[ANN] Miner Control 1.6.1 - Auto profit switching miner controller

[StuffOfInterest]

Let me add a little bit to what Travis9x said.

"power" and "exchange" are currently only used to calculate the cost of mining for next profitability purposes.  The power consumption per algorithm for a machine can be looked at two different ways.  If your machine is a dedicated mining rig then the total power consumption of the machine should be considered.  This can probably best be found with a wall monitor or possibly with a UPS that has built in monitoring.  If your machine is normally used for other activities, and always left on, then you should only consider the difference in power consumption between machine idle and when mining an algorithm.  In this scenario the power when idle is a sunk cost as you would be burning that anyway and all you really care about is the added cost of mining.  As was said, if your power is free then just use 0 for power cost and then the exchange rate doesn't matter as anything multiplied by zero will still be zero.

As for automating the exchange rate, I actually did start looking into that recently and found a couple of exchanges with fairly comprehensive lists of fiat currency to Bitcoin exchange rates available via an API.  It is on my wish list to add to the program after I get the donation mining coded up.  Most likely implementation will be to have a new configuration value, called "currencycode", which gets the three letter currency code such as "USD" or "EUR".  On an occasional basis (perhaps once every 10 minutes) I'll call out to the two exchanges with the currency conversion api to get their rates for the currency code.  If one returns I'll use it, if both return I'll use an average, if none returns when I'll fall back to the manual rate entered or "0" if that has not been entered.

Once we have real exchange rates I'll probably add another column to the services column with the by service balance given in fiat currency so people will see how much they've earned in non digital money.

As for an update on open sourcing the program, I'm making progress in getting familiar with git and GitHub.  I'm leaning towards having the main branch wit releases published out there and keeping the development branch while I'm adding features local.  I still need to figure out how third parties submit code changes while I keep control of the commits.  I see it is there, just haven't played with it yet.  Once I do get the source code out there maybe someone else will have better luck finding the crash bug that a few people have reported.  I have never been able to reproduce it which makes it really hard to find since nobody out there has been able to capture a good error message from their event logs so far.

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[canigetanipa]

Thanks, that makes sense I thought it was a user parameter. Yes it's a dedicated rig

[polanskiman]

How's the work coming along for WafflePool??

Waiting for them to produce a realtime API.

Ok. Hopefully they will soon

By the way, I see you use 0.90 as weight in your .conf file. Why would one not trust the reported price of the pool?

If I don't want to put any weight, I simply use 1 as value, right?

He weights NiceHash slightly lower, since both NiceHash and WestHash provide exactly the same payout, and he is geographically closer to WestHash (thus the tiny weight difference will usually only make NiceHash reported profitability slightly less than WestHash, but not affect the value of WestHash against any other mining pools).  I use a weight of 0.99 on NiceHash for the same reason.
And yes, you can just put 1 for no weight, or remove that line entirely.

Also. I have noticed that since I have been using MinerControl, Nicehash seems to be reporting less hash power than when I used ccminer alone. Any ideas why?

Here are the stats. https://nicehash.com/?p=miners&a=4&d=7&addr=1F1DChiJvjyZymecjFY4JwTjrbkaeVZNKj
Notice the right side of the graph. Average hash is lower than all the left part where all the hash is more compact and miner was not constantly switching from one algo to the other.

It's probably because your miners are switching to other pools some of the time, so your total hashrate for NiceHash per hour is lower.  Just my guess.

Finally, what is the purpose of providing the hashrate, power and exchange values? Are they only used as visual reference in the GUI or are they used to calculate something?

Sorry if all these questions sound dumb but I'd rather ask than remain ignorant!

They are used to calculate the profitability of each algorithm/pool, yes.  The "Net" column indicates this.  (ie, hashrate x price = earn, and earn - fees - power = net…not precisely how the calculations work, but it should help you get the general idea)  This is how the tool knows which algorithm/pool to mine, by judging which is most profitable from these numbers (the one with the highest Net).

Thanks

[Travis9x]

Also. I have noticed that since I have been using MinerControl, Nicehash seems to be reporting less hash power than when I used ccminer alone. Any ideas why?

Here are the stats. https://nicehash.com/?p=miners&a=4&d=7&addr=1F1DChiJvjyZymecjFY4JwTjrbkaeVZNKj
Notice the right side of the graph. Average hash is lower than all the left part where all the hash is more compact and miner was not constantly switching from one algo to the other.

It's probably because your miners are switching to other pools some of the time, so your total hashrate for NiceHash per hour is lower.  Just my guess.

I just noticed something else about this.  The NiceHash graphs only show your hashrate PER ALGORITHM, not your total hashrate for the whole pool in general.  So of course if you compare your hashrate on ONE algorithm, when you were using ccMiner alone, to mining on MULTIPLE algorithms with MinerControl, then the graph for that ONE algorithm is going to look broken and sporadic, because MinerControl switches you to other algorithms when they're more profitable for you.  In addition, MinerControl also switches you to entirely different pools, if they're more profitable (and also only if you've set them up), so that will break up your hashrate with NiceHash as well.  But all-in-all, since MinerControl has you mining with whatever pool & algorithm is most profitable at the time, your total income/profit is going to be higher per hour per megahash, than it would be if you were only mining a single algorithm on a single pool.

In short, you have to take the data from those graphs IN CONTEXT.  You can't just glance at the surface, and make a judgement from that.

[StuffOfInterest]

Just released version 1.2.0.  The only significant change is to finally add donation mining.  By default MinerControl will mine for 2% of the time every 4 hours to my accounts.  You can adjust these parameters or if you don't want to do donation mining just set the "donationpercentage" property to 0.

As always, a big thanks to those who have chosen to donate in the past.  If it hadn't been for those small (and some not so small) encouragements I probably wouldn't have taken MinerControl as far as I have so far.

[AL23]

Thank you.  Just upgraded to 1.2.0.  Keep up the grate work.  Would love to see more pools added when you find once that work with MC.

[DemosMirak]

Upgrading as I type. Thanks for all the work!

[ltc_bilic]

Awesome, just finished upgrading all the miners!
People increase the donation percentage, it's a small fee compared to what you get for it.

[StuffOfInterest]

OK, as promised, time to put the dirty laundry out for all to see.  As of version 1.2.0, Miner Control is now open source.  You can see all of the ugliness over at the GitHub repository.

For now I'll keep offering binary downloads from my site but sooner or later I'll transition to hosting both source and binary packages only from GitHub.  If there wasn't some odd issue with Bitcointalk not being able to proxy image links from GitHub I'd host the screen shots there to.

Consider using the issue tracker for any bugs you find.  This thread will probably remain the main place for support but for things that require code fixes it would be nice to have the issues documented in the repository.

If you are a coder, pull requests will be considered.  There are certainly a few features left to add in.

[StuffOfInterest]

MinerControl 1.2.1 released.

Adds support for WafflePool.

I don't like that their API for earnings only goes to the day level rather than a sliding window of a couple of hours but this will have to do for now.

[Travis9x]

OK, as promised, time to put the dirty laundry out for all to see.  As of version 1.2.0, Miner Control is now open source.  You can see all of the ugliness over at the GitHub repository.

For now I'll keep offering binary downloads from my site but sooner or later I'll transition to hosting both source and binary packages only from GitHub.  If there wasn't some odd issue with Bitcointalk not being able to proxy image links from GitHub I'd host the screen shots there to.

Consider using the issue tracker for any bugs you find.  This thread will probably remain the main place for support but for things that require code fixes it would be nice to have the issues documented in the repository.

If you are a coder, pull requests will be considered.  There are certainly a few features left to add in.

Awesome!  I have some tests and important papers to write for my classes right now, but I'll be sure to examine your code in the next week or two, and submit some feature suggestions for your appraisal.  Keep up the great work!   

PS:  Nice to see WafflePool added, despite their lack of a real-time API.  I wish CoinKing was more willing to work with you on their APIs.   

[StuffOfInterest]

MinerControl 1.2.2 has been released and is available for download.

This is just a fix for a problem with the cumulative running time for a service not showing in the service grid.

[DemosMirak]

The donation miner, does it mine against the same address as to which we could manually donate, or is it a separate address?

[StuffOfInterest]

The donation miner, does it mine against the same address as to which we could manually donate, or is it a separate address?

Same address.  For TradeMyBit, it mines against an account named "MinerControl".  Both are listed in the sample config file now.  I've seen some credit going into all of the pools since yesterday so a few people are definitely doing the donation mining!

I try to keep the MinerControl income and my personal mining income segregated.

[DemosMirak]

Guys, what do you think is a good weight for Wafflepool, due to the 24 hour average stats? I myself chose for 0.8, but should it be higher/lower?

[StuffOfInterest]

Guys, what do you think is a good weight for Wafflepool, due to the 24 hour average stats? I myself chose for 0.8, but should it be higher/lower?

0.8 is about what I was thinking.  So far, even at 1, it hasn't been my top very much since I started testing last night.  20% penalty for out of date information seems reasonable.

[Travis9x]

Guys, what do you think is a good weight for Wafflepool, due to the 24 hour average stats? I myself chose for 0.8, but should it be higher/lower?

0.8 is about what I was thinking.  So far, even at 1, it hasn't been my top very much since I started testing last night.  20% penalty for out of date information seems reasonable.

I agree.  Though even with no weight adjustment, WafflePool hasn't risen to my top at all since it was added.

[Travis9x]

I also just noticed that CoinKing is finally responding to your API requests.  And, Miner Control is getting attention in the ccMiner / CUDAmining thread as well.  This excellent tool and your hard work is being recognized!   

[StuffOfInterest]

I also just noticed that CoinKing is finally responding to your API requests.  And, Miner Control is getting attention in the ccMiner / CUDAmining thread as well.  This excellent tool and your hard work is being recognized!   

Many pages back I posted on that thread when I first put NiceHash Control out being that at the time it was about the only way to algo switch on NiceHash with nVIDIA cards.  I still keep track of that thread but not often enough.  When I went over there now I was over 10 pages behind but I did see the discussion.  Thanks for carrying the torch.

[DemosMirak]

I just noticed, but the wafflepool X13 price keeps being 0, leading to the rest of the calculations being 0 as well. Am I the only with this?