Official FutureBit Moonlander 2 Driver and Support Thread

[Kgonla]

Hello, I need some help 

I have one of these Moonlanders that hangs randomly.
I tested different memory voltages but it stills hanging.
Amperes to the port are enough (3-3.2 A) & I'm not running high frecuencies.

If I'm looking at the miner software & see Asic not responding I just close & restart & It works again, but...
When the miner tries to restart several times it stops working at all & I must disconnect de Moonlander & plug again.

I tested the command:
--no-restart but it is not working

So, what I'm looking for is if there is a command I can make the miner software close & restart when the Asic stops working instead of the software tries to restart it.

Thank you.

[Kgonla]

Hello, I need some help 

I have one of these Moonlanders that hangs randomly.
I tested different memory voltages but it stills hanging.
Amperes to the port are enough (3-3.2 A) & I'm not running high frecuencies.

If I'm looking at the miner software & see Asic not responding I just close & restart & It works again, but...
When the miner tries to restart several times it stops working at all & I must disconnect de Moonlander & plug again.

I tested the command:
--no-restart but it is not working

So, what I'm looking for is if there is a command I can make the miner software close & restart when the Asic stops working instead of the software tries to restart it.

Thank you.

I reply myself, problem solved!!!

I replaced the "bfgminer 5.4.2 FutureBit Moonlander 2 Beta-2 Driver Release"
By previous one "bfgminer 5.4.2 FutureBit Moonlander 2 Initial Driver Release"
Now stick is working fine without crashes.
I can use lower voltage, the best HW errors was about 0.6% with beta 2 & now with beta 1 I have 0.14% after 15 hours without making any voltage or frequency tests 

[Bill48105]

I got 4 moonlander 2's on a powered hub. On Win10 the moonlanders would eventually 1 by 1 show 0 for speed & restarting bfgminer didn't help. I'd have to power cycle the hub or remove each miner & plug them back in then they'd work for hours to a couple days.  I figured it could be a Win10 issue & was sick of dealing with restarting them so I bought a raspberry pi and now they still eventually go to 0 but i can just restart the bfgminer & they'll work again.  Granted I could just cron or script a restart but I'd prefer to get a real fix.  I'm testing the older initial release on the pi to see if it makes any difference because I noticed the latest says it had restart logic added which i figured there was a chance that was the issue.  Btw I'm running them stock (not specifying any speed on command line) and the hub claims to support 2A per port. It's the "Sipolar Well Work 20 Port Industrial USB 3.0 Hub Charger for iPhone/iPad/Cellphone with Box Shape Speed Up to 5Gbps " "Provides up to 5V, 2A (10 Watts) of power per port, for charging battery-intensive devices such as an iPad" so I didn't figure that was the issue.  It's actually a nifty hub in that it's like 2 hubs in 1.. The 20 ports are split into 2 sides, each with own USB type A port like a separate 10 port hub combined in 1 box.  In fact the other half of the hub is running 1 NEWPAC using an older pi without issues. Actually, before I bought the newpac I was running the 4 moonlanders on that pi with this hub with zero issues.. (unfortunately the moonlanders & newpac don't play nice together mining on same machine)  I was tempted to swap the 2 pi's around to see if the problem followed or not. For now i'm testing the initial release bfgminer with fingers crossed.
Thx
Bill

[NRBITC]

Hi

I had the same problem as you with the futurebit and newpac

so i have 2 raspberry one for the gekko and one for the moonlanders

it allows me to mine in lottery on shitcoins xD

on the other hand I have many crash (less with VNC viewer) but I'm still looking for a solution

the LTC show me 0MH or a few kh

the newpacs spit my raspi: /

https://imgur.com/a/cTtVOE9

[Kgonla]

Same problem here, I've been testing one with these results:
Power supply 20A, CPU 0.9V, Mem 1.03V, one powerful fan on top of stick to get low temps.
Randomly crashing the higher the frequency the often.
From 796 to max, crashing after few minutes, at most about 1 h
From 756 to 796 same but it sometimes work for some hours
Now I'm testing 744 with 0.76V CPU & 0.85V mem, crashing after several minutes to several hours

Also tested different frequencies with higher and lower voltages but no changes
Having to unplug to get to work again, the miner software is unable to restart the stick

Is it a Moonlander problem or a softare problem?

[Bill48105]

EDIT: See next post for the updated "smart" method that bases the kill on speed vs just blindly timed
I've tested these moonlanders on multiple systems, multiple hubs, default & custom settings, original release & newer beta, and for some reason they each show 0 for speed eventually.  It's not an ideal solution but so far the cleanest I've found is on my raspberry pi running latest raspbian is to restart bfgminer every hour. I didn't see an option in bfgminer itself so I went a more brute force way which while maybe not pretty, so far seems to do the trick. (Surely there are cleaner ways to go about this but I worked with what I know how to do the fastest since I've wasted too much time on this already)

I start a screen session manually, then start bfgminer in a looping script that's in my home directory with a delay after it to have time to stop with ctrl-c it if needed:
(Be sure to set the correct path to your bfgminer, your own POOL, PORT & USERNAME etc. Set your own command line options like speed as needed)

nano run.sh

Code:

#!/bin/sh
while true
do
  cd /home/pi/moonlander2/bfgminer_5.4.2-futurebit2_linux_armv6/
  ./bfgminer --scrypt -o stratum+tcp://POOL:PORT -u USERNAME -p x -S ALL
  echo "Sleeping 5 seconds.. Press Ctrl-C to stop bfgminer restart."
  sleep 5s
done

Make it executable:
sudo chmod +x run.sh

Then I use the root crontab to tell bfgminer to shutdown every 60 minutes using pkill:

sudo crontab -e

Code:

*/60 * * * * /usr/bin/pkill -f bfgminer

NOTE: Be sure to use sudo crontab -e otherwise if you don't use sudo pkill won't have permissions to work under normal user's crontab

Once setup & running I can watch the screen session cleanly restart hourly. (Use more or less time to balance work lost restarting with how long you're willing to accept 1 or more miners hung)

No doubt this solution isn't ideal & has drawbacks (such as while pskill tells bfgminer to shutdown the same as if you hit Q, it does not help if the issue is USB or hardware related.  Plus unless set on command line, the difficulty has to be negotiated again.  It's possible to lose out on work being done but not as much work is being lost having moonlander's hung up at 0 mhs.

[Bill48105]

NEW AND IMPROVED METHOD!
So while my big hammer method above worked it felt too dirty & dumb. Here's a smarter "2.0" method that reads in the speed via RPC & only stops bfgminer if the speed falls below a certain level.

nano run.sh

Code:

#!/bin/sh
while true
do
  cd /home/pi/moonlander2/bfgminer_5.4.2-futurebit2_linux_armv6/
  ./bfgminer --scrypt -o stratum+tcp://POOL:PORT -u USERNAME -p x -S ALL --api-listen
  echo "Sleeping 5 seconds.. Press Ctrl-C to stop bfgminer restart."
  sleep 5s
done

NOTE: This run.sh is same as previous method except --api-listen is added to enable RPC API for localhost reading of mining stats. Be sure to set the correct path to your bfgminer, your own POOL, PORT & USERNAME etc. Set your own command line options like clock speeds etc as needed

Make it executable:
sudo chmod +x run.sh

We also need a new script:
nano monitor.sh

Code:

#!/bin/sh
MINSPEED=10
MINWAIT=180
cd /home/pi/moonlander2/bfgminer_5.4.2-futurebit2_linux_armv6/
RPCDATA=$(./bfgminer-rpc)
SPEEDTXT=$(echo "$RPCDATA" | grep '\[MHS 20s\]' | sed -e 's/^[[:space:]]*//')
ELAPSEDTXT=$(echo "$RPCDATA" | grep '\[Elapsed\]' | sed -e 's/^[[:space:]]*//')
SPEEDFLOAT=${SPEEDTXT##*>}
SPEED=${SPEEDFLOAT%.*}
ELAPSED=${ELAPSEDTXT##*>}
if [ $ELAPSED -gt $MINWAIT ] && [ "$SPEED" -lt "$MINSPEED" ]; then
  echo "Slow speed detected.. Killing bfgminer!"
  /usr/bin/pkill -f bfgminer
fi
echo "ELAPSED:" $ELAPSED "SPEED:" $SPEED

NOTE: Be sure to set MINSPEED, MINWAIT & path to where bfgminer-rpc is (the cd line)

Make it executable:
sudo chmod +x monitor.sh

sudo crontab -e

Code:

*/5 * * * * /home/pi/monitor.sh

(Don't forget sudo so you're editing root's crontab.  This runs the monitor every 5 minutes, adjust accordingly. Be sure to set path to your script as well. I just put mine in my pi home directory)

So what the heck does this do? Well like before I'm running bfgminer a screen session, in a loop, so that if told to exit it will just run again after a 5 second delay to give you time to hit Ctrl-C to terminate the script.  But now instead of blindly killing off bgminer every hour, I'm running my monitor script every 5 minutes.  The monitor script calls bfgminer-rpc to get the stats (remember you must enable RPC with --api-listen option unlike the earlier method above), parses that output for the 20 second average speed and how much seconds have elapsed since bfgminer started. If the speed is less than MINSPEED (default is 10 MHS since I have 4 stock moonlanders running. Obviously adjust this to suit your speed. Go a little under the average you see in bfgminer though to give it a little wiggle room. I see 12-13 on my 4 so 10 seems like a pretty safe level to detected 1 or more that are stuck) and elapsed time is at least MINWAIT (default is 180 seconds or 3 minutes to give the miners time to settle in & not try to restart bfgminer while it's ramping up. Adjust if needed) then the script kills off bfgminer otherwise it does nothing. (Checking elapsed isn't really needed if you're careful to only run the monitor script after the miner gets up to speed but it was simple enough sanity check that it seemed worth the trouble adding it.)

So far this method is working quite well for me here but no promises.  I'd highly recommend you manually run ./monitor.sh while testing before adding it to your crontab to help troubleshoot. Once you're sure it's working as expected then add it to the crontab.

Some word of warning: Not much error or sanity checking is done to keep the script small & simple. For example you'll get an error if you run monitor.sh when bfgminer is not running, if RPC API isn't enabled, if the bfgminer was just started & RPC isn't ready, etc. So far the errors I've seen are benign & can be ignored. The script does nothing unless the stated criteria is met so it should be harmless if it hits a snag.  The only issue I've seen myself is if I set the MINSPEED too high or if one of the miners is locked enough that it needs power cycled then the script will restart the bfgminer over & over at whatever interval you set in crontab. So keep that in mind & adjust accordingly.  Also note that 20s speed is floating point but to keep it simple in bash script I "convert" to integer chopping off everything after the dot.  I realize this isn't ideal but again was trying to keep it simple & it should be accurate enough for the purpose of monitoring. Obviously if your speed is less than 1 the script isn't going to work right so you'd need to adjust the script. Also note that this assumes . vs , so I'm not sure if bfgminer is localized so you'd need to modify the script for that if needed.  You'd try SPEED=${SPEEDFLOAT%,*} instead perhaps.

[AkiAfroo]

@Bill48105 , thx you save my life. works perfect both scripts. monitor.sh and run.sh. 

[Bill48105]

@Bill48105 , thx you save my life. works perfect both scripts. monitor.sh and run.sh. 

awesome! glad it worked & you found it useful I've been very pleased with it here myself. I'm seeing my daily payouts increased already since there is less downtime where I was AFK & didn't notice 1 or more moonlanders were 0.  Now it's rare to look & find one stuck.

[jstefanop]

Yea sorry guys I know I need to update the binaries for the pi that fixes this issue...you can just pull the latest source off the repo and compile though.

[Bill48105]

Yea sorry guys I know I need to update the binaries for the pi that fixes this issue...you can just pull the latest source off the repo and compile though.

Ok thanks. I had checked github but didn't see any new release but will look again. EDIT: it shows last edit was Nov 2018.. Am I missing something?

[Kgonla]

@Bill48105
Thank your for your info...
As I'm using Windows I tested your first method with a frequency that I know it hangs about every 3 hours.
I created a .bat file for restarting miner every hour but it happens the same, after about 3 hours it hangs.
I'm using 1 second to restart, will try to use longer time but I think the problem is in the moonlander, it need to be powered off and on again to work.
I have no idea how to do the 2nd method in Windows.

[Bill48105]

@Bill48105
Thank your for your info...
As I'm using Windows I tested your first method with a frequency that I know it hangs about every 3 hours.
I created a .bat file for restarting miner every hour but it happens the same, after about 3 hours it hangs.
I'm using 1 second to restart, will try to use longer time but I think the problem is in the moonlander, it need to be powered off and on again to work.
I have no idea how to do the 2nd method in Windows.

Hi. Sorry to say but the instructions are for nix type installations, not Windows. I did it on raspberry pi myself. I suppose they could possibly be tweaked to work on Windows with some effort (for example the scripting was done for bash vs cmd or even powershell), but if your issue isn't resolved restarting bfgminer then the tricks I did won't likely help you anyway. If the computer is dedicated to mining you might be able to work in a restart of the computer but that could be ugly.  Hopefully the new compiled binaries once jstefanop releases are available soon & will help with your issues & not need to bother with these sort of work-arounds.

Btw for what it's worth I had all kinds of issues on 1 of my Win10 computers where I had to power cycle the hub and/or unplug the moonlanders often. Funny thing was exact same setup worked fine on another Win10 computer but I'm not sure what was different other than the one that had issues was a few years newer. In any case I got sick of fighting with it so I ordered a pi kit for like $60 off amazon and it's make mining much less of a hassle. (Besides the locking of the miners I had an odd issue where keyboard keystrokes were delayed or lost until bfgminer.exe was restarted which was mega annoying.)  The bad news was that the moonlanders still locked (went to 0 mhs) but unlike Windows, a power cycle of the powered hub or removing/replacing the moonlanders was no longer needed thus the above "fixes" being born out of necessity.

[COINKING7]

Thinking about buying 1 to solo mine for fun.

Anyone suggest the best coin/pool for this? I know my chances are slim.

[sunk818]

can we have bfgminer 5.5 binaries for moonlander 2 (mac, linux, windows)? I see apollo has 5.5 on there so would like to use features on there for moonlander2

[dayday15]

Anyone in the US, any hints on what hubs can be found for under $100 to work with a few of these? 

I have tried most of the powered usb hubs on amazon this one is the only one that has worked well for me.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NBTS71S/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B07NBTS71S&linkCode=as2&tag=dodailey-20&linkId=4be2ed5ae20f321010c5693eed1f5fe3

I currently have 5 Moonlanders running on one of these hubs. Pulling close to 20Mh/s total without tinkering with the over clocking techniques.

Happy Mining!

[sunk818]

Anyone in the US, any hints on what hubs can be found for under $100 to work with a few of these? 

I have tried most of the powered usb hubs on amazon this one is the only one that has worked well for me.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NBTS71S/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B07NBTS71S&linkCode=as2&tag=dodailey-20&linkId=4be2ed5ae20f321010c5693eed1f5fe3

I currently have 5 Moonlanders running on one of these hubs. Pulling close to 20Mh/s total without tinkering with the over clocking techniques.

Happy Mining!

I have a similar one labelled as a different company. I have about 6-7 ML2 running at base settings. And that seems to be working. I've been through 2 of these. Running 10 of them, will melt the hub eventually. So, running 75% or less (6-7 ML2). If you are clocking up and taking up more watts, you may want to limit to 5 out of 10 ports.

[devincrypt]

Replacing my ML2s (five of them) with another Apollo. Anyone want to buy them (US only please) - thinking of about $35 each. They are all currently online and working well.

[NCarter84]

Replacing my ML2s (five of them) with another Apollo. Anyone want to buy them (US only please) - thinking of about $35 each. They are all currently online and working well.

Tried to send you a PM... Wont allow it.

[whiteogre]

Got cash for someone willing to help out setting up 4 moonlander 2's and 12 gridseed on raspberry pi with eye boot 49 port hub.
I can get one moonlander in bfg 5.4.2 and 12 gridseed orbs in 5.5.0. But I want all devices in 5.5.0 if possible. When I start the
moonlanders in 5.4.2 all 4 run/hash, Then 3 shut down. Just stop hashing. Been reading for 4 days till 12pm. lol
Hair thinning.

Thanks in advance.

https://github.com/jstefanop/bfgminer/tree/futurebit2_driver appears to have bfgminer 5.5.0 with moonlander 2 support based on NEWS file content. It just hasn't been released so there aren't any pre-compiled binaries available.