I don't think I'd really heard of NMB specifically, I was thinking more like Top Motor.  I've had cheap fans that die in a month and fans in PSUs in PCs that are still running fine when the computer's in the scrap heap.  This is rated for 100k hours, but I picked it because I wanted a flow rate around 30 CFM, ball bearings, and low noise.

I bought this G-Blade kind of on a whim, Pooler tried to talk me out of it, but I don't regret it and I'm thinking about buying another.  There aren't many Scrypt ASICs around right now and at 5 mhs for $62 it beats stickminers.  Litecoinpool.org ranks me faster than about 60% of other miners when I have it running.  I can't afford or justify an L3.  This earns about $0.20/day, which might be more than it costs to run it, I'm not sure.  I need to take my power connections apart again and stick an ammeter in there for a while.  I've got about enough solar panels to run it too, at least some of the time.  It's not a 1500 watt monster.

I haven't had it apart but I wonder if taking off the case covering the heat sinks to let room air at them would let me dispense with the fan.  They remind me a little of heat exchangers on the old air-cooled VW engines.  There the engine exhaust heated aluminum heat sinks and a blower forced air through them to heat the inside of the car.  When it worked and they weren't rusted out.

Yeah, I've got one of Sidehack's 2pacs blinking away here.  The heat sink's too hot to touch even at 150 MHz but the chip specs say it can run up to 125 C.  I'll probably bolt a couple of hard drive cases onto it to enlarge it  Or mount it to a file cabinet..  I like the Gridseed, might pick up another.  It's earned me $4, the 2pac has earned $0.04.  I wouldn't mind a board out of an Antminer S3 but I don't want a whole one.  Just looking at expanding in the scrypt direction, there isn't much out there.

Oh, I did order my Gridseed a new fan: http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/NMB-Technologies/3610SB-04W-B20-B00/?qs=sGAEpiMZZMsiJ7OlpASoDhDwog2Qgd8idgg49r%2FTrHQ%3D

Yes, I have electrums, both for bitcoin and litecoin.  But I gave litecoinpool.org my litecoin core wallet as a payout address from mining and apparently nothing gets through until it synchronizes.  So my first $4 from mining is stuck.   Or lost.  It's only $4 but it was my first $4.  Enough to buy a jar of peanut butter or a loaf of bread.

Yup, same problem here, and I didn't look in here before I set my payout address from Litecoinpool.org to the address of my local wallet.  And requested a payout.  Mine seems stuck at having downloaded 36865 block of history so I'm 5 years behind.  I'm connected through a cell phone and I only get about 7 Kbps.

I do have a Litecoin Electrum installed on the same machine, but I don't see a way to set that to use the same receive address.  With Bitcoin transactions if something doesn't go through in 30 days it gets returned to the sender, does that happen here?  It's only about $4 but I picked the timing because the price looks like it's on the downside of a peak and I wanted to get 8it to Bitfinex and change it into USD.

Multiple proxies, or proxy and no proxy seems like the ticket.  I was thinking of running a proxy for slushpool in addition to the one for litecoinpool.  Taking my old Gridseed G-blade off the proxy and connecting it direct at least shows my cpuminers in the Litecoinpool dashboard and they get work accepted:

(I'm still practicing at posting images here,  this might be the first I've gotten to work)

Yes, I know it's generally a bad idea except I've only got 1 asic and about 6 computers.   A Raspberry Pi 3 on all 4 cores is about 1/1000 the speed of a Gridseed G-Blade, and runs on about 7 watts.  I'm tempted to try to do the GPU assembly language to get their GPUs online to as a 5th thread.  These little ARM machines impress me.  And a core on a quad core phone is about the same as one of a Raspberry Pi's cores, but it eats battery fast.  I've also installed cpuminer under the Debian on my phone, not much difference in performance from Pocket Miner.  The alternative is spending more money on dedicated hardware (ASIC) that can't be used for anything else.  An ASIC can't be reprogrammed to a different algorithm, cpus and gpus can.  SHA256 is built into some of the CPUs http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.ddi0514g/way1395175472464.html not that I've managed to make use of it.

Wait a minute.  Pooler, the same Pooler that has a cpuminer on github?  https://github.com/pooler/cpuminer  Apparently.
from the AUTHORS file inside the tarball.

I don't run them just to do hashing, I mostly don't shut them off.  Or I'll run cpuminer on one core while I'm doing other stuff.  I've mostly used one of my Raspberry Pi 3s for the past several months.  It's what I'm using right now to write this.  Less power than my Gekko 2pac probably.

Wow, neat, I didn't know you could do that.  Sounds right up my alley.  I don't have an answer to your question though.

Uh-huh, I was just jumping on with a similar complaint.  It's like the pool doesn't recognize that different workers may need different difficulty values.  I was cpu mining on here with about 6 computers for a week or so and it all worked fairly well.  Then I bought a used asic rig and noticed my computers were suddenly getting a low acceptance rate.  I am using a stratum proxy, I don't know if that matters.  I have 7 distinct workers and the system was keeping them straight.  Is there a syntax for requesting a difficulty on command lines?  I'm mostly using cpuminer plus a couple phones, cgminer on the asic.

Yes, ok, I see "If desired, the default adaptive mechanism can be overridden by appending “,d=N” to the worker's password", I'll try that.   Well, no, a couple sentences later it says "if you connect multiple workers via a proxy they will all share the same difficulty " so I guess that won't work.  So I need to put the asic on a different account?  Or not through the proxy?  I'm using the Android app "Pocket Miner" on a couple phones, I can't change much about how that connects.  One is a rooted phone, I could edit a config file if there is one.

Too soon to be sure but I don't see anything accepted in the proxy log output anymore since I took the asic off it.  I just restarted the proxy and saw "Setting new difficulty: 1024" in the output of that.  I normally see 256 in the asic cgminer.  OK, there's 128, then 16.  Now I'm starting to see work from the cpuminers accepted at diff 4.  Now I see hash rates on the "my account" page for the cpuminers again too instead of zeros.  The phone hash rate even showed up once it found a share.  All seems well.  Maybe I could group machines by speed on different instances of the proxy?  Later.

Doesn't seem very efficient but maybe that board material is more thermally conductive than most.  I still need to come up with a better fan arrangement or find a way to stick it out in the garage or something.  I pulled a fan out of an old ATX PSU but I don't have many 92 mm, most I've got are the next size smaller.  Still too loud and it takes several minutes to come up to speed like maybe some lubricant gradually warms up.  Bestbyte doesn't seem to have anything, I'll try Newark.

Probably the best thing to do is hope for retrofit boards if I want to do SHA then cob together some replacement heat sinks if I still want to use those boards for scrypt.  The number I was seeing of 10 Gh/s per board is in the ballpark of one of Gekko Science's 2pacs, not that great for a board with 40 chips.

I'm getting kind of burnt out on this mining thing, I just want everything running cool and quiet so I can forget about them for a month or so and let them run.  If I were in a position to want to heat with electricity this wouldn't be a bad game.

If you didn't already have your hands on a few of these things I'd suspect they didn't really exist.  The page at http://bitfury.com/products#16nm-asic sorta sounds evasive and run on a shoestring looking for investors.  No datasheets?  I found this Google translation of a page in Russian from 2013 that sounds like they expect the chips any day 4 years ago.  https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&u=https://forum.bits.media/index.php%3F/topic/2464-all-kiev-prodazha-asic-chips-diy-kits-miners-magazin-bitbonanzaco-ofitcialnyi-dis/&prev=search  Almost sounds like the whole thing could be a scam.  They're claiming 100GH/s per chip with an efficiency of 0.06J/GH.  I'd like to see 100 watts worth of those.  I probably couldn't afford it.

I've been RTFMing back discussions.  Got myself a 2pac from HolyBitcoin, it's sitting here idling along at 150 MHz, just came yesterday.  Slushpool says 39 years to payout (A whole BTC or what?).  Meanwhile my $62 used Gridseed has made 0.1357 LTC.  It's hard to judge how the hash rates and difficulties and market values on the currency work out.

Power connectors, what about just a pair of binding posts on standard 3/4 inch centers?  You can put up to about 14 gauge wire into them, don't have to solder, you can use double banana plugs as quick disconnects, stack them, run 20 amps through them.  It seems like a misuse of USB connectors, like the problems microusbs have had in Pis and Kindles, trying to push 2 amps through them.  I look at the problems people have had with hubs that boil down to not enough power and it's like power problems in Pis.

If you're going to build something around a Pi I'd definitely feed power in through the GPIO, you might be able to make use of some of those pins too.  Temperature and voltage control, switching, but that would make the whole thing dependent on using a Pi.  I'm just lurking and waiting for the 16 nm stuff to start coming out.  Seems like the best thing to do with this stuff is forget about it and let it run for a month or so, stop looking every 10 minutes.  It's like watching paint dry.

My first ASIC miner was one of these at $62 because it seemed like pretty good bang for the buck.  https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/Free-shipping-Gridseed-G-Blade-ASIC-Scrypt-Blade-Miner-5-2-6MH-S-100W-Scrypt-Blade/227686_1834929913.html?spm=2114.10010108.1000023.13.6fYgra

It's OK, it's earned me over 1/8 of a Litecoin in the time I've been screwing around getting something running for doing Bitcoin.  The original fan is too loud and needs to be replaced, need a 92 mm 12 volt fan.  As long as you're just doing Scrypt the power usage seems fairly low, I've heard of running them without fans for that. Mine came with cut off pigtails for power, I just spliced them into a computer PSU I had around.  Needs 12 volts.  Running at 750 MHz with cgminer I see about 4,600 kH/s at litecoinpool.org

Sorry, I haven't figured out how to post pictures to this board.  I don't know if the retrofit boards Sidehack/Gekkoscience is working on for the Antminer S1/S3/S5 series might fit this but they seem close.  It's an impressive pair of heat sinks anyway.  I haven't measured the power consumption.

Well personally I wasn't going to try both modes simultaneously, for one thing it means dealing with 2 different pools at the same time.  I've been studying the Gekko Science areas for a few days, finally got a 2pac and got it working.  But in not a lot more time than that my G-Blade has made me 1/8 of a Litecoin.  And by coincidence the value of them went up.

Anyway I can't help but wonder if some value of frequency and core voltage might let me do SHA256 safely.  The two chips, BM1384 and GC3355 are about the same vintage, so in a sense they were competitors.  I did try to set that cgminer to 150 MHz and SHA256 but it ran at 600 MHz and didn't actually hash.  I think the SHA core is disabled somehow, maybe I should read through the Gridseed driver.  Just looking at the boards I have to wonder why there isn't any heat sink on top of the chips, I could make one.  Cut holes in it where tall capacitors might be, put a little heat sink compound on the tops of the chips.  There are 15 holes through the boards, drill the heat sink to match and bolt them together.  Having 80 chips running on Bitcoin sounds appealing.

I can't figure out how to post pictures here, maybe new users can't do that.  I did a screenshot of cgminer, looks like it was going to run at 23 Gh/s (at 600 MHz).  I didn't dare leave it running more than a few minutes as a first test.  Didn't heat up, which makes me think something was disabled somehow.

Maybe there was a change in firmware that locks out SHA256, this is version 02140317.  But I've got it hashing away on Litecoin and upstairs my 2pac is doing Bitcoin.

Well, I'm retired with too much free time, same idea.

Dual mining, as in both at the same time, has 2 problems.  Finding software that supports it firstly.  Secondly if you look at the cg3355 datasheet available at https://github.com/gridseed/gc3355-doc/archive/master.zip the chip draws roughly 10 times as much power doing sha256 as it does doing scrypt.  That causes overheating problems.  I'd read that sha256 was officially abandoned on these.  I think the key is that you want to do scrypt at something like 800 MHz and sha256 at something like 150 MHz, so it's difficult to do them both at the same time.

But I invested $62 in my G-Blade and after about a week I'm just coming up on 0.1 LTC.  With LTC at $15 and BTC at $1300 I know which I'd rather be working at mining, even at reduced speed.  I've been hanging out in the GekkoScience areas for a couple days and by their standards 150 MHz isn't so low it's out of the question.  The cg3355 may actually come to within a factor of  2 of being in the same efficiency class with a bm1384.  I think putting a second heat sink above the chips would help the heat, but not the efficiency.

From the data sheet:
  BTC mode up to 2.25G/s BTC Hash Rate, with 2.4W/GHash

I'm using dmaxl's fork of cgminer I got at https://github.com/dmaxl/cgminer/

Configured with:
./configure --enable-scrypt --enable-gridseed

[edit]

It's called 4.3.5 since I've got a screenshot up.  With so many forks I'm not sure meaningful the numbers can possibly be.  The one that VT made for Gekko's miners he calls 4.1.0 but as far as I can see it's about 2 years newer.  Maybe he started with 4.1.0 for whatever reason.

Minera as far as I know is just a shell that calls cgminer or bfgminer (whatever versions) and uses their APIs to control them.  But it's web-based so it can be accessed remotely.  Good if your miners are in the basement and you want to check them from the living room.  Or from anywhere if you've got a static IP.

From the readme:

http://getminera.com

I skipped from something like page 10 of this to 2 pages before the end because I didn't want to spend a week reading.  So are you involved in chip design?  I read once somewhere that all it takes is the cash to place a certain size minimum order.  Efficiency seems to always be behind getting CPUs at least to market.  I like the current generation of ARM chips like what's in this Pi 3B.  Way back in the 70s/80s I used to read Electronic Engineering Times, before they decided I didn't warrant a free subscription.  Bingo cards and free samples.

Interesting industry that's pushing itself to extinction.  But old web pages are as bad as obsolete documentation in Linux stuff.  And something 2 years old can't hash fast enough anymore. You're not just facing competition but the increasing difficulty.  You almost need to standardize the boards and make just those replaceable by themselves so you could pop in new boards every year, keep the old case and heat sink.  Stick miners all have about the same form factor, an Antminer T9 is about the same physically as my G-Blade from 4 years ago.  The chips change.  Make it like replacing motherboards in computers.  That way you could also switch algorithms according to what was profitable that year.  Be more like Asus and Tyan than Dell and Compaq.

You mean at gekkoscience.com?  Yeah, I was there this morning on my phone.  I've still got a couple Eico VTVMs but my scope is a Tektronix (analog).   I don't know who's who really, but I've been looking at this deal: http://holybitcoin.com/product/gekkoscience-2pac-dual-bm1384-stickminer/  I also found some Avalon Nano3s for $10.26 at http://www.bitmainminer.com/avalon-asic/11-avalon-nano-3-newest-usb-36gh-s-asic-bitcoin-miner.html

I have an itch to get into Bitcoin mining, sort of.  I've been into Litecoin for a couple weeks.  Did CPU mining for a week, bought one of these Gridseed G-Blades: https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/Free-shipping-Gridseed-G-Blade-ASIC-Scrypt-Blade-Miner-5-2-6MH-S-100W-Scrypt-Blade/227686_1834929913.html?spm=2114.10010108.1000023.13.6fYgra  The gc3355 chip was designed to do either Scrypt or SHA256 but first I saw a rumor that they run hot doing SHA, then I find it marketed for doing only Scrypt then finally in the gc3355 datasheet it says the power consumption is 10 times as high doing SHA.  Looking at the way it's built, there's no heatsinking on the tops of the chips, only on the underside of the board.  I've got enough 1/8 inch aluminum sheet to make a heat sink cover for them, goop them up with heat sink compound and have the chips sandwiched between heat sinks.  But it would still eat a lot of power and run slow.

I'll turn 63 in a few months, my eyesight is barely good enough for DIP packages, let alone surface mount.  I used to be an electronics technician for 20 years, then got more into software.  So if working on tiny stuff didn't kill my eyes enough I stared at monitors since about 1990.  I've got a resume at http://devio.us/~ab1jx/files/resume.pdf.  My main web site is http://ab1jx.1apps.com/

I should have started at least CPU mining Bitcoin back when I first heard about it, it didn't sink in at the time that it gets harder.  If my extrapolations are right I should have 1 Litecoin finished in 50 days and who knows what they'll be worth then.  Bitcoin seems like more of a sure thing, even if it takes longer.  I could maybe supplement my Social Security more reliably trying to sell prints of my photographs but I decided photography was too unreliable when I was about 18.  https://images.nikonians.org/galleries/showgallery.php/ppuser/535619/cat/500

Because silver is the bare aluminum, it's cheaper to make them slightly bigger than go through a painting step.  Actually anodizing would probably be better since it's thinner.  I built this power supply about 40 years ago, it mostly ran hot until I painted the heat sinks black.  Nothing else I built 40 years ago is still running.



Anyway it's too bad there isn't a BM1387 stickminer, or something in the < 100 watt range.

Fairly new here.  I haven't read all 129 pages of this thread but I have 2 questions.  (1) is there a BM1387 version of this project in the works? and (2) why is the heatsink green instead of black?  Black is a much more efficient radiator of heat, even just a quick coat from a spray can.

Try Aliexpress.com, search for Gridseed.  Just got one, hope to do it again in a couple more weeks.  Really, I got what is supposedly a used G-blade for $62 including shipping.  Got it in about a week.  Everything tells me it's from 2014 but it doesn't look used, might be new old stock.  Very happy with it so far, glad I didn't get some newer smaller stick miner.  Without pushing it hard it's been doing 4,496 kH/s for maybe 18 hours so far, running at 700 MHz.

I think there are 2 parts to this.  One is to block the reflected sound from bouncing around.  Egg crate type stuff, thick pile carpet, blankets, acoustic ceiling tile, something like that.  The other part is to have something sound won't go through, for that something dense like maybe 3/4" particle board.  Part of the sound is vibration so you want something that isn't easily moved.  Think inertia.  So heavy and dense with a soft lining.  But allow for ventilation.