what can be done?

Two 60mm fans, how about replacing them with a single 120mm fan and will that keep things cool enough. Well, you can do it with a single 120mm fan, but you will have similar noisy miner just like with the default 60mm fans. The reason for that is that fins of the heatsink are only about 60mm tall, so essentially half of the 120mm fan will not be utilized thus half the efficiency. If you however do two 120mm silent fans such as Arctic Cooling F120 or P120 in a push-pull configuration on both sides of the heatsink you will manage to get a pretty silent operation and enough airflow to keep the miner cool at around the 50 degrees Celsius level. Unfortunately, the fan mounting is not very easy and you are still going to be wasting half of the fan’s airflow due to the low heatsink used by the miner. And another possible problem with this setup is when the ambient temperature rises above 25-30 degrees Celsius, it would be a problem for already maxed out F12/P12 fans to keep the ASIC operating at around 50 degrees C.

What comes to mind here is to use a larger 140mm fan instead with higher airflow and stack two of the iPollo miners on top of each other so that you will get the 140mm fan cover both miners and provide enough airflow. This should work pretty well in theory, though we are currently unable to test it as we only have one iPollo miner available. But there is another catch, the inside metal frame that holds the boards of the miner is just a bit shy of being able to properly fit a 140mm fan inside, so you need to remove the metal frame and that results in exposing a lot of the PCB. You would need to think of a custom case in order to secure things and it better be metal in order to prevent any possible interferences for the WiFi signal (if you are using the WiFi module). This could however work out very nicely in making a single 600 MH/s device cooled by a single or maybe dual Arctic Cooling P140 or Noctua NF-A14 fans (push-pull dual fan setup should work pretty well). We need to secure another iPollo miner to continue working on that idea, but if you have more than one such device already and are feeling up to the task you might work on it as well and share your results.

When we initially shared out first impressions from the iPollo V1 Mini Ethash/ETChash it did not work with Nicehash, but at pretty much the same time the platform has just announced that iPollo will actually work on their platform. All you had to do is add “--nicehash” (without the quotes) in the More Options field in the Miner Configuration page in the web interface. And do not forget to remove the option from there if you are switching to another mining pool as will not connect to other pools if you forget the option there. You can also try additional commands here that will be passed directly to the back-end miner software (more details on that below), however you cannot monitor the output from the mining software directly through the web-based interface of iPollo.

Another useful thing here is that the particular gold iPollo V1 Mini ASIC miner is equipped with 6GB of memory (the Classic series of V1 miners from iPollo are with just 4GB!), so you will be able to mine ETH with it. Furthermore, iPollo miners do support dual mining ETH/ETC and ZIL, so some extra profit if you are mining a compatible Ethash or ETChash coin along with Zilliqa. Check out this post on Dual Mining ETC, ETHW or ETHF plus ZIL For Better Profit if you have missed it, the 6GB iPollo miners are able to mine the ETH forks that split at the Merge when Ethereum switched from PoW to PoS as their DAGs are a bit over 5GB currently.

Further digging into the iPollo miner we connected to the device over SSH, it has full root access with root:root as username and password, so if you want to explore and play around with it you can get to it. We’ve quickly discovered that iPollo uses a modified version of cgminer so good news for anyone that is familiar with this old school miner and its wide array of options that can be used, but might not be implemented in the web interface of the device. There are some interesting extra commands available for the miner’s cgminer (note the nicehash option and the poolhub one), though they are not documented and the option for setting the voltage does not seem to work, but you might want to try to explore more, so here they are:

--ipollo-hmode iPollo hash mode(0:1.1v, 1:1.2v)
--xignore xcmd ignore the local target check
--xhrate xcmd hashrate for suggest difficulty from pool
--xfacworker xcmd worker name for fac test
--xndiff xcmd native difficulty for the chips
--xcmpll xcmd cmp setting
--xcmp4w xcmd cmp4w setting
--xcv xcmd cv setting
--xkey xcmd key setting
--xse xcmd se setting
--nicehash xcmd support nicehash stratum
--poolhub xcmd support poolhub stratum
--xigncc xcmd ignore chips with capacity

Here is the default command line that is used for dual-mining ETC + ZIL using the cgminer through SSH if you want to experiment and most of all to be able to see the full miner output… something that is kind of lacking in the web-based interface even though you have three different logs available for viewing:

cgminer --lowmem -a etc --ipollo-fans 1-100-50-100 --xndiff 28 --ipollo-hmode 1 -o us-west.ezil.me:4444 -u ETC_WALLET.ZIL_WALLET.WORKER_ID -p x --api-allow W:127.0.0.1/8,W:10.0.0.0/8,W:172.16.0.0/12,W:192.168.0.0/16 --api-listen

Just make sure that you have you ETC_WALLET, ZIL_WALLET and WORKER_ID set in the command line above in order for the miner to actually start mining to your address. Also, since cgminer will probably already be running once you connect to the miner over SSH, just make sure to first stop it with “killall -9 cgminer” (without the quotes). There is a process monitor that will fire up cgminer if you don’t start it up for a while after you kill the process. Happy digging and don’t forget to share any interesting findings with the rest of us…


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