Or search around, because there are entire threads here dedicated to discussing the best hubs for these.

Are you plugging the miners directly into the Pi's USB ports, or are you using a separate powered hub?

Have you considered the amount of power the sticks draw?

My first piece of advice would be to check in the 2Pac support thread, since you're running 2Pacs.

The GekkoScience 2Pac is in fact a real thing, and ASICPuppy.net (forum handle CrazyGuy) is the top reseller of them. JStefanop is also a reliable maker so I'd believe his stuff is real.

$75-100 is approximately highway robbery, just throwing that out there, but resellers set their own prices.

S7-LN is probably going to be more reliable than an R4 also. Their bundled PSUs are kinda cheap, but I haven't heard any failure issues with the miner itself and almost nothing but failure issues with the R4.

Pretty great that the S7-LN sold for around $400 new shipped a year ago. I tried working out a deal with a guy a year ago to buy up retired S7s for around $300 and undervolt them but it didn't seem feasible. What are they selling for now?

I'm working on a small quiet miner, not ready yet but I should be mass-producing with plenty of time for Christmas. The form-factor will eventually be made with 16nm chips, as soon as I get some time for R&D. Won't be silent, but should be pretty quiet and a lot more cost-effective than a stick miner.

ASICPuppy.net (BitMinerJoe on Amazon) has stock. HolyScott (Holybitcoin.com) will be restocked soon. Bitshopper.de sells in Europe, Eyeboot.com sells out of Hong Kong.

I'll probably reopen individual sales once I'm caught up, but I've been holding at four weeks backordered for about six months now and I'd like to shrink that a little.

Breakeven for a USB miner is pretty much impossible. Anymore they exist as learning tools and lottery tickets.

There really is no "cheap DC transformer". Most of the parts inside that PSU are the things required to make a DC transformer possible, as the bulk of its circuitry are probably transforming 400VDC down to your 24VDC at high current. Transformers work by coupling fluctuating magnetic fields, like AC has naturally as a result of its changing voltage, but DC with its constant voltage has to be turned into AC, run through a transformer and then turned back into DC. This requires a lot of high power switching circuits and filters and an active controller to keep everything in line.

That depends on how inclusive your "all kinds" is. They work for all HP Common Slot PSUs, which include 750W, 1200W and 1500W models.

S7-LN also have a lot bigger heatsinks than S7 and S9, so in addition to drawing less power they cool more efficiently.

S7-LN are also easy to undervolt for even more efficiency/volume improvements.

Be more useful to talk to bitshopper, or in bitshopper's EU sales thread.

General advice for any sales or support thread - read the first post. The guy who set up the thread probably did a bit of work ahead of time lining out the basics. He might have even updated it with pertinent information that came up in subsequent discussion.

He asks, literally a year and a day since the last post in this thread.

That's pretty much what they've always been for, learning tools and lottery tickets. I've never disguised the fact these will never pay for themselves - outside of the improbability of a solo block.

Not likely, unless he compiled it with a filesystem and ran a bitcoin wallet off it.

Bitcoin miners never actually see the bitcoins they generate. They just process transactions - and most of the time they don't actually see those transactions, just a compressed version of a bundle of transactions already being processed. A transaction assigns bitcoins to a particular address. The only way to access those bitcoins is to have the private key corresponding to the address, which will be stored in a file associated with your wallet software on a computer, completely separate from any mining being done.

Interestingly enough, the first search result for "pod" is this thread.

Solid white light usually means there's a problem. Compile the proper cgminer as instructed in the 1st post and if it detects the device but doesn't mine with it, you might have to contact the seller for warranty replacement.


Yeah, in the "news on pod miners" thread. This is the stickminer support thread.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that guy. I believe it was scrypt, not X11. Yeah that and gridseeds were dual-algorithm chips. Good call.

Honestly, I didn't really like that chip anyways. Big CPU-style BGA really makes a lot of unnecessary headache for integrators. Spondoolies was really the only group to do it well, exactly one time, and then went back to array of small chips for the SP50.

But that's a whole different argument.

Ah, that would be why you're talking about 60db fans instead of about 85db.

High pressure is required to move adequate air volume against high resistance. The ridiculous solidity of the cross section of an Antminer presents a lot of resistance. High volume is required to move the ridiculous amount of heat from the ASICs running 100% power, otherwise the die temperatures hot enough to boil water would start getting more like hot enough to melt solder, or start glowing and burst into flames.

So yeah, high CFM at high static pressure is sorta essential to the process.

If you wanted to do it with an ASIC, it'd be a matter of building both cores into the same chip and then integrating a controller that could switch between the two. It's possible, but nobody's done it.

Then there's the FPGA option, where you could program the chip with one type of core and after a while reprogram it with a different core. But then you'd have to build into your miner whatever hardware was required for rewriting the FPGA, and FPGAs are probably going to be more expensive and less efficient.

It's technically possible, but if the major manufacturers can get more money from doing less work (selling simple special-purpose machines rather than more complex general-purpose machines, you buy two miners instead of one) there's no real incentive.