Hello, various fans and consumers of GekkoScience equipment

As often happens around this time of year, we're pleased to announce the release of a new product!

The Smart Hub




Basically we took the GekkoScience Base Hub and added a brain.

We've got 9 powered ports on top, all with data - no dummy ports - and two lower-power side ports for extending to more regular hubs. All ports are protected with the same self-resetting 3.5A fuses we used on the upgraded Base Hub (any sold in the last year), and powered across two high-current main regulators for better power handling than any Base Hub so far. It's got a Raspberry Pi Zero W 2 controller built in, with integrated wifi and ethernet onboard. It's got a green-on-black OLED screen and software made for mining. We partnered up with the guy who originally designed what is now the Mars Lander for this one so it's at least slightly cooler-looking than our usual stuff, and has a pretty good software setup.

On first boot or after a factory reset, this hub will boot as a wifi host and tell you its IP so you can connect to its convenient web interface. Over ethernet, it's immediately ready to configure. From there you can set up your local wifi and your pool configs and miner settings, which take effect upon reboot and persist until it's hardware-reset. The default mining mode cycles through stats (including individual miner hashrates) and keeps a running ticker of BTC/USD price as well as other useful data. This should reduce the learning curve for using our products, as it makes most things plug-and-play. No need to compile cgminer and SSH and command line - unless you want to, of course. It's still a linux computer, and useful for more than just mining.



The vertical port spacing on the hub is sized for sticks with individual snap-on fans, so you can use all 9 ports for sticks. All 11 ports have data lines for connecting any USB miner or device, including another hub with more sticks, or a stack of R909 pods.



We'll be putting a fan power jack on future stick versions, but for the meantime in order to fully support being able to use all ports, we're also putting together a USB splitter which will enable powering a snap-on fan from the same jack. USB-port and regular 2/3/4-wire fans will all work. Sold separately.




In case you're skeptical because all the good pictures here are CAD renders, here's the first one off the production line (I always keep the first one to play with; somewhere I have Compac serial number GS-10000000 and every museum is jealous)



The first batch is already shipping to resellers, and they should be available in time to reach you by Christmas (depending on local conditions of course).

These authorized sellers will have stock:

AltairTech (US)
Bitshopper (Germany/EU)
101 Crypto (AU/NZ)
The Solo Mining Co (UK)

The Smart Hub is the first step in what will be a fairly significant revolution for GekkoScience mining hardware. We've got big plans and are looking forward to what's coming next.

I'm working on the official announcement post, but yes it's a real product. The listing is legit; in fact, I'm sitting next to the guy who put it up. He's a newly minted reseller for UK and will have stock in hand in a few days.

Any version of cgminer compiled with Icarus (autogen.sh --enable-icarus) should be able to run this. But yeah the Block Erupter is ten years old, and about three orders of magnitude slower than current USB miners, which are over two orders of magnitude slower than standard industrial miners, so pools aren't really set up to register work volumes that small anymore. Cgminer stats would show you what's going on, but poolside? Kano's solo pool might be granular enough to handle 333MH/s on stats, maybe?

Another SHA coin with a much lower difficulty, you'd be a larger percentage of the network/pool and more likely to see stats. What's the project?

We're full up on resellers at the moment. You're not the only inquiry I've turned away lately, but we do appreciate the interest.

Technically the minimum spec of the R909 is at least 1.5TH from at most 100W, but actual performance should be closer to 2TH at around 80 watts.

Also, regarding editing the nonce range, that's not readily possible without altering cgminer code. Technically I think you can adjust this by hacking the chip addressing scheme during string initialization, which would adjust the range starting point for each chip, but you'd have to also adjust the work timing calculations to account for shorter cycle times per work unit so there's no duplicates, and I'm not sure but this might also affect the statistics calculations behind the displayed hashrate estimates.

Bumping this because I've heard from a few people in the last few days, it's still around and causing trouble.

That step you mentioned is a couple steps which compile the cgminer. What error are you getting? Without knowing what is failing and where, there's not much to help with. Are you doing "dash oh two" or "dash zero two"? Because it's a capital O, not a zero. That's a common/easy mistake that causes the compiler check to fail.

Yes, MHz and GH correlate (until hardware limitations like heat or voltage cause problems) so if you want more GH you need to increase MHz.

It maaaaaaay be a custom job a little bit. Beefy fan on stock heatsinks though; 27 watts into each chip.

I'mma just leave this here

The power output limits of the hub are internal. If your input power can push more than about 12V/12A, the hub itself will be the limiter in how much juice you can deliver to sticks.

If you're going over about 8 amps, you need to use the 6-pin. The barrel is rated for 8A max.

Yeah let's take it to PM

If formfactors and power levels were standardized so swapping boards on waterblocks wasn't basically a customized rebuild with every successive generation - like how S3 waterblocks would fit on an S5 - it'd be a lot easier.

Saying "it's too difficult right now" should be a vote in the direction of "make this less difficult" rather than "don't do it at all" because, quite frankly speaking, bitcoin mining is turning into an ecological disaster and there really needs to be a way to head that off. Harvesting waste heat for other projects would really help. To do something like heat water for sous vide brisket or desalination or a Turkish Bath, or heating air for greenhousing in cold climates or whatever else - it's worth doing, and just because the infrastructure isn't trivial right now doesn't mean it should stay that way. The effluent of shortsighted gain has been wrecking the planet for quite long enough, and recycling energy is a good way to counter that.

Also, and I'm with Phil on this one - brisket. Brisket, guys.

If Merch wimps out on the warranty, it's a Merch problem. I'm interested in seeing this one since it's the first "magic smoke" failure report I've heard in the wild, so if nothing else, you can send it back to the factory for repair.

Heat desalination uses partial vacuums to reduce the boiling point. By decreasing the pressure in consecutive stages, you can heat water once to 80-90C and it'll boil off in one stage, then boil off again in the next, all the way to the last (lowest temperature/pressure) stage.

Where on the board did the magic smoke come from?

Could do desalination as well. A lot of desalination plants are set up next to industrial facilities to utilize waste heat.

If it's measured as pulling the same amount of power but it's hotter, the problem is not the stick, it's your cooling.

Okay but the BM1387 was used on the S9. S5 was BM1384, the chip in the original Compac and the 2Pac.

Standard boost is 4 midstate, lowboost is 2 midstate. Changes the packet size and timings and I forget why exactly but it worked a bit better on whatever janky USB subsystem Windows uses.