ASIC miner PV-powered operation

[100knot2dae]

Hi all.

I have photovoltaics at home and think about getting an ASIC miner mainly to mine the power excess away, rather than feeding it into the grid (due to the poor rates).

Suppose, I get a cheap S9/T9 for that purpose, would the hardware be able to deal with that or rather die prematurely due to the ramp up/downs? Not talking about hard power on/offs via e.g. wifi socket, but rather adaptively controlling the hashrate (frequency/voltage) via API (is that possible?) so that I can throttle or max up as appropriate during the day.

If somebody has experience/knowledge in that field please let me know.

EDIT: Found out about cgminer/bmminer API meanwhile in a seperate thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5241201.0. So the question is whether the bmminer driver in the S9 (latest) firmware supports the ascset command to be able to control freq and voltage via API.

[mikeywith]

I can't answer in regards to the latest bitmain firmware, but my guess would be no, I highly doubt that you will have access to the voltage and frequency by any means with the latest sets of bitmain firmware.

But to answer this part

but rather adaptively controlling the hashrate (frequency/voltage) via API (is that possible?) so that I can throttle or max up as appropriate during the day.

The answer would be yes if you use Vnish and AwesomeMiner you can basically set different voltage and/or frequency throughout the day/night, and you can even automate that, for example, 10v and 500mhz between 1 am and 5 am and all that kind of schedule, and since you have full access to those parameters with custom firmware, you could probably use something like Arduino or a R-PI to acquire data from your PV system and adjust the miner's setting accordingly.

Old versions of stock firmware allow you to play with the voltage and frequency ( I am sure about the latter but not the former) so I guess you could use the Bmminer API miner on that, BraiinOS, not the + version is also free and open-source so you can eventually find a way to achieve what you want, but if you want the easy way, you will need to pay 3% of your hashrate to AwoesomeMiner and get the license included version of the firmware, you end up with monitoring software that allows you to achieve what you need at little efforts, but of course, you will learn nothing about the API and you pay a fee.

[100knot2dae]

Thanks for your reply.

I have real-time production/consumption data available via API that I would use as input for controlling the miner's performance. The preferred way would be to directly interact with the miner's API, or even calling a script via SSH that will apply the most appropriate (pre-defined) performance profile. But for this script approach I again don't know if this profile/config change would be applied on the fly or rather only when the bmmminer process gets restarted. If the latter only, it's of no use here. And again, I read that at least antminers have SSH support disabled in recent/latest firmwares. What a bummer...

So the biggest question still is, whether such freq/voltage control API commands are available and which makes/models/firmwares (original or custom) do support that. For me this is the most crucial part to clarify before setting this up.

Unfortunately, there's almost no information publicly available and apparently up-to-date bmminer source are not open sourced either. At least I didn't find any. So, any links/infos/personal experiences are highly appreciated!

[mikeywith]

I have real-time production/consumption data available via API that I would use as input for controlling the miner's performance. The preferred way would be to directly interact with the miner's API, or even calling a script via SSH that will apply the most appropriate (pre-defined) performance profile. But for this script approach I again don't know if this profile/config change would be applied on the fly or rather only when the bmmminer process gets restarted.

The program has to restart that's for sure, there is probably no way to change those parameters without restarting, so if you plan on changing those constantly your miner will be offline most of the time, but if say this happens once an hour or so - the total downtime won't be huge, and then mining to a PPS pool would be the best approach.

So the biggest question still is, whether such freq/voltage control API commands are available and which makes/models/firmwares (original or custom) do support that. For me this is the most crucial part to clarify before setting this up.

Yes, most of the old stock firmware versions have SSH enabled by default, some of the recent ones can be unclocked, and the latest 1-2 versions are locked and I am not aware of an easy way to unlock them, but you really can work just fine with one of the old firmware versions.

You can find the list here > https://service.bitmain.com/support/download?product=Antminer%20S9.

Basically, anything prior to any of the 2019 releases is going to have SSH enabled, if so happen that you find it locked you can use this free tool to unlock it, but by all means, you should avoid the 2020 versions.

You could also use one of  thierry4wd free mods, he basically takes the original firmware and modifies the signature/lock aspect, so you have the same firmware with no locks on it, he also knows a lot about the firmware, so moving forward I believe he will be the best person to ask for support.

[100knot2dae]

Thanks again. Unless somebody has made (and is willing to share) experiences in that field, I will probably have to jump into the cold water and try how far I can get here.

[mikeywith]

Thanks again. Unless somebody has made (and is willing to share) experiences in that field, I will probably have to jump into the cold water and try how far I can get here.

I don't know someone who did "exactly" what you aim to do, but the path to it is similar, for example, I used AwsomeMiner to underclock my miners and increase the fan speed in the afternoon in the summer, it was an easy set-and-forget approach, some people have an auto turn on/off based on some other inputs, all that AwesomeMiner and the other paid software do is send an SSH command to perform all that, so the method to what you need is exactly the same except that you will be using different parameters for your script, I use time and miner temp, you will use the data output from your PV system, so this isn't going to be difficult IMO.

[100knot2dae]

If this is getting real, I will go for Braiins since it gives me the best options for what I want to achieve. On-the-fly changes are not possible without restarts there either, but dynamic tuning based on pv input data (and miner process restart) is the most flexible and efficient approach I could find - and Braiins will allow me to do that just fine.

Pretty much everything is possible on custom, so it was anyway inevitable to take that route, if you want (near to) full control of your miner.

[mikeywith]

BraiinOS isn't a bad choice at all, it has a plus to it which is the no-fee version, however, depending on the frequency of your restarts you might need to use the fastest firmware to reboot which might or might not be BO, how often do you think you will need to restart the miner based on the current PV readings you have? I know it will depend on a lot of factors but you should have a rough estimate, I am afraid too much rebooting might damage some stuff.

[100knot2dae]

By now I am also quite certain that the ASICs won't tolerate such a roller coaster ride in the long run, even on 30 minute API polling intervals. Which brings us back to the initial concern if the hardware would bail out prematurely.   

Dynamic scaling is just not there (yet) as I take it.