It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
By default most ZeusMiner Scrypt ASICs do come prepared for direct connection to a PC over a USB cable and for use with the supplied cgminer version with support for Zeus chips. There is however an option to use these miners, smaller or larger, with a Raspberry Pi controller and make them PC independent. In fact some of the companies selling these Scrypt ASICs do offer an option to buy a separate Raspberry Pi controller for the ZeusMiner-based products or even do bundle one with a custom image that supports them – either basic solution with console only monitoring or with a nice and feature rich web-based interface. We have tried to compile a list of who offers what to help you start up with using Raspberry Pi controller for your ZeusMiner ASIC devices. Apart from Zeus directly and their official distributors, there is also GAWMiners with their own branded miners and HASHRA as well selling products that are also based on ZeusMiner Scrypt ASIC chips.
ZeusMiner offers an official Raspberry Pi image for their miners, however it seems to be a very basic one with console only support as well as a slightly more advanced ZeusController image offering a basic web interface. So a good start up point if you want to try out what is available as options.
MinerEU has just released a Scripta based Raspberry Pi image with some additional extras such as pool priority, pool switch on the fly from web UI as well as cgminer options that can be specified in key/value pair directly from the web browser. Scripta is probably the most feature rich web-based RPi solution, so if you like to have more options and control directly from the web interface you should try this image.
HASHRA has updated their own Hashra Controla RPi image with web-based interface to support the new custom branded Zeus-based products they are currently offering to their customers. This image is a bit simpler in terms of features if you compare it to a Scripta-based image for example, but still works very well and gives you easy access to all the important settings and information.
GAWMiners has partnered with ZenMiner and offers Raspberry Pi with preinstalled ZenController as an option to buy along and also bundled with some of the bigger Zeus-based miners. This is a quite interesting solution as it provides you with an easy to use and very convenient web-based control panel for your miners from anywhere in the world. No need to use a real IP address or be on the same local network as your miner or have to use remote connections etc. It is the type of solution that you just need to plug in and it should start working automatically, so great for people that are not way too technical to deal with possible configuration issues.
There could be other RPi images for ZeusMiner available out there, but we might have missed some of them, so if you know about something missing in this list feel free to point us to it and we’ll include it.
We just got a word from GAWMiners that they have started shipping their Week 1 pre-orders to customers. The people that were early enough to place a pre-order for the GAW Miners’s Srypt ASICs that are based around the 55nm Zeus chips should be getting their tracking numbers already and should start receiving their miners in the next few days. Currently there are pre-orders going on for Week 3 delivery that is scheduled to start at around 9th June, so if you are interested in the GAWMiners Scrypt miners you can still order now and get yours pretty soon.
GAWMiners’ Scrypt ASICs include the 1 MHS+ Fury, 13 MHS+ Black Widow, 27 MHS+ Falcon and the 54 MHS+ War Machine starting with a price of $149.95 USD for the smallest unit and going up to $5,899.95 USD for the fastest model. There is also another option and that is to get your new miners hosted. The hosting service increases the price of the miner with $100 USD and there is a 2.5% maintenance fee of your total hashing power. The good thing about the hosting service is that you can at each time get your miner shipped to you should you decide to and the shipping will be free. So this could turn up to be a nice alternative to cloud mining services and we do plan to test the service and write a review on what you can expect from it.
It seems the miners use a modified version of cgminer with support for the Zeus ASIC chips. Though apart from the smallest Fury miner (not available as a hosted option) all other miners do come with a controller (ZenController by ZenMiner), so there is no need to have them connected directly to a PC. It seems that the miners will be easily overclockable through the command line of the miner, though it would be interesting to see how much higher will they be able to go. Also voltage modification might be a possibility as 55nm chips can handle overvoltage well, though you should also mind the power usage.
– Visit GAWMiners for more information about the Scrypt ASIC miners they are offering…