Open Source Bitcoin ASIC miner project that uses 2x BM1387 (Antminer S9)

[Skot]

i checked out the R1 PCB which is what i have. Did you update that wire from TP10 to TP1  in the Kicad PCB on github yet ? probably rename the PCB to R2 after update

Yes, I have updated the schematic and PCB. That’s a good idea to update the revision. I’ll do that soon.

Skot,What kicad plugin do you use for Auto routing and placement on the PCB from bitaxeMax4 schematic ? Is there an easier way than updating and doing placement and routing manually ? i usually use Freerouting plugin in Kicad. Maybe there is a better way ? i know Altium and other CAD software do have such plugins.

I route everything manually. This isn’t a very complicated board, and getting the high current tracks right is super important.

[developeralgo]

Skot, i wanted to send you bitaxeMax4 schematic that i was working on so that you can check it out, its still WIP schematic. If you can create DEV branch on the bitmax4 github repo and add me as a contributor so that i can upload the dev bitaxeMax4 schematic that would be great. i have a forked repo of bitaxeMax4 that i am using for now to try out various schematic designs  

Skot, Any progress with cgminer software (Kanoi version) running on FreeRTOS on the ESP32-C3-Devkit ?  any instructions so as to test the complete setup.  

[srloin]

Hi guys, long-time lurker, and my old account was shut down apparently.

Anyway, I just want to say awesome work and I would love to help out, even if it is just ordering PCBs and testing/contributing to the open-source software for them.

I plan to purchase a slew of the different ASICs. I know this project is targeting specific ones, but I believe it could be adjusted to also test out other ones. There is a lot of closed-source software that was built on the open-source code of others. I think this is a great way to be able to document these chips both in hardware and from a software perspective.

Nice work!

[nullama]

I don't know if it's possible, but it would be amazing if there's manual or automatic fan control based on the temperature, as well as having control of the power consumed somehow.

It would be great to be able to run these silently at lower specs.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

...
I plan to purchase a slew of the different ASICs. I know this project is targeting specific ones, but I believe it could be adjusted to also test out other ones. ...

To use any ASIC mining chip you need the Secret Sauce for it -- in other words, the driver for it. In most cases said driver(s) is closed source and without it your mining software is useless. That said, if you can write the needed drivers then ja, not a bad idea though it's certainly not a new one.

[Skot]

Skot, i wanted to send you bitaxeMax4 schematic that i was working on so that you can check it out, its still WIP schematic. If you can create DEV branch on the bitmax4 github repo and add me as a contributor so that i can upload the dev bitaxeMax4 schematic that would be great. i have a forked repo of bitaxeMax4 that i am using for now to try out various schematic designs  

Skot, Any progress with cgminer software (Kanoi version) running on FreeRTOS on the ESP32-C3-Devkit ?  any instructions so as to test the complete setup.  

Hey, sorry for the delay! gotta make sure I get the work stuff done.... so I can buy more parts haha.

I _think_ the thing to do is fork the repo on GitHub, do your experiments there. Then you can send me a pull request and I can merge it back into my bitaxeMax repo (if you want). I could take a look too at what you have if you send me your git repo url.

I have played around with the cJSON library a bit for parsing Stratum messages on the ESP32. nothing solid to report yet. Any firmware people out there want to help?!

[Skot]

Hi guys, long-time lurker, and my old account was shut down apparently.

Anyway, I just want to say awesome work and I would love to help out, even if it is just ordering PCBs and testing/contributing to the open-source software for them.

I plan to purchase a slew of the different ASICs. I know this project is targeting specific ones, but I believe it could be adjusted to also test out other ones. There is a lot of closed-source software that was built on the open-source code of others. I think this is a great way to be able to document these chips both in hardware and from a software perspective.

Nice work!

Cool!! great to have you. I hear you about the "closed-source software that was built on the open-source code" problem. We wouldn't be here if Satoshi hadn't open sourced this whole bitcoin thing. Just because there is hardware involved doesn't mean we have to get all uptight and proprietary.

[Skot]

I don't know if it's possible, but it would be amazing if there's manual or automatic fan control based on the temperature, as well as having control of the power consumed somehow.

It would be great to be able to run these silently at lower specs.

That seems pretty doable. I think 4pin fans have PWM speed control, and the ESP32 would make short work of that.

Controlling the power is as "easy" as changing the ASIC core voltage and the hashing frequency. The hardware will definitely support it, just gotta make some headway on the ESP32 firmware.

[Skot]

...
I plan to purchase a slew of the different ASICs. I know this project is targeting specific ones, but I believe it could be adjusted to also test out other ones. ...

To use any ASIC mining chip you need the Secret Sauce for it -- in other words, the driver for it. In most cases said driver(s) is closed source and without it your mining software is useless. That said, if you can write the needed drivers then ja, not a bad idea though it's certainly not a new one.

We've heard rumors of Block making an open source ASIC, although I haven't heard any news on that front in a long while. Maybe now that they had a solid earnings report we'll hear more? BitFury also has well-documented mining ASICs (https://bitfury.com/hardware/asic), but the efficiency there leaves something to be desired.

It's also pretty hard to stop a motivated reverse engineer with a mining machine and a logic analyzer. How did cgminer get the drivers for the BM1384, BM1389 and BM1397?

[NotFuzzyWarm]

...
I plan to purchase a slew of the different ASICs. I know this project is targeting specific ones, but I believe it could be adjusted to also test out other ones. ...

To use any ASIC mining chip you need the Secret Sauce for it -- in other words, the driver for it. In most cases said driver(s) is closed source and without it your mining software is useless. That said, if you can write the needed drivers then ja, not a bad idea though it's certainly not a new one.

We've heard rumors of Block making an open source ASIC, although I haven't heard any news on that front in a long while. Maybe now that they had a solid earnings report we'll hear more? BitFury also has well-documented mining ASICs (https://bitfury.com/hardware/asic), but the efficiency there leaves something to be desired.

It's also pretty hard to stop a motivated reverse engineer with a mining machine and a logic analyzer. How did cgminer get the drivers for the BM1384, BM1389 and BM1397?

By Sidehack and -vh then Kano doing exactly that. Sidehack mapped out the IO and -vh did the `84 & `89 drivers. It helped a lot that that Bitmain eventually did release the code for their s9 and their subsequent chips largely use the same data structures and signaling. Kano did the 1397 (s17 chip) driver for Sidehack's Compac-F as well as cleaned up the older code from -vh and other niggling bits which became the latest cgminer.

As for Bitfury... per Kano and Sidehack they are a bitch to work with. For 1 you pretty much must use *their* driver with no changes allowed - and it sux...

[Skot]

By Sidehack and -vh then Kano doing exactly that. Sidehack mapped out the IO and -vh did the `84 & `89 drivers. It helped a lot that that Bitmain eventually did release the code for their s9 and their subsequent chips largely use the same data structures and signaling. Kano did the 1397 (s17 chip) driver for Sidehack's Compac-F as well as cleaned up the older code from -vh and other niggling bits which became the latest cgminer.

I am definitely grateful for that, and putting it under GPL! Thanks Sidehack and -vh then Kano!

As for Bitfury... per Kano and Sidehack they are a bitch to work with. For 1 you pretty much must use *their* driver with no changes allowed - and it sux...

The datasheet for the Bitfury Clarke (https://bitfury.com/content/downloads/bitfury-clarke-datasheet-3.pdf) at least has all of the registers laid out, and it seems somewhat organized. Certainly better than the last Bitmain documentation we got, which was for the BM1385?? (https://bits.media/images/asic-miner-antminer-s7/BM1385_Datasheet_v2.0.pdf).

Either way, I think I'm going to stick with the BM1397 for now. I picked up some used BM1397AG from China for 1/3rd the price of new. I'm very curious how those work out.

[n0nce]

I have played around with the cJSON library a bit for parsing Stratum messages on the ESP32. nothing solid to report yet. Any firmware people out there want to help?!

I can can definitely give you a hand for the firmware. Just strapped for time for a few more weeks, but I can sneak some extra free time in here and there.
Can you elaborate what's the issue? Do you have some base / boilerplate code for the ESP32 already? If so, just push it to a new GitHub repo and I'll have a look.

[SIRBTC]

Skot, i wanted to send you bitaxeMax4 schematic that i was working on so that you can check it out, its still WIP schematic. If you can create DEV branch on the bitmax4 github repo and add me as a contributor so that i can upload the dev bitaxeMax4 schematic that would be great. i have a forked repo of bitaxeMax4 that i am using for now to try out various schematic designs  

Skot, Any progress with cgminer software (Kanoi version) running on FreeRTOS on the ESP32-C3-Devkit ?  any instructions so as to test the complete setup.  

Hey, sorry for the delay! gotta make sure I get the work stuff done.... so I can buy more parts haha.

I _think_ the thing to do is fork the repo on GitHub, do your experiments there. Then you can send me a pull request and I can merge it back into my bitaxeMax repo (if you want). I could take a look too at what you have if you send me your git repo url.

I have played around with the cJSON library a bit for parsing Stratum messages on the ESP32. nothing solid to report yet. Any firmware people out there want to help?!

Hi, I speak spanish but I will try to write In English. If you need a code for to create a Miner BTC with ESP32 there are a code for Arduino.
The Code generate a Miner and conect with BFGMiner. ¿Do you need this?

[hZti]

So has somebody here actually done it and built this miner and can tell what is the efficiency in comparison to simply using a complete S9? I would be interested in pulling apart an S9 to do the project, but so far I’m not shure if it is really worth it.

[developeralgo]

Skot, i wanted to send you bitaxeMax4 schematic that i was working on so that you can check it out, its still WIP schematic. If you can create DEV branch on the bitmax4 github repo and add me as a contributor so that i can upload the dev bitaxeMax4 schematic that would be great. i have a forked repo of bitaxeMax4 that i am using for now to try out various schematic designs  

Skot, Any progress with cgminer software (Kanoi version) running on FreeRTOS on the ESP32-C3-Devkit ?  any instructions so as to test the complete setup.  

Hey, sorry for the delay! gotta make sure I get the work stuff done.... so I can buy more parts haha.

I _think_ the thing to do is fork the repo on GitHub, do your experiments there. Then you can send me a pull request and I can merge it back into my bitaxeMax repo (if you want). I could take a look too at what you have if you send me your git repo url.

I have played around with the cJSON library a bit for parsing Stratum messages on the ESP32. nothing solid to report yet. Any firmware people out there want to help?!

Hi, I speak spanish but I will try to write In English. If you need a code for to create a Miner BTC with ESP32 there are a code for Arduino.
The Code generate a Miner and conect with BFGMiner. ¿Do you need this?

i have come across some info from a paper and some project work by Kinshuk Dua on ESP32 which can be used as a starting point. It is basically a simple BTC stratum miner running on ESP32-C3_DevKitC-02. You would need to port Kanoi's version of Cgminer 4.12 to run on ESP32 or extract and port the Drivers used by gekko Compac-F for BM1387 and BM1397. The issue is that the gekko driver does utlize the standard Linux distro libraries and i am not sure if ESP32 with FreeRTOS will have what is needed to do that

https://anonymous.4open.science/r/cryptominer
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.01646v1.pdf
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4047844

If anyone can help with this,  it would be great. ESP32-C3 does not have much memory  just 4 MB SPI flash

[SIRBTC]

So has somebody here actually done it and built this miner and can tell what is the efficiency in comparison to simply using a complete S9? I would be interested in pulling apart an S9 to do the project, but so far I’m not shure if it is really worth it.

¿Can help you with this? Code Miner for ESP32 (arduino)

https://github.com/joric/arduino-bitcoin-miner

I have a few knowledge with this and other Arduinos Codes for ESP32, only a few but I was figthing with this same weeks. (excume for my English)

[developeralgo]

So has somebody here actually done it and built this miner and can tell what is the efficiency in comparison to simply using a complete S9? I would be interested in pulling apart an S9 to do the project, but so far I’m not shure if it is really worth it.

i think Skot has 2 working development versions with
1. with 2 x BM1387 (bitaxe) and
2. with 1 x BM1397(bitaxeMax)

and i am just finishing the PCB assembly of  bitaxeMax (1 x BM1397) version for dev testing. Also started working on a schematic with 4 chips in series but have not done much on that it will be interesting to see and discover. 

[developeralgo]

So has somebody here actually done it and built this miner and can tell what is the efficiency in comparison to simply using a complete S9? I would be interested in pulling apart an S9 to do the project, but so far I’m not shure if it is really worth it.

¿Can help you with this? Code Miner for ESP32 (arduino)

https://github.com/joric/arduino-bitcoin-miner

I have a few knowledge with this and other Arduinos Codes for ESP32, only a few but I was figthing with this same weeks. (excume for my English)

i have looked at running bare-metal Linux 5.0 kernel and cgminer 4.12 on ESP32-C3-DevkitC-02 but can't seem to find a better clean way to do it. Everything seems so complex with tons of bugs to accomplish. The best way is always the simplest way.

Just to run bare-metal Linux 5.0 kernel on ESP32-C3 you need to add external memory using the SPI at least  8 MB (preferably 16 MB )  PSRAM plus 2 or 4 MB Flash and then connect a MicroSD for storage (32 or 64 GB ). Should we rethink using ESP32-C3-DevKitC-02 ? and try something else ? Not sure what it might be.

How about using  -- The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W  for US $15-- it has everything we need with 40-pin breakout with all the pins we need and might act as drop in replacement for ESP32-C3-DevkitC-02. it can run 32bit & 64Bit ubuntu 20.04, 21.04 and so on. All we need is to add cgminer 4.12 (Kanoi version ) . Any ideas or experience about this ? i think Nonce did something similar .


Porting Cgminer 4.12 drivers for Gekko Compac-F to ESP32 is something we really need !!! .

[SIRBTC]

So has somebody here actually done it and built this miner and can tell what is the efficiency in comparison to simply using a complete S9? I would be interested in pulling apart an S9 to do the project, but so far I’m not shure if it is really worth it.

¿Can help you with this? Code Miner for ESP32 (arduino)

https://github.com/joric/arduino-bitcoin-miner

I have a few knowledge with this and other Arduinos Codes for ESP32, only a few but I was figthing with this same weeks. (excume for my English)

i have looked at running bare-metal Linux 5.0 kernel and cgminer 4.12 on ESP32-C3-DevkitC-02 but can't seem to find a better clean way to do it. Everything seems so complex with tons of bugs to accomplish. The best way is always the simplest way.

Just to run bare-metal Linux 5.0 kernel on ESP32-C3 you need to add external memory using the SPI at least  8 MB (preferably 16 MB )  PSRAM plus 2 or 4 MB Flash and then connect a MicroSD for storage (32 or 64 GB ). Should we rethink using ESP32-C3-DevKitC-02 ? and try something else ? Not sure what it might be.

How about using  -- The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W  for US $15-- it has everything we need with 40-pin breakout with all the pins we need and might act as drop in replacement for ESP32-C3-DevkitC-02. it can run 32bit & 64Bit ubuntu 20.04, 21.04 and so on. All we need is to add cgminer 4.12 (Kanoi version ) . Any ideas or experience about this ? i think Nonce did something similar .


Porting Cgminer 4.12 drivers for Gekko Compac-F to ESP32 is something we really need !!! .

Hi, ¿This can help tou? Linux 5 in ESP32 and link for ubuntu 9 in ESP32

https://www.cnx-software.es/2021/07/19/linux-5-0-arranca-en-el-procesador-esp32/

Tell me something for try help you........is yuo have telegram or Discord and need speak tell me too.

[developeralgo]

So has somebody here actually done it and built this miner and can tell what is the efficiency in comparison to simply using a complete S9? I would be interested in pulling apart an S9 to do the project, but so far I’m not shure if it is really worth it.

¿Can help you with this? Code Miner for ESP32 (arduino)

https://github.com/joric/arduino-bitcoin-miner

I have a few knowledge with this and other Arduinos Codes for ESP32, only a few but I was figthing with this same weeks. (excume for my English)

i have looked at running bare-metal Linux 5.0 kernel and cgminer 4.12 on ESP32-C3-DevkitC-02 but can't seem to find a better clean way to do it. Everything seems so complex with tons of bugs to accomplish. The best way is always the simplest way.

Just to run bare-metal Linux 5.0 kernel on ESP32-C3 you need to add external memory using the SPI at least  8 MB (preferably 16 MB )  PSRAM plus 2 or 4 MB Flash and then connect a MicroSD for storage (32 or 64 GB ). Should we rethink using ESP32-C3-DevKitC-02 ? and try something else ? Not sure what it might be.

How about using  -- The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W  for US $15-- it has everything we need with 40-pin breakout with all the pins we need and might act as drop in replacement for ESP32-C3-DevkitC-02. it can run 32bit & 64Bit ubuntu 20.04, 21.04 and so on. All we need is to add cgminer 4.12 (Kanoi version ) . Any ideas or experience about this ? i think Nonce did something similar .


Porting Cgminer 4.12 drivers for Gekko Compac-F to ESP32 is something we really need !!! .

Hi, ¿This can help tou? Linux 5 in ESP32 and link for ubuntu 9 in ESP32

https://www.cnx-software.es/2021/07/19/linux-5-0-arranca-en-el-procesador-esp32/

Tell me something for try help you........is yuo have telegram or Discord and need speak tell me too.

i think that's just running JuiceVM emulation with ubuntu 9.  i think we don't need a vm if the native CPU supports standard Linux Distro . Instead i am thinking of Ubuntu 20.04 , 21.04 etc  with Cgminer 4.12 and that's supported on Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and no need to do a lot of messing around .