Linux mining distro for the Raspberry PI - MinePeon

[MineForeman.com]

FYI my MinePeon miner died at 00:00 again last night.  I fixed it this morning by stopping and starting cgminer.

There are a pile of checks etc that it does then as well as reloading of cgminer, while it is not the cause of your problems because it works fine for most everyone else something in those checks is tripping the problem.  I will be investigating.

Possibly related: I started having USB hub issues.

I am almost positive that your hubs will be the issue, it turns out that it was a hub that caused mine.

I have three powered hubs:
Targus 7-Port USB Powered Hub (bought from Noel Leeming) - Output 5V, 3A, so can only connect 6 ASICMINER Block Erupters to it, which I was doing.
2x Dick Smith 7-Port USB Powered Hub - Output 5V, 2A, so can only connect 4 Erupters to a hub, I'm only connecting 3.

I tried one of those targus's and it blew for me almost instantly.  I have not used that Dick Smith hub but I do use;-

http://www.dicksmith.co.nz/accessories/dick-smith-13-port-usb-hub-dsnz-xh1237

with up to 8 devices plugged into it and it seems to work fine.

Is it dangerous to hot plug Erupters? 

It should not be, I think your hub may have already been on the way out.

Can someone please recommend a high-quality powered USB hub for use with MinePeon / Raspberry Pi?  Something that I can either buy in New Zealand, or can ship to NZ?

I would be interested in this as well, now that kano confirms that USB3 works with MinePeon I am hunting again to see what I can find.

Neil

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[Zelek Uther]

I have this hub on order from ebay.co.uk seller orico_pc:
ORICO 10-Port Aluminium USB3.0 Powered Hub

Ordered on 2013-07-16, before I'd done more research to know that USB3 may have problems with cgminer / Rasp Pi.  I'll let you know if it works with MinePeon.

[kano]

Does anyone know how many fpga/asic miners can MinePeon (or Raspberry Pi) support before CPU becomes a bottleneck?

Obviously depends on the devices and the pool protocol ...

[coblee]

Does anyone know how many fpga/asic miners can MinePeon (or Raspberry Pi) support before CPU becomes a bottleneck?

Obviously depends on the devices and the pool protocol ...

BFL asics and stratum

[BitMinerN8]

Does anyone know how many fpga/asic miners can MinePeon (or Raspberry Pi) support before CPU becomes a bottleneck?

Obviously depends on the devices and the pool protocol ...

BFL asics and stratum

I've had 8 SC and 2 FPGA on one Pi running MinePeon 0.2.2, it worked, only ran it for a day or so. I opted for one Pi per shelf in the rack so if I had a failure, I minimized the impact. Time is money, redundancy is king. Pi r cheap. (Or Pi r squared, whichever you prefer.  )

[menace_one]

Hey,
at first thanks for your nice work!

Will MinePeon work out of the box with Klondikes K16 and Burnins Bitburner?

[MineForeman.com]

Hey,
at first thanks for your nice work!

Thanks, I enjoy doing it and I am glad you enjoy using it.

Will MinePeon work out of the box with Klondikes K16 and Burnins Bitburner?

Possibly (probably).  I believe they both use standard drivers that are already present in cgminer and bfgminer.

Neil

P.S. It is one of my pet peeves that mining hardware companies release these things and expect the developers to buy a device to build support for them.  At the very least they should be sending one to Con, Kano and Luke.

[Zelek Uther]

Possibly related: I started having USB hub issues.

I am almost positive that your hubs will be the issue, it turns out that it was a hub that caused mine.

I agree.  Now that I'm avoiding the "blown" USB ports, and connecting less Erupters per hub, my hubs seem stable for now.  No issues last night.  I actually got up at midnight to watch it, to make sure everything went ok.  The changeover to donation time was very smooth.  Funnily enough, as I watched my rig mining for MineForeman I felt happy - glad to be donating a few hashes, and grateful for the excellent MinePeon that makes life as a miner so much easier.  

I will be replacing the hubs that have "blown" ports very soon.  I have decided to play it safe with hubs, and not risk overloading them.  I think Erupters actually use a little bit more than 500mA.  I was connecting 6 of them to a 3A hub, because 0.5A x 6 = 3A.  Problem is, I think the Erupters were drawing more than 3A at times... and hence blew my hubs.  So now I connect one less Erupter per hub than theoretically possible, to stay within the limits of the hub.

[kano]

Hey,
at first thanks for your nice work!

Thanks, I enjoy doing it and I am glad you enjoy using it.

Will MinePeon work out of the box with Klondikes K16 and Burnins Bitburner?

Possibly (probably).  I believe they both use standard drivers that are already present in cgminer and bfgminer.

Neil

P.S. It is one of my pet peeves that mining hardware companies release these things and expect the developers to buy a device to build support for them.  At the very least they should be sending one to Con, Kano and Luke.

I think neither of them will work up front.
BKK has written a cgminer driver for the Klondike (and I have provided minor input into that) but I've no idea what's actually going to happen there with the actual hardware.

Bitburner? We've never heard anything from them.
If it is a pure Avalon clone, it may work.
But I've also got nothing to do with Avalon at all (ckolivas has one) so I can't say what will happen there.
(He had to pay for his Avalon ... 50BTC ... and since then the Avalon performance has gone from ~70GH/s to ~80GH/s thanks to him ...)

The problem is that a lot of people seem to think we ask for hardware with an agenda to simply be given stuff for free.
(The whole Me vs GitSyncom drama should have made that clear - "proper support" is provided by ckolivas - many months after they said they would provide it but never did)

When Klondike finally appears and people release them, the basic board is like ... 15GH/s?
So yeah I'm really gonna make a fortune from that in a month or two
Next week I'll have 130GH/s courtesy of the company that a lot of people hate (I already have 70)
So it sorta puts the whole "You only want a Klondike for free" into the realms of ... why should I have people abuse me for that ...

I sold an Icarus for $1800 back in Apr coz I had 2, I kept the 2nd one coz I need it to support cgminer.
I will keep the 'tiny' devices mining probably long after they cost more to run than they generate coz it means I can easily test changes on the hardware "We Support"

Yes it peeves me also

... and I will add of course what most know but never hurts to remind people, MineForeman.com paid and posted my RPi to me.
Thanks again

... and sorry to derail the thread ... yeah this is how I sometimes start a war around here ... but I don't think it will this time

[cardcomm]

...
Kano,

Did you get your LCD display yet? I just got mine yesterday, and already hacked up a quick script to display data from the cgminer API.

I was wondering if you completed your script yet, or have added support in cgminer? I'm sure it has more functionality than my simple attempt. lol

BTW, I got the LCD with the v1.3 firmware.  Unfortunately that version does not seem to allow absolute positioning on the display. I guess the v1.4 firmware model is the one to get, if it can be found.

As far as there being a standard interface for these type devices, I haven't seen one. It would be nice...

Yes I got it.
I then decided to try using my miner.php as an include so it would be a small amount of php code based on what is already done
I then found that php doesn't support direct usb (there is a git addon/project that has it, but I want to avoid adding external code)
I don't like python, so I stopped there, to wait til I have more time.
For now, it sits next to me running clock.py showing me the time
I am still running around in circles looking at these silly USB1.1 mining devices in cgminer, so the direct code will have to wait a little longer.

Yeah, I know what you mean. I'm not a big python fan either. lol! But I hacked together a little python script that displays a few basic cgminer stats. Sorta arbitrary choices based on what I though was most important to display and the limited space to display it.

If there is any interest, I'll clean it up and throw it up on github as an open source app. I do need to add code to display an error if all devices stop hashing. (I already show an error if cgminer doesn't respond "alive" on status, or if there's a network connection.) I know I overlooked it, but what gcminer API should I look at to find out if hashing devices have failed to stopped?

I'm including a screen shot of it running on my Pi mining with one Block Erupter. Let me know if anyone wants this up on github.

[kano]

Yep post a link I'll even run it - the clock next to me is getting rather boring

[stellan0r]

More than likely raspbian's fault, arch (minepeon) seems to have solved some of the more esoteric usb problems
(like I can mine on my powered USB3 hub fine on arch)

Wait what? Which USB3 Hub exactly and what did you have to change in Minepeon (say 0.2.2) to make the hub work?

[menace_one]

Thanks for your replies,
sounds there is some trouble between free software developers and hardware companys.

BKK and Burnin will deliver their own cgminer driver. I believe cgminer have to be compiled with this drivers.
Obviously I over estimated the importance of these custom designs, so i thought there will be a newer MinePeon version with the special compiled
cgminer.

Greetings


P.s. Link for Burnins Bitburner:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=179769.0

[ct1aic]

...
Kano,

Did you get your LCD display yet? I just got mine yesterday, and already hacked up a quick script to display data from the cgminer API.

I was wondering if you completed your script yet, or have added support in cgminer? I'm sure it has more functionality than my simple attempt. lol

BTW, I got the LCD with the v1.3 firmware.  Unfortunately that version does not seem to allow absolute positioning on the display. I guess the v1.4 firmware model is the one to get, if it can be found.

As far as there being a standard interface for these type devices, I haven't seen one. It would be nice...

Yes I got it.
I then decided to try using my miner.php as an include so it would be a small amount of php code based on what is already done
I then found that php doesn't support direct usb (there is a git addon/project that has it, but I want to avoid adding external code)
I don't like python, so I stopped there, to wait til I have more time.
For now, it sits next to me running clock.py showing me the time
I am still running around in circles looking at these silly USB1.1 mining devices in cgminer, so the direct code will have to wait a little longer.

Yeah, I know what you mean. I'm not a big python fan either. lol! But I hacked together a little python script that displays a few basic cgminer stats. Sorta arbitrary choices based on what I though was most important to display and the limited space to display it.

If there is any interest, I'll clean it up and throw it up on github as an open source app. I do need to add code to display an error if all devices stop hashing. (I already show an error if cgminer doesn't respond "alive" on status, or if there's a network connection.) I know I overlooked it, but what gcminer API should I look at to find out if hashing devices have failed to stopped?

I'm including a screen shot of it running on my Pi mining with one Block Erupter. Let me know if anyone wants this up on github.

...

I also received my new "USB 2.8" TFT LCD module LCD". I hope that one day, MinePeon will interact with this display. But with this comment, I'm NOT ASKING ANYTHING to Neil, or he will ban me for life.

[kano]

...
Yeah, I know what you mean. I'm not a big python fan either. lol! But I hacked together a little python script that displays a few basic cgminer stats. Sorta arbitrary choices based on what I though was most important to display and the limited space to display it.

If there is any interest, I'll clean it up and throw it up on github as an open source app. I do need to add code to display an error if all devices stop hashing. (I already show an error if cgminer doesn't respond "alive" on status, or if there's a network connection.) I know I overlooked it, but what gcminer API should I look at to find out if hashing devices have failed to stopped?

I'm including a screen shot of it running on my Pi mining with one Block Erupter. Let me know if anyone wants this up on github.

http://www.bizdistrict.com/post/lcd_and_pi.jpg

Hi cardcomm (again)
Could you post a link to what you've done please?
As I said, would be good to have anything useful showing on it rather than just the time
(Yes I will get to doing something about it soon ...)

[klotzenhotz]

FYI my MinePeon miner died at 00:00 again last night.  I fixed it this morning by stopping and starting cgminer.

Unfortunately, same here. Last night 00:00, dead. Had to restart the pi this morning.

[ct1aic]

FYI my MinePeon miner died at 00:00 again last night.  I fixed it this morning by stopping and starting cgminer.

Unfortunately, same here. Last night 00:00, dead. Had to restart the pi this morning.

Please try to "kill a cat" and you'll see the problem is solved... But I can't do any more comments or I'm risking to be slapped again by Neil...

See my comment, regarding this problem, in this thread (and Neil's answer): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137934.msg2732667#msg2732667

[Tesla71]

I try to run an avalon unit via minepeon, disconnected the internal USB from the wrt703 router and plugged it in the same hub as the USB-Miner but I won't regognize.. any ideas ?

[cardcomm]

...
Yeah, I know what you mean. I'm not a big python fan either. lol! But I hacked together a little python script that displays a few basic cgminer stats. Sorta arbitrary choices based on what I though was most important to display and the limited space to display it.

If there is any interest, I'll clean it up and throw it up on github as an open source app. I do need to add code to display an error if all devices stop hashing. (I already show an error if cgminer doesn't respond "alive" on status, or if there's a network connection.) I know I overlooked it, but what gcminer API should I look at to find out if hashing devices have failed to stopped?

I'm including a screen shot of it running on my Pi mining with one Block Erupter. Let me know if anyone wants this up on github.

http://www.bizdistrict.com/post/lcd_and_pi.jpg

Hi cardcomm (again)
Could you post a link to what you've done please?
As I said, would be good to have anything useful showing on it rather than just the time
(Yes I will get to doing something about it soon ...)

Hi Kano,

Here's the link to to code on github:

https://github.com/cardcomm/cgminerLCDStats

Sorry for the delay. I got bogged down last night with some last minute changes adding some rounding code. I belatedly realized the display would get badly scrambled if the hash rate was too large. I'm still not sure how well it's going to display higher average hash rates - looking for your input on that one since I only have the one Block Erupter at the moment  haha

Also, I'm attempting to check for problems with cgminer, and display a warning screen. Right now I'm showing the error screen if I can't connect to the API, if cgminer isn't returning "Alive" in the STATUS call, or if the NOTIFY call is returning "Reason Not Well" other than none, or a "Last Not Well" code of non-zero. Is there anything else I should be checking?

Thanks for trying the code, looking forward to any feedback you have.

[cardcomm]

I also received my new "USB 2.8" TFT LCD module LCD". I hope that one day, MinePeon will interact with this display. But with this comment, I'm NOT ASKING ANYTHING to Neil, or he will ban me for life.

I know absolutely zero about MinePeon, except that it runs an instance of cgminer in the background, I believe. If that's the true, and if the API is enabled on the cgminer instance, then my python script should work.

Sorry if I'm showing my naiveté here, I'm talking about things I don't know about...