Modular Python Bitcoin Miner - Official Thread

[fizzisist]

Another option might be the low tech version: hang out on IRC with TheSeven and he can initiate a power cycle by typing:

Code:

Hey BR0KK, can you power cycle the board for me?

 

[antirack]

Another option might be the low tech version: hang out on IRC with TheSeven and he can initiate a power cycle by typing:

Code:

Hey BR0KK, can you power cycle the board for me?

 

Buying new tech toys is way more fun!

[TheSeven]

The BountyChest effort to get a ztex board for Con in Australia fr cgminer development didn't go anywhere. They are going to "refund" the people at one point as far as I know from mjt (bountychest dev).

If I didn't understand this wrong, with ztex's discount program you would have to buy your ztex board, then write the software, and then once done he would decide how much credit you get in form of a refund to your bank account.

http://www.ztex.de/os_discount_program.e.html

You will get the money refunded (via bank wire transfer to a European EUR account or via Paypal) after the project is published and rated.

You'd also have to publish it on his wiki etc and link back to ztex on the MPBM website/thread to qualify.

And the way his discount program sounds, a "simple" miner (which effectively duplicates functionality that's already there with his own open source project) wouldn't score very high on his 15% to >50% discount table IMHO.

He mentioned up to 100% for mining software on his forum thread at some point.

I have to be absolutely honest here, if I would only have ztex boards I would probably never have tried MPBM. Now that I am using it, I see a couple of great and unique features (ie the way it handles work sources/blockchains). But I can also understand ztex for discouraging third party miner use, he has to cover his ass for the 2 years warranty and if somebody fries the FPGA chips it will be very costly to replace the boards.

This is why MPBM 100% replicates ztex's clocking behavior.

The main advantage (to me) in having a third party miner would actually be to get it to work on platforms with a very low resource/power footprint. But I don't know enough about Python to say if that would be possible. I always liked xiangfu's approach of running his cgminer with 40+ Icarus in a mini dlink router that's not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes. This won't happen with Java. But would this be possible with python for instance?

That's very well possible, but not with ztex boards, those cause too much host CPU usage due to offloading the error rate measurement and clock adjustment to the host.
With Icarus or BFL boards MPBM should easily handle two figure board numbers on ARM platforms. It might need quite a bit of RAM, but not all that much CPU.

[BR0KK]

Quote from: fizzisist on Today at 12:23:29 AM
Another option might be the low tech version: hang out on IRC with TheSeven and he can initiate a power cycle by typing:
Code:
Hey BR0KK, can you power cycle the board for me?

 

Buying new tech toys is way more fun!

Defently possible and yes buing new hardware is my hobby

Since im not home all day we have to work sonething out. Maybe in the evenings ?
I work at a restaurant atm. so it could get late .....

If i get a new job in some weeks that shouldnt be a problem anymore.

That's very well possible, but not with ztex boards, those cause too much host CPU usage due to offloading the error rate measurement and clock adjustment to the host.
With Icarus or BFL boards MPBM should easily handle two figure board numbers on ARM platforms. It might need quite a bit of RAM, but not all that much CPU.

I ordered a rasberry pi for the ztex boards yesterday. I will try to run the Ztex boards with it.... hope to get this thing soon. For 30€ its worth a try

Did you try it?  Is it impossible to run this boards with an arm powered device? What are the sideffects?

[O_Shovah]

I am running mpbm, p2pool and the bitcoin clients on ARM boards for some time now very sucessfull.

There is the Gumstix, the Panda board and other.

I just dint get a rasberry yet.
I will offer a system for it too as soon as i get one.

[antirack]

I am running mpbm, p2pool and the bitcoin clients on ARM boards for some time now very sucessfull.

There is the Gumstix, the Panda board and other.

I just dint get a rasberry yet.
I will offer a system for it too as soon as i get one.

How many FPGA boards do you have connected, which ones, and how about CPU load etc?
If you'd build a bigger cluster, what would you use?

[O_Shovah]

Highly depends on if you use p2pool or a pool.

I had 7 boards connected at maximum. This resultet in ~ 55% CPU for the Gumstix  and ~12 % on the Panda.

Running a p2pool server seems limited to the Pandaboard but is also highly influenced by SD card I/O performance.
It then uses something like 40% CPU.

The Gumstix uses 4W maximum on the wall and could be plugged on top of a modular board. (Measueres something like 50 by 20 mm)
But the panda board is easier to develop for and uses 7,5 W. In additionis has a dual core so paralelising threads is easier.
Therefore i would recommend The panda baord for bigger setups with USB connectors and the Gumstix for modular board approaches.

[TheSeven]

I had a closer look at the Ztex issues: Seems like there's some bitswapping that needs to be done so that the boards understand it.
This will however take ages if implemented in Python, so I'd prefer to distribute pre-swapped firmware files.
Sounds like I'll have to work out some licensing issues with Stefan...

For those keen on doing it themselves:
- Extract the bit file from the btcminer jar file
- There should be a couple 0xFFs in the first few hundred bytes.
- Reverse the bits of each byte starting from there, i.e. bit 0 swapped with bit 7, bit 1 swapped with bit 6, ...
- MPBM should accept the resulting firmware file

[hashking]

I have the version .4a for windows.  How can I install the new version..

[TheSeven]

• Clone my git (testing branch if you want to try the latest greatest, risking that it might break from time to time)
• With the boards you want it to use plugged, run run-mpbm.py, it should autodetect them unless they are Icarus boards
• http://localhost:8832 (user: admin, password: mpbm)
• Add your pools to the "User work sources" group
• Right-click on them and assign them to the right blockchain

[BR0KK]

Hi im not home but in 3 Days we could arrange the Remote Access to all of my boards if you want

[TheSeven]

Hi im not home but in 3 Days we could arrange the Remote Access to all of my boards if you want

I don't think it will help much right now. I've identified at least one problem, which I can only really fix after sorting out licensing issues with ztex.

[BR0KK]

Uhh Licensing; thats complicated....Hope that you can arrange something with Ztex. If u need Accesss to a board sometimes just ask

[hashking]

Which pools is this program optimized for?

[Garr255]

Hey all,

I've been having a terrible time getting some x6500s running. I've tried everything under Ubuntu 10.10, XP, and 7. I spend a night on IRC with a few people but with no success. (Thanks for your effort anyway!)

My current error under a clean install of Ubuntu 10.10 with proper drivers, python-usb, etc installed:

http://pastebin.com/Mm0stxux

I really hope this gets resolved soon! Thanks.

Turns out it was a PSU activation method error (OK to ON instead of ON to ground). Derp.

-Garrett

[TheSeven]

Which pools is this program optimized for?

Well, basically anything except for pools that don't comply to the usual JSON-RPC protocol or do some other weird things like ozcoin.

[freshzive]

Is this version working properly with p2pool (using x6500s)? Just wanted to make sure before I upgrade from that pesky v0.0.4alpha

[allinvain]

TheSeven, any ideas when we can expect a non beta release?

[TheSeven]

Is this version working properly with p2pool (using x6500s)? Just wanted to make sure before I upgrade from that pesky v0.0.4alpha

While x6500 generally isn't the board that's best-suited for p2pool (but it should work reasonably well, 1-2% DoA unless your host PC is overloaded), there should not be much difference between the MPBM versions left. While 0.0.x might have generally lower latencies due to less complexity, 0.1.x has added a couple of optimizations, which seem to more  than outweigh that.

That said, I'm currently running MPBM 0.1.0beta on an Icarus and I'm getting like 0.8-0.9% DoA, ~5% stales total, so that's >100% efficiency, even though p2pool isn't running on the same host.

[TheSeven]

TheSeven, any ideas when we can expect a non beta release?

When enough people have tested it and we can consider it bug-free. Oh, the UI also still needs some improvements (IE/firefox/opera compatibility, highlighting in the stats table to make that more readable, description tooltips for some elements, ...), and it should also be documented better.

There are currently some experimental fixes and improvements in the testing branch, which I'd like to apply to master soon. This version has been running for like a week here without any issues, however I might have broken compatibility with some python/pyusb version and board type combinations by accident, so some more people should test this.

BTW, a non-beta of 0.0.x was never released, and I'd say that 0.1.0beta should outperform that on most aspects.