Official FutureBit Apollo II/BTC Software/Image and Support thread

[Polynom42]

Just use ckpool, that's what I'm doing

The point of mining solo directly on our node is it might be a little bit faster.
Any fraction of a seconds counts to get the edge.
ckpool is not the best with one block per 4 months and all the intermediate connections.
FutureBit told me solo mining was not ready for release yet.
Hopefully soon.

Solo mining to your own node may have the opposite effect. ckpool's VPS is in very well-connected paid datacentre, and most likely connected to maximum amount of 125 peers. ckpool can push the block to 125 connected nodes, and to the entire world, in a matter of few seconds. What is your home upload? Most likely in tens of Mbits or slower, no match for 1Gbit upload from datacentres. If your block is not propagated well, then 20ms delay you save by not connecting to ckpool means nothing if you propagate your block in 30000ms (30s) and by then someone faster pushes hit block and yours become an orphan.

Currently my node is connected with 18 other nodes and upload for a few kb nonces cmon u dont need 1Gbit. I just bought this full node package for mining the own node. Sure ck.pool is not bad and the only option right now not supporting the big boys like ant/via etc.

[crypto_curious]

Just use ckpool, that's what I'm doing

The point of mining solo directly on our node is it might be a little bit faster.
Any fraction of a seconds counts to get the edge.
ckpool is not the best with one block per 4 months and all the intermediate connections.
FutureBit told me solo mining was not ready for release yet.
Hopefully soon.

Solo mining to your own node may have the opposite effect. ckpool's VPS is in very well-connected paid datacentre, and most likely connected to maximum amount of 125 peers. ckpool can push the block to 125 connected nodes, and to the entire world, in a matter of few seconds. What is your home upload? Most likely in tens of Mbits or slower, no match for 1Gbit upload from datacentres. If your block is not propagated well, then 20ms delay you save by not connecting to ckpool means nothing if you propagate your block in 30000ms (30s) and by then someone faster pushes hit block and yours become an orphan.

Currently my node is connected with 18 other nodes and upload for a few kb nonces cmon u dont need 1Gbit. I just bought this full node package for mining the own node. Sure ck.pool is not bad and the only option right now not supporting the big boys like ant/via etc.

18 connections? That's very low. I connect ONLY via Tor, no IPv4/v6 connections as all, and have 32 peers. I was reading a bit today about block propagation in Bitcoin network and apparently it's still an important factor, especially for big miners who hit blocks often. You must be extremely lucky to hit the block within your lifetime if you own one, or even 10, Apollos. Then, you must be extremely unlucky to have that block orphaned by not propagating fast enough, but it is possible.

[jstefanop]

Just use ckpool, that's what I'm doing

The point of mining solo directly on our node is it might be a little bit faster.
Any fraction of a seconds counts to get the edge.
ckpool is not the best with one block per 4 months and all the intermediate connections.
FutureBit told me solo mining was not ready for release yet.
Hopefully soon.

Solo mining to your own node may have the opposite effect. ckpool's VPS is in very well-connected paid datacentre, and most likely connected to maximum amount of 125 peers. ckpool can push the block to 125 connected nodes, and to the entire world, in a matter of few seconds. What is your home upload? Most likely in tens of Mbits or slower, no match for 1Gbit upload from datacentres. If your block is not propagated well, then 20ms delay you save by not connecting to ckpool means nothing if you propagate your block in 30000ms (30s) and by then someone faster pushes hit block and yours become an orphan.

Currently my node is connected with 18 other nodes and upload for a few kb nonces cmon u dont need 1Gbit. I just bought this full node package for mining the own node. Sure ck.pool is not bad and the only option right now not supporting the big boys like ant/via etc.

18 connections? That's very low. I connect ONLY via Tor, no IPv4/v6 connections as all, and have 32 peers. I was reading a bit today about block propagation in Bitcoin network and apparently it's still an important factor, especially for big miners who hit blocks often. You must be extremely lucky to hit the block within your lifetime if you own one, or even 10, Apollos. Then, you must be extremely unlucky to have that block orphaned by not propagating fast enough, but it is possible.

Yes this is one of the reasons we have not released it yet, we are building infrastructure on the backend that will allow each individual node to connect to the back bone of the main pools. Number of connections is not as important for new block propagation as how close your node is to the nodes of main pools.

Its in the interest of small miners to send the block to the main pools first, because as soon as the large pools node sees the Block they will stop mining on the previous block header and move work immediately to the next. If a small miner is on the fringes of the node network, by the time the block propagates to the pool nodes they could have very well found another block and will orphan yours.

This would be a horrible outcome, your device actually finds a 6BTC valid block but you lose out because of slow propagation. We are currently spinning up super nodes that are on fast connections and directly connected with major pools, in a future update all futurebit nodes will have our infrastructure nodes as a seed nodes, so once we enable solo mining direct to node if you do find a block the first "hop" will be to our backbone super nodes, so at worst your block will be two hops away from all the major pools.

This should significantly increase odds of small solo miners not orphaning blocks, but want to make it perfectly clear its still worse than solo mining directly to ckpool for example (and the degree of how much worse depends on your upload speed).

If your on dialup or DSL you should not be solo mining on your own node, and would not recommend anything less than a 30-40 mpbs upload speed and direct ethernet only (worst case 500ms delay with ~1.5MB blocks). Not bad but obviously not as good as a 30-50ms upload speed of a few kb pool share to ckpool. So for example to be on par with solo mining to ckpool you would need beat ~50ms share propagation to ckpool + ckpools 50ms block propagation (assuming his setup is near perfect which I would assume it to be), so 100ms for ~1.5MB you would need a 120-150 mbps upload speed.

I also dont want to discourage people and blow the issue out of proportion either, bitcoin has 10 minute blocks for a reason its extremely unlikely anyone will find two blocks within a few seconds of each other...for each second you delay uploading a block there is 1/600 chance you'll orphan the block.

This is also a good exercise in remembering why we won the block size war...if we did not no one on low end hardware or slow internet connections would ever have a good chance at solo mining...

[kano]

Alas you are still missing a few points about this

1) Block distribution is now much faster, size isn't exactly what is sent, so 'winning' the block size war has indeed been a VERY negative thing for bitcoin telling people to use other coins coz bitcoin is often high fees, and often too slow confirming transactions - all because blocks are too small - as you've said around 1.5Mbytes which I guess is somewhere near what they average.

2) That pool you like to mention is only a single node somewhere in the USA, with no worldwide block distribution at all.

3) A 3TH Apollo at the moment is 1/652058 per day chance, so hoping they wont hit the 1/600 (or 1/300 or 1/200 or worse) but that they will hit the 1 in 652058 seems rather a fun idea
Be aware that orphans still do happen on the big pools, just that marketing is what runs bitcoin mining, not facts.
And this is true even though none of the large pools confirm the transactions in the blocks they start building on until after they switch.

[heslo]

Just use ckpool, that's what I'm doing

The point of mining solo directly on our node is it might be a little bit faster.
Any fraction of a seconds counts to get the edge.
ckpool is not the best with one block per 4 months and all the intermediate connections.
FutureBit told me solo mining was not ready for release yet.
Hopefully soon.

Solo mining to your own node may have the opposite effect. ckpool's VPS is in very well-connected paid datacentre, and most likely connected to maximum amount of 125 peers. ckpool can push the block to 125 connected nodes, and to the entire world, in a matter of few seconds. What is your home upload? Most likely in tens of Mbits or slower, no match for 1Gbit upload from datacentres. If your block is not propagated well, then 20ms delay you save by not connecting to ckpool means nothing if you propagate your block in 30000ms (30s) and by then someone faster pushes hit block and yours become an orphan.

Currently my node is connected with 18 other nodes and upload for a few kb nonces cmon u dont need 1Gbit. I just bought this full node package for mining the own node. Sure ck.pool is not bad and the only option right now not supporting the big boys like ant/via etc.

18 connections? That's very low. I connect ONLY via Tor, no IPv4/v6 connections as all, and have 32 peers. I was reading a bit today about block propagation in Bitcoin network and apparently it's still an important factor, especially for big miners who hit blocks often. You must be extremely lucky to hit the block within your lifetime if you own one, or even 10, Apollos. Then, you must be extremely unlucky to have that block orphaned by not propagating fast enough, but it is possible.

Yes this is one of the reasons we have not released it yet, we are building infrastructure on the backend that will allow each individual node to connect to the back bone of the main pools. Number of connections is not as important for new block propagation as how close your node is to the nodes of main pools.

Its in the interest of small miners to send the block to the main pools first, because as soon as the large pools node sees the Block they will stop mining on the previous block header and move work immediately to the next. If a small miner is on the fringes of the node network, by the time the block propagates to the pool nodes they could have very well found another block and will orphan yours.

This would be a horrible outcome, your device actually finds a 6BTC valid block but you lose out because of slow propagation. We are currently spinning up super nodes that are on fast connections and directly connected with major pools, in a future update all futurebit nodes will have our infrastructure nodes as a seed nodes, so once we enable solo mining direct to node if you do find a block the first "hop" will be to our backbone super nodes, so at worst your block will be two hops away from all the major pools.

This should significantly increase odds of small solo miners not orphaning blocks, but want to make it perfectly clear its still worse than solo mining directly to ckpool for example (and the degree of how much worse depends on your upload speed).

If your on dialup or DSL you should not be solo mining on your own node, and would not recommend anything less than a 30-40 mpbs upload speed and direct ethernet only (worst case 500ms delay with ~1.5MB blocks). Not bad but obviously not as good as a 30-50ms upload speed of a few kb pool share to ckpool. So for example to be on par with solo mining to ckpool you would need beat ~50ms share propagation to ckpool + ckpools 50ms block propagation (assuming his setup is near perfect which I would assume it to be), so 100ms for ~1.5MB you would need a 120-150 mbps upload speed.

I also dont want to discourage people and blow the issue out of proportion either, bitcoin has 10 minute blocks for a reason its extremely unlikely anyone will find two blocks within a few seconds of each other...for each second you delay uploading a block there is 1/600 chance you'll orphan the block.

This is also a good exercise in remembering why we won the block size war...if we did not no one on low end hardware or slow internet connections would ever have a good chance at solo mining...

This sounds great! Any idea on an ETA for this new software? Any plans to open it up to testing?

[ruszip1]

Does anyone know if the SBC for this is the Orange Pi 4 and the newer one is the Orange Pi 4 LTS? I bought one used but there seems to have been a mishap before my buying it. The USB ports are dead. The SBC mine has the the Orange Pi 4, but I can't locate a replacement. But the Orange Pi 4 LTS can be bought. I also seen there was a picture to find out which SBC it has, and from the placement of that dastardly microphone it looks like it's the Pi 4 LTS variant, though the microphone for mine isn't in the same place as the LTS variant. In which case I should be able to just upgrade to that one, provided the wires and plug going from the GPIO to the hash board is the same and the wires connect to the same pins. Anyone willing to help di into this with/for me? Just need to compare note on the wire harness to make sure they are the same so I can just upgrade it.

[unicornmangle]

Does anyone know if the SBC for this is the Orange Pi 4 and the newer one is the Orange Pi 4 LTS?

I believe batch 1-3 had orangepi-4 (not a version sold outside of futurebit to my knowledge) im not sure whats different on the newest mcu besides it only had 24 pins. The wires should be the same what makes the most difference is header pin count so long as it has 40 pins you should be good, the pi5 comes with 26 pins im not sure if that works or not. I have put armbian-bulleyes cli on mine an it has made the node a lot better in terms of resources used. I may try alpine next for fun after i built a full size node out of a normal x86.

make sure after flash and before you hook it to the internet you change root password and futurebit user password because ssh is wide open on the futurebit image.

[unicornmangle]

Is it ok to daisy chain the apollos power connectors on the back of apollos? example 1 apollo gets 1 pci-e plugged into power and the other power port on that apollo feeds 1 power port on another apollo?

Or can i use usb C with like a 100w wall adapter to power both units? I have these really underclocked and only using 30w per board.

[MrMik]

Is it ok to daisy chain the apollos power connectors on the back of apollos? example 1 apollo gets 1 pci-e plugged into power and the other power port on that apollo feeds 1 power port on another apollo?

Or can i use usb C with like a 100w wall adapter to power both units? I have these really underclocked and only using 30w per board.

The USB C probably has no way of getting the current where it needs to go without frying something. Or rather, It cannot power the hashboards at all.

But if you really have reduced the power per Apollo to 30W (how do you do that?), then maybe the daisy-chaining could work.

At 280W ( = 100% power) you would have about 280W / 12V / 2 connectors = 11.66A flowing through each connector on one Apollo.

At 2 x 30W = 60W  you would have 60W/12V = 5A going into the one connector on the first Apollo, and 30W/12V = 2.5A for the rest of the way to the second Apollo.

That seems feasible to me.

Why not run one Apollo at 120W instead?

[unicornmangle]

Why not run one Apollo at 120W instead?

Trying to cut power and already have the equipment and just trying to see if. having 88 chips hashing slow is better than 44 hashing at the same speed. i dont really know at this point im just trying things while i can.

[SlackerBitcoin]

Been mining and running full node relatively problem free since last Oct using Batch4 Apollo.

Other day it went off line and when I rebooted it, fan runs high but lights never come on.

Connecting a monitor it never boots up or gets a prompt. No changes were being done at the time and never ran an update on it.

What should my next steps be?

Thanks!

[siklon]

My Apollo Node does not want to cooperate since I flashed a new 64GB SD card.
Everything else works fine, much better than with that old 16GB card I found lying around.
I'm not certain yet if the faster specs of the new SD card are making the difference, it could be due to something else as well.

However, the node is giving the following error message: There is a problem fetching system stats (Invalid params, response status code: 401)

The node seems to be downloading data from the internet (visible in System Monitor), but goes back to show the above error message after I click Start in the node dashboard. Please wait while node is starting up, followed by same error message a few minutes later. But download showing in System Monitor.

When I click Stop, then it says Node is shutting down , and the download of data in System monitor stops.

And in the Bitcoin>Blocks folder the number of e.g. blk00165.dat keeps increasing while the node is starting up.

I have rebooted the Apollo a few times and the issue persists.

I'm running into the same issue after flashing. Did you ever solve this?

[Rider58]

So my unit arrived the other day and looks great and seems to be running well. The full node has fully synced up and i don't think i ran into any issues while i was mining on Eco.

The only issue i have is on the miner dashboard. For some reason I am getting a very high error rate - it's currently reporting 70%-80%+ hardware errors but i did not get many "rejections".

I thought running the node was taxing the CPU too much so i waited until that synced to reboot the unit and see if it would reset the errors but no luck on that.

It's odd - the unit seems to be running fine, any idea why it's reporting such high levels of hardware errors?

A very small number of units will have this issue. Probably means you have a bad ASIC with a few bad cores that produce a really high number of errors. As long as your hashrate matches what it should then your unit is fine. Were trying to see if we can disable these cores in software for a future update.

I have been running a unit for 5 months.  It was running fine.  I haven't really checked on it until a few days ago.  it had been running for over 3 months.  Now it has hardware errors 70-80%. Hashrate seems to be OK with very few rejects.  I restarted it, but no difference.  This sounds like the same problem as above. 

[Glpragma]

Hello everyone,

Is there any news on the release of a new  firmware that allows solo mining?

Thank you
D.

[unicornmangle]

Hello everyone,

Is there any news on the release of a new  firmware that allows solo mining?

Thank you
D.

Dead project they could at-least open source it so we can do a little more with these paperweights.

[Glpragma]

What does it mean "Dead Project" ??

Let me quote the Apollo BTC "Getting Started document"

----------------------------------
The Apollo Full Node runs the latest release binaries from bitcoincore.org, and is automatically configured and setup at the system level. It will start syncing a clean chain state from block 0 on your nvme SSD on first boot, and is capable of downloading a full unpruned node on its 500 GB drive with a 1-2 year buffer. This is the core that will enable us to release additional apps and services in the coming months and years (solo mining, block explorer, Lightning network all planned in the short term), and allow you the user to verify your own transactions and chain state without needing to trust anyone else.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Solo  mining, block explorer, Lightning network and such have been promised for a long time, and in ("short term"),   and having the chance to solo mining my own node was one of the features for which I decided to buy an Apollo.

So I can understand the difficulties, delays, all is legit,...but I cannot accept a "dead project", I would like to have answers to this.
It does not satisfy the premises underlying the moral contract between the seller and the customer.

Is there a responsible who can answer, please?

I'm kindly inviting the one who is responsible for this project to give clarification to all of us.

Thank you very much.
D.

[jstefanop]

What does it mean "Dead Project" ??

Let me quote the Apollo BTC "Getting Started document"

----------------------------------
The Apollo Full Node runs the latest release binaries from bitcoincore.org, and is automatically configured and setup at the system level. It will start syncing a clean chain state from block 0 on your nvme SSD on first boot, and is capable of downloading a full unpruned node on its 500 GB drive with a 1-2 year buffer. This is the core that will enable us to release additional apps and services in the coming months and years (solo mining, block explorer, Lightning network all planned in the short term), and allow you the user to verify your own transactions and chain state without needing to trust anyone else.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Solo  mining, block explorer, Lightning network and such have been promised for a long time, and in ("short term"),   and having the chance to solo mining my own node was one of the features for which I decided to buy an Apollo.

So I can understand the difficulties, delays, all is legit,...but I cannot accept a "dead project", I would like to have answers to this.
It does not satisfy the premises underlying the moral contract between the seller and the customer.

Is there a responsible who can answer, please?

I'm kindly inviting the one who is responsible for this project to give clarification to all of us.

Thank you very much.
D.

Already answered this, we decided late last year to scrap all updates and refresh the entire OS/web UI with a modern architecture since the Apollo UI is over 5 years old now. Thats probably going to delay all these features until later this year.

Also the Apollo UI is open source, anyone can modify it and do whatever they wish with it. Ive also said this multiple times, FutureBit is not a VC funded company with dozens of full time engineers. It's a small group of people working part-time when we can, and the whole company essentially operates as a non profit. Anything beyond the hardware we provide is a perk, and like with everything bitcoin is up to the individual to DYOR and install the apps and services you want.
 
Yes we want to make one click installs to make this easy for everyone, but our main focus is hardware (and past year has been focused on Gen 2 that all Apollo Gen 1 will benefit from software wise).

[unicornmangle]

Already answered this, we decided late last year to scrap all updates and refresh the entire OS/web UI with a modern architecture since the Apollo UI is over 5 years old now. Thats probably going to delay all these features until later this year.

 Ive also said this multiple times, FutureBit is not a VC funded company with dozens of full time engineers. It's a small group of people working part-time when we can, and the whole company essentially operates as a non profit. Anything beyond the hardware we provide is a perk, and like with everything bitcoin is up to the individual to DYOR and install the apps and services you want.
 

I don't think most that bought are looking for perks but your development environment is not noob friendly. its not very hard to solo mine to a node is it worth it? who cares the problem is this hardware was sold at a premium which is fine i guess, but getting ghosted with updates like china does is not acceptable. crypto is the only thing that kills crypto.

you sold a device that has multiple points of vulnerability in anyones home network i just wonder why? i mean you could of atleast properly secured the device or explained to people hey you need to isolate this gigantic hole you are about to implement into your network. less teasers on twitter and more real talk if you need help ask the internet is dead.

maybe im the only one tired of being scammed in crypto on all fronts maybe im just bitter who knows. i can see a good vision but i can also see alot of wasted money which i have spent for what good reason beyond fattening the wallets of others. atleast you dont have the excuse of being a china company that has no obligation to make anything right. mine are gonna end up in my firepit this spring ill take a video.

[heslo]

Already answered this, we decided late last year to scrap all updates and refresh the entire OS/web UI with a modern architecture since the Apollo UI is over 5 years old now. Thats probably going to delay all these features until later this year.

 Ive also said this multiple times, FutureBit is not a VC funded company with dozens of full time engineers. It's a small group of people working part-time when we can, and the whole company essentially operates as a non profit. Anything beyond the hardware we provide is a perk, and like with everything bitcoin is up to the individual to DYOR and install the apps and services you want.
 

I don't think most that bought are looking for perks but your development environment is not noob friendly. its not very hard to solo mine to a node is it worth it? who cares the problem is this hardware was sold at a premium which is fine i guess, but getting ghosted with updates like china does is not acceptable. crypto is the only thing that kills crypto.

you sold a device that has multiple points of vulnerability in anyones home network i just wonder why? i mean you could of atleast properly secured the device or explained to people hey you need to isolate this gigantic hole you are about to implement into your network. less teasers on twitter and more real talk if you need help ask the internet is dead.

maybe im the only one tired of being scammed in crypto on all fronts maybe im just bitter who knows. i can see a good vision but i can also see alot of wasted money which i have spent for what good reason beyond fattening the wallets of others. atleast you dont have the excuse of being a china company that has no obligation to make anything right. mine are gonna end up in my firepit this spring ill take a video.

Instead of them ending up in your firepit, send them my way, I'll pay shipping. My Apollo is running sweet and I'd love more, plus I hate waste

[Glpragma]

First all   I'd like to thank you for answering me, I appreciated that.

I understand that you are not "Google" and the company is small and probably there's not a department full of senior engineers working on this thing 24h a day.
We all know that and we can imagine that "all we can get, but the hardware, is a perk".
Yet this is not actually what you declared at the very beginning, or probably the market response to your device could have been more "tepid", wouldn't it?

I accept as answer (and promise..) that you will make a further effort to pursue your goals, within this year, if I have properly understood.

Regarding the open source interface, please accept my apologies I don't know the github link, could you please be so kind to write it here, once again, for me (and us..) ?

I really thank you, if you make us in the position to cooperate with you, probably the software which will come with the next APOLLOs could be better, and probably none of us should be referring at these as "paperweights", ever.

The entire community is willing to move on, let us help you.

Have a nice day
D.