Asteroid -- a new Mac mining client (0.9.7)

[Karin]

Some more things to consider:
- cgminer works well without much tweaking for sha256, but you have to tweak it a bit to get the best performance with scrypt with ATI/AMD GPUs.  See the scrypt readme for details, but passing the number of shade processors or concurrent threads can make a big improvement.  Of course, each card model has different values.   Luckily, there aren't many options on a mac.  Unfortunately, I haven't investigated the card on my iMac yet so I can't report what my instance would use.
<snip>
-- Add a dialog box/form that has some of the main tweaks exposed that a user could set
-- In a perfect world, it could ID the specific card then set the tweaks for it from a database -- emphasis mine (Karin)

You're in luck, this is exactly what Asteroid does (and a feature I love to talk about)!  Each time you start scrypt mining, Asteroid will wait for your hash rate to stabilize, and then check your settings/hashrates with the Asteroid webserver.  If someone has found better settings for your card, Asteroid will let you know.  For example, this is what you'll see in Asteroid's Litecoin preferences:

Which could lead to this:

By default, Asteroid won't upload your settings to the server, but it will check see if anyone else has found better settings for your hardware and make recommendations accordingly.  What I would like is for more people to check the box that says so that we can collectively populate the database with more settings for each Mac / graphics card.  Of course, any tweaking you do can greatly benefit other Asteroid users if you find a combination that works well.

I've only revealed thread-concurrency and work size as these are the two most significant and "best" values to tweak, according to the scrypt readme for cgminer.

I noticed there's a command line dialog box - does that pass parameters to cgminer?

You bet.  I'll clarify the wording on the dialog box for the next version.

Also, advertise that it has stratum support (I know, I should have guessed that since it uses cgminer in the backend).

Good point!  I'll do that.  I should lift a few terms from the cgminer specs to be completely transparent.

More as I find it...

Awesome, keep 'em coming, and thank you for taking the time to post this.

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[SpaceCadet]

Very cool! Can't wait to check it all out - great work!

[Karin]

0.8.1 is out this morning, release notes are here, and duplicated below:

• New: Detects when miner crashes due to "Error -54" and attempts to restart the miner with safer settings
• Updated: Now uses cgminer 3.3.1, hopefully providing better compatibility for USB-based devices
• Fixed: Send Feedback works now when not all the logs are present/generated yet
• Fixed: Changed P2Pool settings to the right ones for BTC and LTC mining
• Fixed: Changed wording on command-line miner box to better reflect what it does

Compatibility on 10.6 and 10.7 needs some tweaks, although the miner backend should work fine if you were so inclined to access it through the app bundle.  More details (and a new project!) to be released soon!    You testers have been amazing, I'm even getting text messages from some of you.

Don't forget to check out the website too, if you haven't seen it yet:  http://www.asteroidapp.com/

[ct1aic]

Greetings.

The new version still aborts with the "Error -54". Very strange. Already sent feedback with debugging info.

[Karin]

Greetings.

The new version still aborts with the "Error -54". Very strange. Already sent feedback with debugging info.

Hey Rui, looks like Asteroid was waiting for the miner to crash, and then diagnose the error -54.  However, the miner doesn't crash, it's just not able to load the kernels.  I've fixed this for the next version.

In the meantime though, you can try a fix by entering "--worksize 64 -I d" in the "Start command-line miner..." command under the "Mode" menu.  If that works, then great, the new version of Asteroid will handle that automatically.  If not, I'll have to look for other causes of that error.

Thanks for the report!

[ct1aic]

Same... sent another feedback.

Strange things are happening with the trackpad of the laptop, stopping to work when Asteroid is mining... If I stop Asteroid, the trackpad works again.

[djtriggz]

I have here a macbook pro retina 13 and asicminer usb disruptor

[Karin]

0.9.0 is now out!  New features include complete device agnosticism (countless multiple miners!), temperature monitoring with alerts and automatic cooldowns, hot plugging devices, lifetime stats and the latest unofficial "cgminer for Mac OS X" binaries.

Asteroid is still in private beta, but as you can tell by the version number, 0.9.0, I am rapidly approaching where I'll do a public beta.

Full changelog is here.  Here's a screenshot of the latest build:

[mnyonpa]

Will you add bfgminer support too?

[Karin]

Will you add bfgminer support too?

Asteroid has all the hooks for multiple miners, and it's not the first time I've been asked about it, but it would require additional time to maintain a universal binary version of bfgminer and some time to test compatibility.  Time that would take me away from maintaining cgminer and Asteroid.  But that being said I'm not averse to doing so if the demand is there.

The other side of that is a smooth user experience for the target audience, which are everyday users who don't need to be saturated with details (I'm thinking similar to the BitMinter audience, but on any pool and a cleaner UI).  Again, that's somewhat of a cop-out but I can't ignore that KISS is a strong design principle for this project.

But let me ask since you brought it up, and I'm honestly very interested, what do you find you like in bfgminer that you don't see in cgminer?

[mnyonpa]

But let me ask since you brought it up, and I'm honestly very interested, what do you find you like in bfgminer that you don't see in cgminer?

Well, for me it is simply that I have an ASIC and corresponding drivers installed, so I can freely switch between bfgminer and BitMinter client, but as soon as I want to use cgminer, I have to remove kernel extensions and reboot, which is a little bit inconvenient

[Karin]

But let me ask since you brought it up, and I'm honestly very interested, what do you find you like in bfgminer that you don't see in cgminer?

Well, for me it is simply that I have an ASIC and corresponding drivers installed, so I can freely switch between bfgminer and BitMinter client, but as soon as I want to use cgminer, I have to remove kernel extensions and reboot, which is a little bit inconvenient

Fair enough!  I actually am in the same boat with one of my mining machines, as I have other USB devices that need to run (unrelated to mining).  I think I know of an elegant way to handle this though.  I'll see what I can include in the next version

[wlwesq]

If you're in need of more beta testers, I've got a couple of MacBook Pros that I can test on, along with two of the ASIC USB miners.

[Karin]

I've had a bunch of requests in the last couple hours, you should all have received invites now.  And thanks!

[wlwesq]

OK, here's something odd I've observed running on two different Macs.

I'm using a pair of the USB miners. In the "Asteroid" window, both ASICMINER options are checked.

The lower one is labeled 1, the upper is labeled 2.

I start the mining, and things spin up (so to speak).

Block 1 shows it is tooling along at around 300+ Mh/s. Block 2 shows it is "starting."

If I uncheck Block 2, everything comes to a halt--zero Mh/s on both, and they both show "stopped."

Yet, the Miner Console shows the thing is still working.

Odd, no?

Here's the other weird thing. I would expect that if both miners are running that the speed would be 600+ Mh/s, but the pool stats show it's only half that amount.

I'll send a bug report directly to you, Karin.

[wlwesq]

Oh, forgot to mention--if I have just one of the miners plugged in, it runs at about 250 Mh/s rather than 300+.

Very strange indeed!

[Karin]

Oh, forgot to mention--if I have just one of the miners plugged in, it runs at about 250 Mh/s rather than 300+.

Very strange indeed!

Awesome, thanks for the reports and log files!  It looks like they're mostly UI bugs.  With what you provided I should be able to clean it up easily enough (looks like it just gets confused with identically internally named devices).

I'll do some tests on the rates reported by the pools, although it's been my experience that they typically under-report hash rates and shouldn't be seen as very accurate.  Have you seen accurate hash rates reported by that pool with those same devices in other mining programs?   Your logs show you averaging 625MH/s and the number of submitted shares looks good for your hash rate.  Nonetheless, I'll of course double check.  Thanks again!

[wlwesq]

Here's some more info, which I think is good.

On a whim (and on a different laptop, the one at home) I plugged one miner in, launched Asteroid, and fired it up. After it was up and running, I plugged the second one in.

At this point, the Asteroid window went kablooey--the two miner bars got written on top of the overall bar, so it's a bit messed up UI wise. But, the console shows definitely higher hash rates more along the lines of what I have seen using Bitminter, for example.

So, other than the UI problem that I "discovered" I'd say things are looking up! 

[wlwesq]

I'll do some tests on the rates reported by the pools, although it's been my experience that they typically under-report hash rates and shouldn't be seen as very accurate.  Have you seen accurate hash rates reported by that pool with those same devices in other mining programs?   Your logs show you averaging 625MH/s and the number of submitted shares looks good for your hash rate.  Nonetheless, I'll of course double check.  Thanks again!

Oops, forgot to answer this question!

Yes, hash rates reported by Eligius (and other pools) with these devices in MacMiner have reported in the 660 Mh/s range (2x330).

But, the rates in MacMiner were using the FPGA/ASIC miner that he has built in, not cgminer. Perhaps that's the difference?

[wlwesq]

To help illustrate, here's the link to my stats where you can see the 600-700 range using MacMiner's FPGA/ASIC option and then the lower range using Asteroid and cgminer.

http://eligius.st/~wizkid057/newstats/userstats.php/1BoCjgNQmsc8EK3Fmo1QgBjwuUTsy5ys66

I'll try to quiet down and be less of a pest now.