  Cheers!!!  Check what kind of cable it is. If it leads to the power button, it should likely be connected to the POWER pins. The board turns on when the contacts are shorted, so it doesn't matter which side the red wire is on and which side the black wire is on. However, you can look for the mark left on the board by the plastic connector to see how it was installed at the factory. However, check everything yourself before connecting, if you have any doubts, consult a specialist.No this is the power wire, it definitely matters which side is black/red. If you plug in the wrong way you will definitely fry the controller board. Looks like you yanked the whole socket of the pins, you'll need to remove the beige socket off the connector, then place the socket back through those two power pins and plug in the power connector. Here is the correct orientation since im sure more people than you will need this: https://imgur.com/YC1MhnT |
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Thank you both of you.
I played with ssh and ChatGPT. Copying the command results it gaves me, it ended telling me the miner couldn't start because of the temperature sensor which couldn't be reached. It makes sense because I can hear the fan briefly starting and immediately stopping, preventing the miner from burning as the fan wouldn't self adjust without the temperature value.
I'm waiting for the distributor answer now.
Thank you
Where did you order from? We have had one other report of a failed temp sensor which causes the board to auto shutdown, want to make sure we get this back so we pinpoint the failure. |
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Thanks for your reply.
So you say 24/7 stable (and tested by your team) bottom hashrate speed would be 8 TH/s, rather than 5 TH/s?
Yes 8TH was the lowest we could get efficiency, you can go lower but efficiency remains flat or even slightly worse due to dimension returns. |
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Just wanted to say thank you to @jstefanop and the FutureBit team. I've had my Apollo III running non-stop for the last 11 days and I'm very happy with how it's performing. I configured it for 6 TH/s and that's exactly what it has been running at, drawing around 69 W, with all 21 chips running, zero restarts and no faults. Temperatures have also been very good, sitting around 51°C. I've also put together a small script to extract the JSON stats from the Apollo III, so I can monitor the detailed stats and keep track of everything over time. Apollo III:
External temperature: 20.5°C
Miner temperature: 51°C
Chip temps: 49-53°C (avg 51, 21 sensors)
Fan: 1280 RPM
Hashrate: 6031.1 GH/s (solutions, 1h)
Pool rate: 6165.1 GH/s (credited, 1h)
Board rate: 6067.5 GH/s (live)
Power draw: 69 W
Power efficiency: 12 W/TH/s
PSU: master 13.07A, slave 0.81A, total 13.9A
Chips: 21/21 (restarts 0, stopped none)
Error rate: 0.6% (1h) / 0.0% (board)
Faults: none
Shares: 281572 Accepted / 177 Rejected
Bad shares: none
Pool reconnects: 0
Pool diff: 6051
Uptime: 11d:8h:56m
Process memory: 67.6 MiB
Firmware: 3.0.1-b9bf8f5 Overall, I'm a very happy customer. It's been running quietly and reliably 24/7, exactly as expected. I hope it will continue to do so, despite new design change. Awesome thats an extreme under clock...suprised it's stable at only 13A....good to see our firmware is pretty stable even outside tested ranges. Why not run it at 8-10 TH thats the sweet spot if you want minimal power draw, and only consume 30 watts more power. |
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The tamper tabs in the first batch aren't up to the task when shipping so no need to worry about that. Have you let the node sync before trying to do anything else like mining on it?
Thank you for that information. It didn't appear there was any physical damage. I did let the Node synch and download 100% over ethernet. It took about 48 hours. I then started the Miner, but it still did not hash and cycled on and off continuously. I also cannot connect Sparrow to the Node to use the Node for transactions and while Sparrow can give me a valid address, I cannot connect to the Apollo 3 for it to use. Connecting sparrow to your node is for using your own node to download transaction history etc, you dont connect sparrow to "give you a valid address" for solo mining. You just would generate a receive address in sparrow and then copy/paste this into the Apollo UI for solo mining. As for your miner issue have you reached out to support? We would need to run diagnostic tests on your unit to see whats wrong/open an RMA for it if something is wrong. Just reply to your order email for direct support. |
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I think for some lucky people who did preorders there were a few cards preloaded with some BTC
Thanks for the info. I wasn't in that group, so my card is completely empty. If I were handling marketing for Coldcard, I'd preload every card I gave away or sold through a partnership with $1, or even $0.10. That would give people a reason to install the app and explore the product. Instead, I have a plastic card with zero Bitcoin on it. With nothing on the card, there isn't really any incentive to install the app or look into it further. I'll just discard it. Hi friends,
Question:
SATSCARD included in Futurebit preorder, is completely empty, not even 1 sat on it preloaded?
yes they come empty. also check around to see if they did not get hacked as I think they may be okay. https://satscard.com/Thanks. According to Futurebit e-mail, these products are safe. From recent e-mail: WHAT IS NOT AFFECTED
FUTUREBIT HARDWARE + SATSCARD
This is a COLDCARD firmware issue and not an issue with FutureBit hardware or firmware. SATSCARDs included with some FutureBit products use a separate codebase and are not affected. We are proactivly emailing our entire customer and subscription email base to spread awarness. If you know somone with a coldcard wallet please reach out to them. But still - I would not trust it. Not my keys, not my coins. I have not generated seed or private key to an address on that card, so it's not mine. Adding hexdump of genesis block on the back of the card is not going to help.  The point of the satscard is for a plug and play zero config bitcoin wallet/address for solo mining. You setup the Apollo, tap the card on your iPhone, copy the address and paste it into the solo mining payout address. No messing with new wallets, seeds etc. Obviously this does not apply to most people on here, but 90% of our customers are new customers that have never mind before (and some never used bitcoin). Our goal has always been to make the transition into bitcoin as easy as possible for them. It is a really cool product, and for people new to bitcoin it's a great way to get a payout address fast. Yes we have verified with coldcard and checked the source and OS the wallet uses. It actually uses an OS called Java Card OS, which is the same firmware used for all Visa/Mastercard NFC cards etc. They use the onboard RNG that the banks use so definitely no coldcard class of bug is present on these cards. |
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So I cloned my 2tb ssd to a second 2tb ssd and I now have 2 pretty much up to date 800gb blockchain nodes.
questions are where do I store the slightly up to date backup?
If I put it in the Apollo will that confuse the unit or does it prioritize one drive over the other?
next question is my node has 11/64 connections how to max or make more than that?
also all connections are out
none are in. so what must I tell my router to let incoming happen
RAID mode is being worked on for 2.2 release for both Solo Node and Apollo III. You dont need to "clone" the drives, you'll be able to select which RAID mode you want and it will either automatically "clone" the drives for backup/redudancy in RAID 1, or "double" your drive space and read/write throughput in RAID 0. |
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anyone know why the node is set to run bitcoin 28.1 by default?
It's just the most tested core version for our OS, and where most futurebit blocks have been found on. We are pretty conservative when it comes to solo mining, and our default is a few version behind. Will probably start testing 3x version for next default but that requires months of validation and testing on testnet. |
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Right, so my node is finally synched and looks like it's running fine, and the solo pool is live to other devices on the network.
But no standalone mining is happening, indeed, there's no miner mention anywhere on the UI - I can't even access logs for the miner, it's like it doesn't exist.
The only reference I can find is in system logs:
2026-08-13T06:50:10.457309-04:00 futurebit-apollo-3 miner_start.sh[36925]: Error: I/O error
2026-08-13T06:50:10.467064-04:00 futurebit-apollo-3 miner_start.sh[35929]: internal board error
2026-08-13T06:50:10.467400-04:00 futurebit-apollo-3 miner_start.sh[36926]: ls: cannot access '/dev/ttyACM*': No such file or directory
2026-08-13T06:50:10.467502-04:00 futurebit-apollo-3 miner_start.sh[35929]: Started
2026-08-13T06:50:10.491742-04:00 futurebit-apollo-3 miner_stop.sh[36933]: /opt/apolloapi/backend/apollo-miner/miner_stop.sh: line 23: gpio: command not found
2026-08-13T06:50:10.999474-04:00 futurebit-apollo-3 miner_stop.sh[37062]: /opt/apolloapi/backend/apollo-miner/miner_stop.sh: line 25: gpio: command not found
2026-08-13T06:50:11.007277-04:00 futurebit-apollo-3 miner_stop.sh[37063]: ls: cannot access '/dev/ttyACM*': No such file or directory
2026-08-13T06:50:11.008400-04:00 futurebit-apollo-3 miner_stop.sh[36927]: Stopped
2026-08-13T06:50:11.010542-04:00 futurebit-apollo-3 systemd[1]: apollo-miner.service: Deactivated successfully.
2026-08-13T06:50:11.010796-04:00 futurebit-apollo-3 systemd[1]: Started apollo-miner.service - apollo-miner.
2026-08-13T06:50:15.725727-04:00 futurebit-apollo-3 node[1756]: Service Status:
2026-08-13T06:50:15.725843-04:00 futurebit-apollo-3 node[1756]: - miner: offline (systemd: inactive)
How do I bring the miner online? Board error doesn't look good...
If you updated via command line this will downgrade your unit to pre-apollo 3 support and will cause this error. For anyone that received their unit before this week you need to flash your SD card to the image linked below to make sure you are on the latest bug fix release. All units that shipped this week will have this latest image installed so you should be good to go. OTA updater wont work for Apollo III until we merge 3 support into mainline in a week or two. Latest Apollo III factory image: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/kk285qtgiewduefws6eqs/apollo-3_080826.img.xz?rlkey=4i5g2xko7w1yv18zurgq72ore&dl=06a9085a9855eb252a6783a29fc560e5a721ad765963f241cf0d75116f8824d7a apollo-3_080826.img.xz |
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I really hope Futurebit hasn’t sacrificed the robustness of the old design just to save a few dollars per unit. If my Apollo III dies out of warranty because of this, it will probably be my last Futurebit.
I have never skimped out on components/design for cost, and never will as long as im making the engineering decisions. This is a design change around the ASIC itself, nothing I could do about it...every 3nm ASIC now handles IO in serial, because no one wants the added complexity around parallel IO anymore. Failure rates will be higher with this design, no way around it when you have 21 chips in series, and one chip or IO voltage rail/ LDO fails the whole chain dies. Our board designs at this point are better than most so we mitigate most of those issues. Regarding the few failures we have had so far they actually seem to be correlated with a firmware bug that we fixed, but some units that have shipped out in the last few weeks had the old firmware on it. So thats a plus. |
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I just did check yes (just woke up) and I'm giving that a shot. Hopefully that's the issue and will save me from sending back the unit all the way from Australia. Will report back soon!
hey mine went from Howell , New Jersey to Brooklyn, New York under 60 miles and instead of a day will take at lease 4 to get there. Support/order team has instructions to send out new units, we are not waiting to get the old one back. Had to pause on shipments this week to look further into testing and firmware update we need to reflash on all units at the factory...replacements and more shipments going out early next week. first off thanks for being professional. Shit happens. I remember when I was selling upgraded 2005 Mac minis with upgrades to a 500gb hdd 10 of 11 seagate drives failed . It sucked bigly. I can imagine it is somewhat like that for you. Well if 90% of the units were failing that would be a shitshow. Looks like we are under 1%, but still early I was expecting around a 2% field failure rate with our new design since our old design was a parallel coms and each bank of chips had its own IO chip which was a cool design...dont think we had more than a dozen boards fail over thousands shipped. This new design is a serial chain design like almost every other bitcoin ASIC, which means if one chip blows up the whole chain is dead. |
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I just did check yes (just woke up) and I'm giving that a shot. Hopefully that's the issue and will save me from sending back the unit all the way from Australia. Will report back soon!
hey mine went from Howell , New Jersey to Brooklyn, New York under 60 miles and instead of a day will take at lease 4 to get there. Support/order team has instructions to send out new units, we are not waiting to get the old one back. Had to pause on shipments this week to look further into testing and firmware update we need to reflash on all units at the factory...replacements and more shipments going out early next week. |
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Broken pull tabs seems to be almost on every shipment at this point. We made this easy to tear off, but apparently they are way too easy so even small ship drop will cause them to tear.
Will have better ones coming but not much we can do, these are mainly designed for bulk shipments to our distributors/retailers so not a big deal.
Looking into the cause of the dead boards...seems to be early manufacturing defects we are not catching at the factory. We increased our cycle/test time, but so far we have only had 3 units with this issue (2 here and 1 over normal support channels) and so wont know more till we get them back.
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Got mine a couple days ago. Took almost exactly 1 full day to download the blockchain. Super impressed by how quite this thing is at ~13TH/s (Eco mode). Running Solo now... Question about my Apollo BTC... can I point the hash to my Apollo 3? I will shut that node down since I have the III now. I ran the Apollo BTC for years without a single issue and it's still running fine. Well, that is until I tried to update to the latest version anyway. It bricked during the update but I'm restoring it now and I'm sure it will be fine.
I am at block 960,000 so it should mine in a little bit. the blockchain is a bit over 803gb so far I have a new 2tb ssd in it. node is good miner won't mine I will be back later to work on this. I constantly get 0 asic found I think I need to return the unit. as I can get pools to see the miner but I can't get the miner to see the asic chip.  If your logs are show no asic detected thats a board level issue, have you reached out to support? We have not received many failures yet so want to catch any early. |
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RE: Satscard
We have independently reviewed the satscard design and shares zero code with any coldcard or product from coinkite.
The card actually runs a small chip card os call javacard os, which is used by visa and billions of cards worldwide. The crypto functions it generates for seeds is the exact same RNG function used by almost every credit card.
They are safe for short term "hot wallet" storage and easy setup.
I actually like these cards so much will develop our own if coinkite does not survive this (which I doubt that it would).
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What model of ASIC chip is in the Apollo 3?
it is a future bit designed chipset. not bitmain not avalon not whatminer made chips We dont tapeout our own chips...would love to have that kind of cash but that requires a major investment round in which we would lose our non-profit/independent operating nature. We partner with chipmakers to help design and tapeout the chip since we have 10+ years of ASIC design experience. For Apollo BTC/II (12nm and 5nm designs) that was with bitfury (European company) For Apollo II it was Auradine (3nm design) and first major American designed and taped out ASIC chip which we are really proud of. We dont touch chinese ASICs and hopefully will never have too, part of diversifying bitcoin mining is decentralizing the supply chain, and we have been a big push/contributor in making that happen (and some cool next gen designs we are already working on) Nice do you mean the New Apollo III is Auradine 3nm? Ie is that a typo that i bolded yes fixed. |
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What model of ASIC chip is in the Apollo 3?
it is a future bit designed chipset. not bitmain not avalon not whatminer made chips We dont tapeout our own chips...would love to have that kind of cash but that requires a major investment round in which we would lose our non-profit/independent operating nature. We partner with chipmakers to help design and tapeout the chip since we have 10+ years of ASIC design experience. For Apollo BTC/II (12nm and 5nm designs) that was with bitfury (European company) For Apollo III it was Auradine (3nm design) and first major American designed and taped out ASIC chip which we are really proud of. We dont touch chinese ASICs and hopefully will never have too, part of diversifying bitcoin mining is decentralizing the supply chain, and we have been a big push/contributor in making that happen (and some cool next gen designs we are already working on) |
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Does it make sense to set up my own node on this device now, or is it easier to save money and buy a version without native node support? I don't really understand the point of having my own node when my hashrate is 18 terahashes.
The whole concept behind FutureBit and Apollo devices is a plug and play solo node + miner with essentially zero config. It's for people that want to solo/lottery mine without needing complicated DYI setups. Standalone nodes cost 500-800 these days before you even include the SSD drive...add a 12TH miner (even a cheap chinese home miner in the same TH range) you are over 1099. Add a $400 2TB SSD drive that is not junk and there you go. And of course thats not taking into account high quality made in the USA engineering, Apollo OS, plug and play etc. Obviously most of that is not for people on this forum...its for people that want to take a deeper dive into bitcoin without the extra hassle. Unfortunately we are going to need to increase our prices further to sustain this as we had supplies locked in prior to the major component cost spikes over the last 6 months. |
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hi I tried to update my apollo btc miner but it was stuck so i turned the system off and now i having an issue trying to flash the sd card. I can't seem to flash the card it fails upon the validating step. pop the sd card into the miner and just get a solid red light. I can see the miners ip address on my router.
You need to decompress the image first before loading it into etcher |
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Testing shows that RAID 0 with SSD drives does not perceptively increase read/write speeds. The creator of the APOLLO III Solo Node mentioned that he was interested in implementing the "mirror drive" feature sometime earlier in the development process. I am still intrigued, and looking forward to seeing it. It would increase local data security.
Hm... RAID 0 can significantly improve performance, although with NVMe drives the gains are often minimal because a single drive may already saturate the available bandwidth. So that's a fair point. As for RAID 1, I don't see much value in it for a Bitcoin node. The blockchain is already replicated across thousands of nodes worldwide, so there's little benefit in mirroring it locally. For storing only the blockchain, RAID doesn't provide much practical advantage. "It would increase local data security." Only if the drive also stores your own important data. For a dedicated blockchain drive, RAID 1 simply doubles the SSD space and write wear for little real benefit. I'd rather keep a second NVMe as a spare and replace the primary drive when it eventually fails, instead of wearing out both drives at the same time. If they're identical models with similar usage, they may even fail around the same period, reducing perceived protection RAID 1 is supposed to provide. It's a redundancy feature for people solo mining. We have clients using the solo node for 100s of petahash of hashrate...if one drive dies or gets corrupted raid setup is way more robust. Will have the RAID feature complete for both solo node and Apollo 3 once we get all the pre-orders out in the next few weeks. RAID 0 also has the benefit of nearly double random read bandwidth, with makes building blocks even faster. Almost all major pools use Muti-raid setups across 10s of thousands of dollars of infrastructure. The Solo node pretty much will replicate 90% of that for a fraction of the cost. I am sceptical to the idea of NVMe RAID on the Apollo because the Apollo is a home hobbyist device, not a platform for professional mining operations. That's why I've argued against it in my previous posts. Of course, I appreciate new features, but personally I don't think this is a feature suited to professional use. For hobbyists, it can be offered as an option, but the benefits are marginal. Now, let's look at what a 100 PH/s operation actually looks like. I checked the ASIC Miner Value website. Using one of the latest miners, the Bitmain Antminer S23 Hyd 3U (1.16 PH/s), you'd need around 86 units. That's well over half a million dollars' worth of mining hardware, consuming roughly 1 MW of power. We're talking about a serious operation with dedicated power infrastructure, water cooling, redundant internet, monitoring, physical security, and staff on site. The minimum standard for serving the blockchain to that operation is not a US$1,000 black plastic brick sitting on the owner's desk over flaky Wi-Fi. It's a proper Dell, HPE, or similar enterprise server with plenty of x86-64 cores, ECC RAM, redundant storage, redundant power supplies, mounted in a rack. A server like that should never go offline except for scheduled maintenance. I have a home server running 24/7 on consumer-grade hardware, and it hasn't gone down due to a fault since I built it in 2018. If someone is running a 100 PH/s mining operation and using an Apollo as their primary blockchain server, they're doing it wrong. Well thats your opinion, but unfortunately bad hardware and software in the space has made this perception a reality. We have optimized the solo node even beyond what a stock "server" can do in terms of raw performance per dollar. ARM embedded systems are designed for no downtime as much as enterprise servers, and that enterprise server will probably consume 1000 watts...8 cores, 16GB LDDR5 RAM, 2.5 GB ethernet and RAID NVMe gets you 99% of the way there on 20 watts. He's been up for 6 months straight found two blocks with zero downtime. Perception that bitcoin mining requires crazy infrastructure is wrong...now if you dont want to risk that 1% for a few grand thats entirely up to you, have also helped install solo operations on 10k worth of node hardware but still think thats overkill. |
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