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BITMAIN Antminer U2 with Additional Heat Sinks

The trip to New York is over, but it was great. Thanks to all that let us stay with them and showed us around.

Back at home, I have the chance to delve into tiny packages all waiting for my return. Also waiting was the Raspberry Pi. Before any further tinkering I should update the status of the mining as it goes with the BITMAIN Antminer U2. I left it running while I was away on my laptop with lid down in attempts to minimize power consumption. It has been running at 0781 frequency setting and is averaging just over 1.5 GH/s at 1.57 GH/s over the past week. I have no active cooling currently, so I fear increasing the frequency. This little circuit board runs hot! I will follow this post with updates on my thermoelectric cooling/energy recovery attempts and setting up the Raspberry Pi and getting it to mine with the Antminer U2.

Seebeck(Probably Peltier) Chip and Micro Heat Sink with Fan

In the packages awaiting my return from New York were a set of micro heat sinks for the Antminer U2 and a Seebeck chip - or so I thought. Excited I grabbed a battery and a candle and the tiny heatsink/fan I purchased and received before I left. I held the leads to each respective end of a AA battery. Sure enough one side grew hot and the other cold. I don't know everything about Seebeck and Peltier chips but I may have a Peltier despite the seller claiming it was a Seebeck. As I said I don't know everything about them so it may be possible to produce the Peltier effect with a Seebeck, and hopefully vise versa. Attempting a quick trial, I connected the leads to the matching leads on the fan. Next I lit the candle and carefully held the chip, hot side down, over it. No motion.

It may be possible that I am not effectively cooling the cold side of the chip and therefore not allowing it to generate electricity. Likewise my quickly finger twisted connections were not sufficiently conductive. A third option could be that the chip is producing a current, but that current is insufficient to drive the small fan. Tonight I will research a bit more about setting up a thermoelectric generator and post my findings in following posts.

The other arrival, the micro heat sinks, were pretty fool proof. The came with pre-applied thermal conductive adhesive. I shut down my mining and carefully removed the Antminer U2 (it was very hot). Once it cooled I peeled the backing off of the adhesive sections and pressed them to the appropriate chips. I inserted the Antminer and restarted mining. I don't expect a hash rate increase form simply adding the heat sinks, but I do hope they dissipate more heat while I work on alternative cooling options mentioned above.

Raspberry Pi Arrival!

Raspberry Pi Starter Kit

Yesterday I celebrated Pi Day a bit late when the Raspberry Pi arrived! I didn't have much time to delve into the setup. I also didn't have a spare keyboard to use and the TV was claimed by my girlfriend.

I'm vacationing in New York for a few days starting tomorrow, so I won't have much time to play until I get back. I should be able to borrow one of the numerous spare keyboards from work. I can claim the TV to use as a monitor for a bit while I set it up and will hijack the network drop for the Xbox 360.

Some of the parts I ordered for the Antminer cooling apparatus arrived. I sacrificed an old USB printer cable to get the fan to work. I may attempt to rig the fan to the heat sink of the miner with zip ties until I have everything. Heat may not transfer well to the pot metal heat sink on the fan from the Antminer's. At this point though I may wait to avoid the annoyance of taking it all apart.

Antminer Ticking Away Haiku

Laptop Antminer

Heat is a problem. No fan

Parts on order now

I'm planning to sandwich a Seebeck chip between a heat sink and the Antminer. I will mount a small fan to the heat sink and it will be powered by the Seebeck chip. Perpetual motion, details will follow soon.

Installing the BITMAIN Antmine U2

Antminer in action.

Wading through search results majoring in the sales of BITMAIN Antminers, ASICMiner Block Erupters, and all other variety of devices one can find a few quality resources with installation instructions for the previous version of the Antminer. Finding a guide specific to the U2 was a challenge and I am yet to be successful. Luckily the technology is not far off from the U1 and so the setup was basically the same.
Note: This installation is for Windows 7 64 bit. Other operating systems may vary.
Before inserting the Antminer I needed to accumulate a host of software and drivers. I also needed to establish that my account with the mining pool BTC Guild was still active and accessible. I was easily able to log in with my old credentials. There were also a few fractions of Bitcoin left that I never paid out. Actually these were what I thought was in my wallet but couldn’t recover. No losses! For future reference, mining with NVidia GTX 560 is not fruitful…
The account with BTC Guild pool is good to go and I have miners set up there. I took note of the host URL, my miner or username, and the password for use later when launching the mining client.
I found many recommendations, and instructionals, pointing towards BFGMiner and CGMiner. In truth, I couldn’t get BFGMiner to work last night. I may give it another try but for the scope of this project it may not be worth the time. CGMiner gave me some issues but at the 11 th hour I found the magic combination of arguments to pass and USB finagling voodoo when launching that got it working. I didn’t let it mine over night as my PC is a bit too power thirsty for a long run mining mission. Tonight, or sometime this weekend, I will fire up my laptop and run through this installation again to see what I can get for a few days’ worth of mining.
Now on to installing the Antminer. It is a USB device and obviously not plug and play compatible. So using it out of the box is impossible. The computer and mining clients have no clue what to do with it other than say it’s plugged in… maybe. You will need to grab the branch of CGMiner from Github specifically tailored to mining with the Antminer. I know it says for the U1 but it does work with the U2. Make sure to get the latest stable release, as with any software. Extract it to C:\ into its own directory for easy access from the command line. Next download the Silicon Labs CP2102 driver for your operating system and install it. Finally, download and install Zadig, a piece of software that offers a GUI for USB device driver installation.
Insert the Antminer U2 and let the computer acknowledge it. Next, and very important, launch Zadig and click “Option” -> “List All Devices” and select [CP2102 USB to UART Bridge Controller] then click “Reinstall Driver” or “Replace Driver.” In all honesty it would be nice to have some confirmation that the Antminer U2 was correctly installed and functioning but that may add too much overhead and cost to the package.
Launch command prompt. Drill down to the directory where CGMiner was installed. You can launch CGMiner using
cgminer.exe --bmsc-options 115200:20 -o [your pool URL] -u [your username/miner] -p [your password] --bmsc-freq 0781
I finalized this line after various other attempts sourced from forums and instructional pages. You should see some output and it should eventually start mining after requesting block information and jobs from the pool.
The whole process above is finicky. If the Antminer is not plugged in it will pause and output that it is waiting for the device. You can plug the device in but it won’t acknowledge it. If the miner is plugged in CGMiner will start but may not begin mining. In one instance I managed to get CGMiner running and mining but it was using my GPU. I was actually unsure of which device was being used to mine until I opened a system monitoring app and notice my GPU was clocking at 99%. With the line above it should specifically use the Antminer and nothing else.
To make life easier I prepended the location of the .exe and saved this line
C:/cgminer/cgminer-run/cgminer.exe --bmsc-options 115200:20 -o [your pool URL] -u [your username/miner] -p [your password] --bmsc-freq 0781
in a .CMD file. That file resides on my desktop and when double clicked launches CGMiner with the appropriate settings.
Results from mining for a few minutes are in the picture.

Antminer Arrives

I tried posting this last night but was distracted by delicious Pad Thai and Les Revenants episodes.

After a not so long wait the Bitmain Antminer U2 is in!

Opening the envelope reveals a modest USB dongle in a nifty white plastic case. Very clean packaging with a spiffy magnet catch. Exposed circuitry on the back for the geeks and a simple black heat sink on the opposing side for the other geeks. No scratches and nothing apparently broken or burned out. Now to get cracking on some blocks!

First off, revive that old wallet...

Easier said than done.

My last attempts at mining left me with about 10 cents worth of Bitcoins, so the effort to unscramble the splattering of numbers and characters I left myself as notes to access said wallet was not worth it. I made a new wallet. Again
I went with BlockChain for no other reason than it was where my last one was. I must have done some amount of research before opening the original, so using it again didn't seem too harmful. I'm no BTC millionaire so if it get hacked or lost or whatever I'm no worse than I am loosing spare change.

After filling out text boxes and waiting for confirmation codes my new wallet is open. Next up, mining pools, mining software, and drivers. Still waiting on the Raspberry Pi.

Perseus Telecom and ATLAS ATS Announce Bitcoin Trading Platform

Perseus Telecom, a private global high precision network provider for trading, gaming, e-commerce, and multimedia announced Wednesday, 12 March 2014 trading Bitcoin on ATLAS ATS matching engine in New York, Hong Kong, and Singapore. ATLAS ATS was built to provide a modern secure platform for digital currency transactions.

More here

Pi and Miner Ordered

Finished writing the last post and then proceeded to order some things. Will post pics when they get here in a few days. I should be able to get the Pi mining with what I ordered. After I get things up and running I'll look into the solar panels and batteries.