LIGHTNINGASIC LA100M,100MHS SCRYPT Miner, USD1999; LA1THS, USD1750.shipped out!

[bobby35ny]

First impressions of the 2x LA3M i received 24 hours ago:

+ve

Very robust packaging - these are very unlikely to be damaged in transit.

Pretty easy to wire up if you have a basic understanding of wiring or are smart enough to follow the instructions on the forum.

Speed is as advertised - mine are both around 3.1 MH/s when they are running well

-ve

BUT - they dont really run well. They constantly restart themselves, around every 15 to 20 minutes. Each time they reset they take a while to spin up again, reducing the average hash rate considerably (around 20-25% after adjusting for stales)

Very very unstable - perhaps it is the miners, perhaps it is the controller software. But the long and short of it is, these need babysitting so you had better plan on having them somewhere where you can power cycle them regularly - or invest in an internet connected power supply - they are a long long way away from 'set-and-forget'.

Both of my units stopped hashing during the night while i was asleep - mined for 4 hours, idle for 4 hours.
I power cycled them and got them running again once i woke up - running for about an hour at 2.6MH/s each before i left for work.

They mined for 3 hours and now they are hung up again - the soft reboot won't work to get them restarted and unfortunately I am not there to do it nor do I have a 'helper hand' at home. So looks like another 6 or 7 hours of wasted mining time...

If anyone is considering buying these and calculating a 5 month ROI - please be aware that they are not mining at advertised speeds for most of the time. They reboot themselves minimum 3 times per hour, reducing the hourly hash rate by approximately 20-25% while they get back up to speed each time. They will also hang up without any apparent reason and stop mining altogether and require a full power cycle (switch all off, then switch on controller first, wait 1 minute, turn on PSUs, then turn on USB hub).

You should also be aware that Jack's 'Secret photo' showing 5MH/s rate is not what you are buying at all. Until it is proven otherwise, that screenshot is bullshit. Don't bank on it.

Hopefully there will be a controller firmware update soon to improve this - i am not very impressed with the product or the 'service' Jack has been providing.

Right now i am seriously considering buying two of the Gridseed wiibox controllers to replace these buggy Lightning ASIC controllers and see if that makes a difference

As always YMMV

I would probably give the same review!!
We need that firmware NOW!!
What color are your cells? my 20 are RED.
I had 3 DOA.
-Bobby

[wasubii]

I will be receiving a lightning asics LA3M as well as 10 gridseed units and original wiibox controller from another supplier. I will post results from both controllers for comparison.

Very interested to see your results!! please do keep us updated!

The stability problem stems from the fact that the controllers have only 32MB of RAM, which isn't sufficient to run 10 miners including cgminer on, it uses up all the memory and the whole system becomes sluggish and unstable. Just try connecting 5 miners and see for yourself.

I will try 5 miners on each controller once i get home. I hope it is a simple as just spending a few bucks on extra controllers.

I would probably give the same review!!
We need that firmware NOW!!
What color are your cells? my 20 are RED.
I had 3 DOA.
-Bobby

Sorry you are having the same issues as me. Mine are all gold coloured.

One wasn't recognised when it was plugged in but i quickly narrowed the fault down to the USB cable - switched it out and the miner was found straight away

[richmke]

Just try connecting 5 miners and see for yourself.

What hash rates do you get with 5 miners? I would buy another controller if it made a material difference.

Ok, going to run 5 miners overnight. Let's see if they can average more than 1.7MHs.

[sandor111]

Just try connecting 5 miners and see for yourself.

What hash rates do you get with 5 miners? I would buy another controller if it made a material difference.

Ok, going to run 5 miners overnight. Let's see if they can average more than 1.7MHs.

Half of what I would get compared to 10 miners, running on Wiibox controller which has 64MB to play with.

[worldlybedouin]

Just try connecting 5 miners and see for yourself.

What hash rates do you get with 5 miners? I would buy another controller if it made a material difference.

Ok, going to run 5 miners overnight. Let's see if they can average more than 1.7MHs.

@richmke -- Looking forward to how this works out for you.  I'm curious to see if this helps.

[worldlybedouin]

I will be receiving a lightning asics LA3M as well as 10 gridseed units and original wiibox controller from another supplier. I will post results from both controllers for comparison.

I'm very interested to see how this works out!

One other thing, would it be possible to swap controllers?  I'm not sure if the actual round miners themselves have firmware specific to the controller firmware (i.e. Lightening ASIC miners only work with LightingASIC controllers).

[pauldulong]

Here are my ASIC findings:

• LA3M miner ordered and paid with BTC on 18 of February. Quick replies from Jack on sales related questions, but poor English. Had no experience with support related questions
• Miner shipped on 24 of February and delivered on 27 February, have to pay 125USD import tax on the package
• Sturdy and solid packaging, unlikely to get damaged in shipping. Hardware feels of decent quality.
• Some power cables are US some are EU, therefore you need some adapters. In total you need 4 sockets and an ethernet cable.
• Easy assembly, takes an hour to get up and running
• You can access the controller via it’s ip-address on your network. I used Angry IP scanner to find it (Mac).
• Software offers you insight in actual hashing speed and setting a pool for both BTC and Scrypt. Make sure you set a BTC pool even if you don’t use it otherwise the software will not start.
• Software is buggy but gets the job done. Offers basic over clock features for scrypt mining.
• With basic over clocking 10 units (which is 1 miner) gives you around 3.5MH/s
• Unit takes around 5 to 10 minutes to boot up before it starts mining
• Heat and noise is low compared to GPU mining

Concerns

• No failover pool can be added, therefore you can only add one pool add a time. This makes it impossible to lease your rig. You have no settings you can tweak except the pool and mining speed.
• The hardware offers the option to mine both BTC and Scrypt at the same time. However, when mining both the speed of scrypt decreases by 50% and becomes unstable. Therefore you only use this product to mine Scrypt.
• The 10 units give different speeds all the time, in general each unit creates 300-400kh (without BTC enabled). Some give you double digit speeds, some triple digit speeds. They do not give you the same speed all the time.
• When mining on coin-switching pools such as Middlecoin or Wafflepool the hash rate drops to 2Mh/s. When mining a single coin, for instance LTC, it goes back up to 4Mh/s

Verdict
In general the product is good as advertised, it get the job done, however at this point I will not invest more. The product is too immature, and the firmware/software is too buggy and lacks features. A lot of problems can be solved by better software but since this is not available of accessible for us we have to wait for this. Only the supplier can update these devices. According to screenshots this new software is already created but not available for us buyers. At this point in time we don’t have any timeframe when the new software will be available, but this would definitely improve the products value.[/list]

[SheepOnDrugs]

Did anyone manage to buy from LightningASIC directly? Seems to be way cheaper.

[richmke]

Ok, going to run 5 miners overnight. Let's see if they can average more than 1.7MHs.

Running all 10 miners, I averaged 3.63 MHs @900.
After running for almost 7 hours @900, the hash rate on 5 miners is 1.46 MHs. The miners rebooted 3 times.

I can't say there is a noticeable improvement.

When mining on coin-switching pools such as Middlecoin or Wafflepool the hash rate drops to 2Mh/s. When mining a single coin, for instance LTC, it goes back up to 4Mh/s

Hmmm... This was on wafflepool. I will have to try a LTC only pool.

Did anyone manage to buy from LightningASIC directly? Seems to be way cheaper.

I did. Paid on Feb 12, and received Feb 20.

[worldlybedouin]

Here are my ASIC findings:

• LA3M miner ordered and paid with BTC on 18 of February. Quick replies from Jack on sales related questions, but poor English. Had no experience with support related questions
• Miner shipped on 24 of February and delivered on 27 February, have to pay 125USD import tax on the package
• Sturdy and solid packaging, unlikely to get damaged in shipping. Hardware feels of decent quality.
• Some power cables are US some are EU, therefore you need some adapters. In total you need 4 sockets and an ethernet cable.
• Easy assembly, takes an hour to get up and running
• You can access the controller via it’s ip-address on your network. I used Angry IP scanner to find it (Mac).
• Software offers you insight in actual hashing speed and setting a pool for both BTC and Scrypt. Make sure you set a BTC pool even if you don’t use it otherwise the software will not start.
• Software is buggy but gets the job done. Offers basic over clock features for scrypt mining.
• With basic over clocking 10 units (which is 1 miner) gives you around 3.5MH/s
• Unit takes around 5 to 10 minutes to boot up before it starts mining
• Heat and noise is low compared to GPU mining

Concerns

• No failover pool can be added, therefore you can only add one pool add a time. This makes it impossible to lease your rig. You have no settings you can tweak except the pool and mining speed.
• The hardware offers the option to mine both BTC and Scrypt at the same time. However, when mining both the speed of scrypt decreases by 50% and becomes unstable. Therefore you only use this product to mine Scrypt.
• The 10 units give different speeds all the time, in general each unit creates 300-400kh (without BTC enabled). Some give you double digit speeds, some triple digit speeds. They do not give you the same speed all the time.
• When mining on coin-switching pools such as Middlecoin or Wafflepool the hash rate drops to 2Mh/s. When mining a single coin, for instance LTC, it goes back up to 4Mh/s

Verdict
In general the product is good as advertised, it get the job done, however at this point I will not invest more. The product is too immature, and the firmware/software is too buggy and lacks features. A lot of problems can be solved by better software but since this is not available of accessible for us we have to wait for this. Only the supplier can update these devices. According to screenshots this new software is already created but not available for us buyers. At this point in time we don’t have any timeframe when the new software will be available, but this would definitely improve the products value.[/list]

As an owner of the 3MH/10-miner set I would agree with your assessment 100%.  I will not be buying anymore of these devices until the new firmware is released and it has been clearly and factually demonstrated as being stable and usable.  At the prices these are currently selling for we should not be getting "beta" hardware/software.  To make matters worse the firmware is all closed-source, so all the really smart guys on this forum can't even help out to fix these problems.  This is perhaps the most disappointing because the community is READY and BEGGING to help out and improve the software, but can't because of closed-source.  This is a real shame in my opinion...

[Andareed]

Here are my ASIC findings:

• LA3M miner ordered and paid with BTC on 18 of February. Quick replies from Jack on sales related questions, but poor English. Had no experience with support related questions
• Miner shipped on 24 of February and delivered on 27 February, have to pay 125USD import tax on the package
• Sturdy and solid packaging, unlikely to get damaged in shipping. Hardware feels of decent quality.
• Some power cables are US some are EU, therefore you need some adapters. In total you need 4 sockets and an ethernet cable.
• Easy assembly, takes an hour to get up and running
• You can access the controller via it’s ip-address on your network. I used Angry IP scanner to find it (Mac).
• Software offers you insight in actual hashing speed and setting a pool for both BTC and Scrypt. Make sure you set a BTC pool even if you don’t use it otherwise the software will not start.
• Software is buggy but gets the job done. Offers basic over clock features for scrypt mining.
• With basic over clocking 10 units (which is 1 miner) gives you around 3.5MH/s
• Unit takes around 5 to 10 minutes to boot up before it starts mining
• Heat and noise is low compared to GPU mining

Concerns

• No failover pool can be added, therefore you can only add one pool add a time. This makes it impossible to lease your rig. You have no settings you can tweak except the pool and mining speed.
• The hardware offers the option to mine both BTC and Scrypt at the same time. However, when mining both the speed of scrypt decreases by 50% and becomes unstable. Therefore you only use this product to mine Scrypt.
• The 10 units give different speeds all the time, in general each unit creates 300-400kh (without BTC enabled). Some give you double digit speeds, some triple digit speeds. They do not give you the same speed all the time.
• When mining on coin-switching pools such as Middlecoin or Wafflepool the hash rate drops to 2Mh/s. When mining a single coin, for instance LTC, it goes back up to 4Mh/s

Verdict
In general the product is good as advertised, it get the job done, however at this point I will not invest more. The product is too immature, and the firmware/software is too buggy and lacks features. A lot of problems can be solved by better software but since this is not available of accessible for us we have to wait for this. Only the supplier can update these devices. According to screenshots this new software is already created but not available for us buyers. At this point in time we don’t have any timeframe when the new software will be available, but this would definitely improve the products value.[/list]

As an owner of the 3MH/10-miner set I would agree with your assessment 100%.  I will not be buying anymore of these devices until the new firmware is released and it has been clearly and factually demonstrated as being stable and usable.  At the prices these are currently selling for we should not be getting "beta" hardware/software.  To make matters worse the firmware is all closed-source, so all the really smart guys on this forum can't even help out to fix these problems.  This is perhaps the most disappointing because the community is READY and BEGGING to help out and improve the software, but can't because of closed-source.  This is a real shame in my opinion...

Most of it is open-source; you can check out what gridseed posted at http://github.com/gridseed. I'm pretty sure LightningASIC is just running cpuminer and has built a simple web frontend around it.

[pauldulong]

....

Did anyone manage to buy from LightningASIC directly? Seems to be way cheaper.

I did. Paid on Feb 12, and received Feb 20.

How much was it?

[pauldulong]

....

As an owner of the 3MH/10-miner set I would agree with your assessment 100%.  I will not be buying anymore of these devices until the new firmware is released and it has been clearly and factually demonstrated as being stable and usable.  At the prices these are currently selling for we should not be getting "beta" hardware/software.  To make matters worse the firmware is all closed-source, so all the really smart guys on this forum can't even help out to fix these problems.  This is perhaps the most disappointing because the community is READY and BEGGING to help out and improve the software, but can't because of closed-source.  This is a real shame in my opinion...

Most of it is open-source; you can check out what gridseed posted at http://github.com/gridseed. I'm pretty sure LightningASIC is just running cpuminer and has built a simple web frontend around it.

But the thing is we can't access the controller or modify anything. Only they know how to access it, I read some things about SSH or FTP. But I found nothing on anybody actually succeeding to modify the LA3M unit. I think the source code is only suitable if you use the USB miners. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I would love to improve this stuff. The hardware seems good, but the software makes it bad.

[Nurka]

The hash rate reported in the web UI seems to be derived from submitted shares, rather than an "actual" hashrate. The actual hashrate is likely much more stable than it appears.
Shares submitted depends on luck and has built in variance as the shares requires different ammounts of processing. I guess it's closer to WU?

Also, it does appear that they are somewhat limited or sensitive for difficulty. I seem to get the best results with individual workers and a difficulty of 64 or 128. Haven't experimented to much, but 512 seems a bit to high. Since each unit individually has a rather low has rate, shares will be submitted less frequently and are more susceptible to variance. Pair this with what seems to be a setting to reboot everything if no share is submitted for 10 minutes on any individual unit and you're going to have a "bad time".

Mining at multipool.us or a single currency pool with vardiff, my units are pretty stable around 3.2-3.7 or so. They seem to reboot roughly every 40 minutes, but that's way better than the 10 minute intervals people have been reporting which is probably due to to high difficulty on the shares.

I have had a problem with it resetting/rebooting during the night and not coming back up online. But that might have been due to problems with the SHA-256 stratum (which wasn't enabled, but still).

So far I'm quite pleased but look forward to new features and better stability in updated firmware. Anyone got word on when they'll release new firmware? Was said to be ready several days ago.

[maardein]

Here are my ASIC findings:

• LA3M miner ordered and paid with BTC on 18 of February. Quick replies from Jack on sales related questions, but poor English. Had no experience with support related questions
• Miner shipped on 24 of February and delivered on 27 February, have to pay 125USD import tax on the package
• Sturdy and solid packaging, unlikely to get damaged in shipping. Hardware feels of decent quality.
• Some power cables are US some are EU, therefore you need some adapters. In total you need 4 sockets and an ethernet cable.
• Easy assembly, takes an hour to get up and running
• You can access the controller via it’s ip-address on your network. I used Angry IP scanner to find it (Mac).
• Software offers you insight in actual hashing speed and setting a pool for both BTC and Scrypt. Make sure you set a BTC pool even if you don’t use it otherwise the software will not start.
• Software is buggy but gets the job done. Offers basic over clock features for scrypt mining.
• With basic over clocking 10 units (which is 1 miner) gives you around 3.5MH/s
• Unit takes around 5 to 10 minutes to boot up before it starts mining
• Heat and noise is low compared to GPU mining

Concerns

• No failover pool can be added, therefore you can only add one pool add a time. This makes it impossible to lease your rig. You have no settings you can tweak except the pool and mining speed.
• The hardware offers the option to mine both BTC and Scrypt at the same time. However, when mining both the speed of scrypt decreases by 50% and becomes unstable. Therefore you only use this product to mine Scrypt.
• The 10 units give different speeds all the time, in general each unit creates 300-400kh (without BTC enabled). Some give you double digit speeds, some triple digit speeds. They do not give you the same speed all the time.
• When mining on coin-switching pools such as Middlecoin or Wafflepool the hash rate drops to 2Mh/s. When mining a single coin, for instance LTC, it goes back up to 4Mh/s

Verdict
In general the product is good as advertised, it get the job done, however at this point I will not invest more. The product is too immature, and the firmware/software is too buggy and lacks features. A lot of problems can be solved by better software but since this is not available of accessible for us we have to wait for this. Only the supplier can update these devices. According to screenshots this new software is already created but not available for us buyers. At this point in time we don’t have any timeframe when the new software will be available, but this would definitely improve the products value.[/list]

As an owner of the 3MH/10-miner set I would agree with your assessment 100%.  I will not be buying anymore of these devices until the new firmware is released and it has been clearly and factually demonstrated as being stable and usable.  At the prices these are currently selling for we should not be getting "beta" hardware/software.  To make matters worse the firmware is all closed-source, so all the really smart guys on this forum can't even help out to fix these problems.  This is perhaps the most disappointing because the community is READY and BEGGING to help out and improve the software, but can't because of closed-source.  This is a real shame in my opinion...

Most of it is open-source; you can check out what gridseed posted at http://github.com/gridseed. I'm pretty sure LightningASIC is just running cpuminer and has built a simple web frontend around it.

It may not be open-source, but there is a way to get root access to the miner, and thus people could start looking around to see what they could improve. Look here to see how to get root access:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=490348.0

[MZD]

When running these with just a computer are they more stable? Seems as if most of the problems are buggy controllers...

[worldlybedouin]

When running these with just a computer are they more stable? Seems as if most of the problems are buggy controllers...

I ran these off of a custom version of minerd that DrFranz & Chirale worked on for their Scripta project (Litecointalk forum)....it seemed to be much more stable..however, that version of minerd doesn't yet support turning off the BTC chip so effectively you trade off stability for a 5x increase in watts.

[scryptographer]

When running these with just a computer are they more stable? Seems as if most of the problems are buggy controllers...

I ran these off of a custom version of minerd that DrFranz & Chirale worked on for their Scripta project (Litecointalk forum)....it seemed to be much more stable..however, that version of minerd doesn't yet support turning off the BTC chip so effectively you trade off stability for a 5x increase in watts.

Same experience here, though I use the cpuminer supplied by Gridseed. My unit runs non-stop without issues.
The only exception is on pools that do not push work at least every 120 seconds. Don't know if it's an issue with the pool or cpuminer.

[MZD]

What if you want to preserve mine both algorithms? Is there still a speed drop off or stability issues?

[worldlybedouin]

What if you want to preserve mine both algorithms? Is there still a speed drop off or stability issues?

Not sure if this is because of the controller or not...but when I tried dual-mining I noticed the LTC hashrate dropped down by 25-33% no matter what frequency I tried to use.  The BTC hash rate would bounce between 60-80Ghs...

Also, I had more "restarts" when mining both...not sure if this happens when using a windows computer to control the mining instead of the small TP-Link controller device.