ahem gimme a few months

It also means increased complexity and therefore increased likelihood of failure, which increases the likelihood that you'll have to replace it sooner and/or more often, which spells profit.

Hello all. I hope you've been HALVING a good time mining lately!

(yes, it wasn't funny; no, I won't apologize)

Your old pals at GekkoScience are rolling out more stuff. Our new product for 2024, the first of many if everything works out, is a new stickminer. Of course it is; we always start with new stickminers.

This fellow is called the Compac A1.



If you have figured out the nomenclature of our company and products, you know it's all an homage to Eureka Seven, in which the Amita Drive was attached to Renton's Compac Drive, expanding its abilities. In the same vein, we've added our own Amita Drive of sorts to the Compac A1 (get it?) in the form of built-in telemetry and software control. No longer will you need to reach for a tiny screwdriver to tweak the voltage; it'll be done in software via cgminer commands or the API. And you'll be able to watch the temperature! And the USB bus voltage! And even change how the blinky light blinks! It should be possible to adjust the voltage on the fly, making tuning easy. Should be pretty fun.

There's also an optional 2-pin fan jack for snap-on fans without tying up another USB port. That's a new feature. Resellers will probably have add-on fan packages utilizing this. Please note that the fan jack is spec'd for fan loads only and CANNOT be used as an external 5V power input. You will burn things up by doing this.


This stickminer is built around S19 chips for good efficency, approximately 30% better than the Compac F. Samples have marked Compac F stock speeds around 260GH from under 8 watts.

Another benefit over the Compac F is low-end stability. It's built to handle high speeds, but unlike the F, it won't choke up at low speeds, so you don't have to overclock it on a juiced-up hub just to make it work.

But you can if you want. I've clocked samples running over 550GH on stock Smart Hubs, with a bit beefed up cooling of course. The main regulator on this stick is built to handle high power, up around 20W without blinking. The LEDs will blink of course, but power won't. Power will be fine.

And as always, these guys are Designed And Built In America.


*May not come in fancy retail packaging


The Compac A1 will be shipping in May. We're working on our own website for limited direct sales, but in the meantime confirmed resellers include:

AltairTech in USA
Bitshopper.de in Germany
The Solo Mining Co in England
101 Crypto in Australia
MineFarmBuy
Eyeboot (under construction)
BitcoinMerch

Once during testing, I had a pod that dropped a chip and cgminer started to misbehave, which pegged the CPU use. I mentioned the bug to kano and his preferred fix was "stop using hardware that fails". That's about the only time I've seen one of these guys not running smoothly so could be related to your issue. My test guy ran 40 days uptime with no problems before a power outage forced an unplanned restart.

Everything from 2Pac to the present are mechanically compatible, so if it fits a Compac F it should fit the 2Pac.

Unless you lucked into the batch where our main heatsink provider was out of stock and we had to use a backup with slightly different dimensions, but the vast majority are identical.

I know altair tech has snap-on fans, might check out that site.

The cgminer install supports all Gekko devices. Power comes from 12V 6-pin or barrel like the regular hubs and Terminus pod miners.

Raspbian and Ubuntu are both Debian-based so they'll have the same innards. Likely you won't notice a difference.

Were I doing it, I'd plug both hubs into different ports on a single Pi. The internal controller's pipeline and timings won't be any different but I'd feel better about distributing the data payload early on in the stream.

It probably doesn't make any difference. I think all of the above would have enough horsepower to maintain the USB timings. It doesn't take much, until you start loading up a bunch of sticks, and then the problem is more to do with OS scheduler timings interleaving than with CPU/RAM.

The original announcement post says we guarantee 1.5TH under 100DC watts, but when we do burn-in testing, we pretty much don't pass anything under 1.6TH and most see 1.65-1.75 before going out. Under 1.6TH or over about 85 DC watts indicates at least one weak chip which probably gets replaced, or some endemic balance issues that may necessitate a complete overhaul. Our internal testing standards are higher than advertised.

Maybe I'm too used to fan noise, but it takes a lot of F8 for me to notice the sound of them running. If it's really "too loud" for people, I'll investigate other options for the next generation. Good input.

Also, the new Smart Hub (and we may make more integrated-controller devices) takes a lot of the headache out of assembling a controller and setting up software.

Gotta ask bitshopper.de

I also vouch for this guy

System seems solid indeed. Around the time of the launch, my number zero had been running about 11 days uptime without any hiccups.

Did you sudo?

It came out bigger than I wanted, but that's because of the decision to make room for individual stick fans. Turns out people like those?

The whole footprint is roughly twice the size as the base Hub, about 14x20cm

Quoting for the sake of new-user image visibility

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.