Running Compac F & R909 in cgminer at the same time on the same computer

[GlenAllan]

Newb here to this forum. Recently got into "lottery mining". I have 4 of the Compac F USB miners running using the Gekko Science hub. That all works fine. Still have some tuning to do for getting the different sticks to run at different frequencies based on what that hub puts out, but that's a different question.

My issue is i also just bought an R909 Terminus miner and i'm having a pain of a time getting the Compac Fs and the R909 running at the same time on the same computer. If i run either separately, works like a charm. Turn on the other, USB failures.

I've tried running the R909 out of a free port on the Gekko Science hub, tried running both through a USB 2 hub out of the same USB port, tried running through different USB ports on the same computer, all no gos.

Another suggestion i had given to me by the guys at Bitcoin Merch was to run the 909 through a different terminal window. This part i've probably not done well. Basically ghosted the 909 in the one window and then started another where the 909 ran until USB errors happened on both sides and then confusion ensues as both terminal windows try to load devices randomly.

Can you point me to proper cgminer terminal commands to exclude specific miners per terminal instance, or if anyone knows what the trick is that i'm not doing right to get this combo to work?

I'm currently running the 909 on a different computer for now, but it's not an ideal setup. I'd like it all running on the same machine.

If it matters i'm running it all on an M1 Mac Mini. No resource issues on that end.

Thanks for any help!

~Glen

[NotFuzzyWarm]

All covered in the R909 thread and the Compac-F thread near that one Do remember, running one R909 is the same data bandwidth as 6 Compac-F's,

[GlenAllan]

So the data bandwidth is possibly the issue? I've seen people mention running like 15 Compac Fs at the same time through a Pi. Okay, i'll go through the thread. Thanks for the link!

[GlenAllan]

What i'm reading seems to imply power might be the issue. That seems weird, but worth a try plugging into different sources. It was one last thing i hadn't tried.

[paid2]

So the data bandwidth is possibly the issue? I've seen people mention running like 15 Compac Fs at the same time through a Pi. Okay, i'll go through the thread. Thanks for the link!

We can suppose that the bandwidth won't be a problem, miners consume almost nothing if you compare to what we are used to nowadays in terms of consumption.

For a long time I mined with a shared connection from an Android by bridging WLAN-ETH, I connected a laptop to this WIFI and I put an ethernet cable between the laptop and an ethernet switch.
This allowed me to indirectly measure the mobile data consumption of my Antminers. The overall amount of data was very very small, we are talking about a few tens of MB maximum per month for a 15Th/s Antminer.
I remember having the conversation on the forum with Kano a while ago, it seems he had detailed how to calculate this precisely (I can't find the topic unfortunately)
I don't remember the exact figures because I haven't been mining this way for a long time, but it's certainly very negligible in terms of bandwidth consumption.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

It's not network bandwidth between pool and miner that becomes a problem - yes that is very minimal.
It's the bandwidth of the work being sent over the USB coms between the chip(s) in the miner and cgminer that is the issue. On a Pi that sets a limit of 13-14 compac-F's with 1 chip before the USB port bandwidth starts to limit things. The R909 with 6 chips is working with 6x the data so...

[GlenAllan]

Well i'm only running 4 Compac Fs and one 909, and it's connecting to an M1 Mac Mini, so i'm doubting that's the problem. Unless people have had issues with M1 Mac Minis before.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

re: Mac mini - unknown. It all depends on the USB/CPU setup in the PC. In the case of Pi-3's and under there is only 1 USB channel to the CPU and that same channel is also used for the LAN adapter.. Pi4 at least has a dedicated LAN channel and I believe 2x USB channels.

Really should ask about this in the R909 channel where Kano is active - he wrote the code being used and has covered the USB data usage in posts somewhere there... Plus, other folks are sure to chime in 

[GlenAllan]

Thanks, i've asked in that thread. Hopefully i've just done something stupid and this is an easy fix 

[NotFuzzyWarm]

for those lurking, answers to this starts in the R909 thread
@ OP, to help keep the Forum tidy ya may want to lock this thread so it is not needlessly resurrected...
Cheers