Butterfly Labs - Bitforce Single and Mini Rig Box

[Unacceptable]

I don't understand why any of you are complaining. Do you have money with BFL and they have not delivered your product?

I've paid BFL more money than most, and you don't see me complaining.

I would recommend that you either do you due diligence and make your purchases, or get left behind.

Like to boast eh ? but it's not just earning the money but how you earned it, it's one thing running a few video cards when Bitcoin was worth $30 and the difficulty level quote low, sitting back and getting the money almost for free, then sending it to another company...
it's completely different working a 9 to 5 job everyday sweating and saving up at $7 per hour..

  If you make $7 an hour,I feel sorry for you,not to be mean,but I've been unemployed for over 3 years now & still manage to get my bills paid.I don't have a new car or a home,I pay rent & utilities & car insurance.

My skills,A/C installation & service,electrician,plumber,mechanic,any phase of construction (from slab work to roofing) & remodeling,PC repair & gamer build ups,class "A" CDL (1,000,000 miles or more under my belt).

I also ran a 52 meter concrete boom pump (110,000 lbs GVW,six axle's   ) for 5 years @ $20 an hour + time & half daily ($52,000 a year).Most of my other trades land me about $30,000+ a year.

As of now being self employed (15-20 hrs a week) is more profitable (time wise) than working a 40 hour job,at least here in Fla,I'm making maybe $15,000 a year.I'm NOT giving away my hard earned knowledge so these greedy buisness owners can make $xxx,xxx a year & fleece me.Hopefully the payscale will improve soon here & I can get back to saving for my retirement

I learned all I know ON THE JOB,NO schooling,over the past 25 years.But with the economy the way it is,my skills can only get me about $20,000 a year right now,if I'm lucky............

Sorry,had to vent

I do believe in Bitcoin,so every coin I earn goes back into it.So get you a few GPU's or FPGA's & get some coin & reinvest back into it

BTW,my first Single is on its way (shipped today 5/16),now to save up for the next one & so on

Thanks BFL-Engineer for the explaination,but I already figured it was something to that effect

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[ice_chill]

To above post, i understand you, I used to be self-employed earning $2k per week building and selling all types of PCs. But the economy is completely different to what it was 4 years ago.
I was just saying regarding gigavps post that reinvesting money that you made off mining into more mining equipment is much much easier then investing money that you earned from active jobs (I see mining as a passive job)

[Unacceptable]

Well,I invested $1000 at first 4 vid cards,2 6950,2 6970,2 500 watt PSU's,1 low end DDR2 mobo & 1-45 watt CPU & started in june.I've made almost double that back & am now investing in FPGA's to lower my electric bill.If you start now I'd go with FPGA's unless your electric is VERY cheap.

Good luck!!

[WhitePhantom]

To above post, i understand you, I used to be self-employed earning $2k per week building and selling all types of PCs. But the economy is completely different to what it was 4 years ago.
I was just saying regarding gigavps post that reinvesting money that you made off mining into more mining equipment is much much easier then investing money that you earned from active jobs (I see mining as a passive job)

Why save up from your job for it?  The rig box (2 mini rigs) I ordered in March is 100% funded by a loan.  It's a risk either way, but I figure that I'll get it faster this way.  If I can afford to save up for it, I can afford to make loan payments if BTC goes south.

[ice_chill]

Good idea too, but from seeing how loans have spiraled out of control for many people I stay well clear of them.

[SgtSpike]

To above post, i understand you, I used to be self-employed earning $2k per week building and selling all types of PCs. But the economy is completely different to what it was 4 years ago.
I was just saying regarding gigavps post that reinvesting money that you made off mining into more mining equipment is much much easier then investing money that you earned from active jobs (I see mining as a passive job)

Why save up from your job for it?  The rig box (2 mini rigs) I ordered in March is 100% funded by a loan.  It's a risk either way, but I figure that I'll get it faster this way.  If I can afford to save up for it, I can afford to make loan payments if BTC goes south.

I so would have done this as well if I had the cash flow to support paying off a $50,000 loan if something went wrong.  Well, and if I could find a bank willing to lend me that much...!  How did you manage to do that, anyway?

[this time]

When I plug in my single, I get a driver not found error. Is there a manual way to install a driver? I've tried plugging in to several W7 machines.

[bombo999]

http://www.butterflylabs.com/drivers/

Try downloading easyminer from bfl ... they have some diagnostics that may help

[SgtSpike]

When I plug in my single, I get a driver not found error. Is there a manual way to install a driver? I've tried plugging in to several W7 machines.

Odd... might be an issue with the unit, as it successfully installed drivers for all the ones I plugged in on my W7 machine.

[this time]

I emailed bfl and they pointed me here:

http://www.ftdichip.com/FTDrivers.htm

I've installed those drivers and now the single detects as "USB Serial Port" (COM3)

cgminer 2.3.6 does not auto detect any singles and from researching the threads, that's the version to go for with singles.

I'm able to mine using -S bitforce:\\.\com3

I'm not sure of the syntax to start more than one. Does anyone know the json syntax to enter this into cgminer.conf for multiple com ports?

[Fefox]

I emailed bfl and they pointed me here:

http://www.ftdichip.com/FTDrivers.htm

I've installed those drivers and now the single detects as "USB Serial Port" (COM3)

cgminer 2.3.6 does not auto detect any singles and from researching the threads, that's the version to go for with singles.

I'm able to mine using -S bitforce:\\.\com3

I'm not sure of the syntax to start more than one. Does anyone know the json syntax to enter this into cgminer.conf for multiple com ports?

try the bitminter miner, in my case it auto-detected 8 BFL units, you should be up and running in about 2 mins tops. about 15 seconds if you have java installed.

[rjk]

I'm not sure of the syntax to start more than one. Does anyone know the json syntax to enter this into cgminer.conf for multiple com ports?

Try a comma, like so: -S \\.\COM23,\\.\COM24,\\.\COM25
Not actually sure whether that will work, but the comma delimited settings are common in other options for cgminer.

[WhitePhantom]

To above post, i understand you, I used to be self-employed earning $2k per week building and selling all types of PCs. But the economy is completely different to what it was 4 years ago.
I was just saying regarding gigavps post that reinvesting money that you made off mining into more mining equipment is much much easier then investing money that you earned from active jobs (I see mining as a passive job)

Why save up from your job for it?  The rig box (2 mini rigs) I ordered in March is 100% funded by a loan.  It's a risk either way, but I figure that I'll get it faster this way.  If I can afford to save up for it, I can afford to make loan payments if BTC goes south.

I so would have done this as well if I had the cash flow to support paying off a $50,000 loan if something went wrong.  Well, and if I could find a bank willing to lend me that much...!  How did you manage to do that, anyway?

I got a $32,000 loan through http://www.lendingclub.com.  It's kind of high interest (17%  ) and they take 5% up front, but I'll work on refinancing it at lower interest if things don't work out like I planned.

[SgtSpike]

To above post, i understand you, I used to be self-employed earning $2k per week building and selling all types of PCs. But the economy is completely different to what it was 4 years ago.
I was just saying regarding gigavps post that reinvesting money that you made off mining into more mining equipment is much much easier then investing money that you earned from active jobs (I see mining as a passive job)

Why save up from your job for it?  The rig box (2 mini rigs) I ordered in March is 100% funded by a loan.  It's a risk either way, but I figure that I'll get it faster this way.  If I can afford to save up for it, I can afford to make loan payments if BTC goes south.

I so would have done this as well if I had the cash flow to support paying off a $50,000 loan if something went wrong.  Well, and if I could find a bank willing to lend me that much...!  How did you manage to do that, anyway?

I got a $32,000 loan through http://www.lendingclub.com.  It's kind of high interest (17%  ) and they take 5% up front, but I'll work on refinancing it at lower interest if things don't work out like I planned.

Ah, very cool.  I got my loan through prosper.com.  Looks to be very similar to lending club.  My interest was 22%, lol.

[Garr255]

Why are you willing to pay such high interest? That seems really ridiculous, but then again I've never looked into private loans like this.

[SgtSpike]

Why are you willing to pay such high interest? That seems really ridiculous, but then again I've never looked into private loans like this.

Because I didn't plan to keep the loan for the entire term (3 years).  I planned to have it paid off within a year, and as it is, I'll have it paid off in a few days, which means I've only had to pay 3 months worth of interest on it.  And because, no bank wanted to give me a personal loan in that amount.

If it wasn't used to purchase assets that generate income, I would never think about taking out that much of a loan at that interest rate.

[kano]

I'm not sure of the syntax to start more than one. Does anyone know the json syntax to enter this into cgminer.conf for multiple com ports?

Try a comma, like so: -S \\.\COM23,\\.\COM24,\\.\COM25
Not actually sure whether that will work, but the comma delimited settings are common in other options for cgminer.

With -S it is:
-S \\.\COM23 -S \\.\COM24 -S \\.\COM25

[this time]

Thanks to everyone who posted, I started from scratch on the conf file and now the singles are working alongside the gpus.

[rjk]

Thanks to everyone who posted, I started from scratch on the conf file and now the singles are working alongside the gpus.

Yeah that reminds me - not sure if it applies to recent versions, but the config file generation from cgminer on windows always exported a broken config for me. I never figured out what was broken, i just had to keep poking at it until it started working. Not sure if it is a bug because of no video cards or because windows, or what.

[kano]

Thanks to everyone who posted, I started from scratch on the conf file and now the singles are working alongside the gpus.

Yeah that reminds me - not sure if it applies to recent versions, but the config file generation from cgminer on windows always exported a broken config for me. I never figured out what was broken, i just had to keep poking at it until it started working. Not sure if it is a bug because of no video cards or because windows, or what.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28402.msg886474#msg886474

Fix: https://github.com/ckolivas/cgminer/commit/c2e2e7e43772c261ea295da8ddbb9b48ae448317

The next release (after 2.4.1) will have that fix in it
At the moment it just puts an extra comma in the config file if you have no GPUs
(... just remove the extra comma)