u/karpuzmining

I’ve always been a huge fan of TinyChipHub, and when I heard they had begun work on their first BM1373 miner I was ecstatic. When I saw the initial plans for it, I was even more so.

Took a while, but this past week I finally received the TCH “Zyber Blanc.” It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. The body itself is thick and heavy billet aluminum, the “mountain peaks” on top are 3D printed PETG. The idea with this miner isn’t to be an overclock monster, there will be other devices far better suited for getting this most out of the massive S23 chip. This ship with a 5V 6A power supply that leaves no room for hashing above 2.7TH/s. Still, at 8.7w/TH it’s extremely impressive.

The Zyber Blanc doesn’t have a display which is a hit unusual, so mine shipped with a “Watchdog” which looks like a 3D-printed robotic dog with a holographic display cube for a head. The Watchdog displays both the Zyber Blancs current running data, as well as every other Axe device on your fleet. Tapping the dog’s paws allows you to scroll through the various displays which is really cool, and I honestly found myself more fascinated with the Watchdog than the 5x more expensive miner it shipped with.

This miner isn’t cheap, but didn’t really expect it to be. The enclosure was probably expensive to produce, the BM1373s are costly and hard to come by, and TCH has always been essentially a luxury brand in the mini miner space. At 289usd, it’s quite a bit more expensive than the Hammer ThorX1 which is capable of achieving a much higher out-of-the-box hashrate. I’ve ordered a new PSU and will be trying to experiment with overlocking this device, but I’ll be cautious.

A number of users have reported current issues and devices that have suddenly stopped hashing, and TinyChipHub announced that they’ve been working to resolve the issue. My Zyber Blanc hasn’t been smooth sailing just yet. When I experimented with custom frequencies, it was very finicky and would drop hashrate immediately if I tried even an incremental frequency or voltage adjustments.

Hopefully, this is a firmware issue which I strongly suspect. The BM1373 is new territory for builders, and they’re a long way from perfection. The chips that power our open source miners are very closed, and they come with zero instructions as to how to use them in “unauthorized” applications. Builders do the best they can to reverse engineer and figure it out it can be a long process with a lot of speedbumps along the way.

While this is by far the most beautiful device in my desktop mining fleet, it still feels like it’s in the experimental phase. I don’t fault TinyChipHub for this, and am confident they’re working hard to get it dialed in to meet their typically very high standards. If you happen to have one of these, I’d love to hear what your experience has been like so far. Although if you already have one it’s unlikely you’d read such a lengthy post about one. I will continue to post about this as updates occur.

First photo (rendering) of the Bitaxe Pro 1373 miner from Stellapex. Price is 110usd for pre-order, which is quite a bit cheaper than the NerdQAxe equivalents at around 699usd. Better off buying four of these instead.

No word yet on when these will ship, this was sent to me by a Stellapex rep and I’m currently awaiting more details.

The Monster Miner project was started off simply: Build the most powerful and efficient 120V home miner that exists.

To really understand this project, you have to understand the Avalon Q. The Q is essentially a single-board A15 Pro build. The Monster Miner is the same idea, but with a far superior S21XP hashboard.

The project started out by removing two of the boards. BM1370’s don’t handle underclocking well, but you can easily power (and even overclock a bit) a single board with a 120V PSU. After that was done, 3D-printed baffles were inserted to maintain static pressure and direct the entirety of the airflow towards the remaining board. The power supply is a modified APW12 from an S19K Pro. By adding two resistors to the brown-out detectors on the board, can you disable what typically causes a shutdown when the voltage dips below 200. Pretty easy, just tedious.

Once the PSU is modded, you connect it to the control board with the hashboard still disconnected. Once that’s done you have to figure out internet connectivity, and you’ve got two choices; run Ethernet (the way the Lord intended) or run a wifi bridge which is what I opted to do here. Biggest reason for that was I wanted an apples to apples build with the Q—Q has wifi, so this needed it too. Pretty simple, you just splice in the Vonets cable with the 6-pin Molex and you’re off to the races. This allows you to power the board on, install Lux OS, and enable PSU bypass.

From there, it’s time to hook up the hashboards. The miner won’t actually start hashing until you’ve input a pool, so you’ve got some time to select presets and do a systems check before it ramps up. It was as this point that I realized in all of my excitement, I plugged the fans into the opposite headers, so the intake fans were blowing air in my face. Rookie mistake despite not actually being a rookie. Once I corrected it, I let the miner ramp up, and it quickly proved to be the monster miner I had hoped for.

Reporting 117TH/s, it exceeded the Q hashrate by 24TH/s. It also did so at nearly 200 watts less. I wish Lux’s efficiency numbers were accurate, but they were off by 180w according to the wall plug which reported 1610.

Overall, phase one of the Monster Miner has been a success. Phase two will add quieter fans, a touchscreen control panel, and powercoat to enhance the appearance a bit and make it a bit more monster-like. There’s still a lot of work to do, but I’m already dreaming up the S23-based Monster II. Huge shoutout to the guys at Altair for lending parts and support to make this project a reality. They’ve got a long history of building cool things and supporting others who do the same.

I’m building a Bitcoin node for a friend this morning, and needed to update the BIOS settings to boot from a USB. When I tried to launch the setup menu, I realized the BIOS admin password was enabled, and none of us know what it is. This is G6 HP Elitedesk, with more “modernized” security and no clear jumper.

Do we give up? No way. Here’s the solution. Shoutout to Rhys Goodwin by the way for providing this info which I have verified to work.

1. Power off the device. Unplug PSU.
   2.Locate the GigaDevice controller
   3.Create a short jumper wire, and place one end on a ground point and the other on pin #2 of the controller (shown in photo)
   4.Plug in PSU, power on. The thing will go nuts. Red flashing lights, a series of beeps, don’t be alarmed.
2. Power off the device. Unplug the PSU.
3. Hold the power button down for 15 seconds to clear caps.
4. Plug the PSU back in, power it on, and hooray! You’re in!

I’ll post a YouTube video later today for anyone who needs it. Hope this helps someone!

So this is interesting. 2.5TH/s at 20w, which makes for one of the most efficient miners in the world.

Full battery of tests and review coming soon.

By no means the most powerful or efficient miner on the market these days, the Hex models are still one of the leaders in the looks department. As far as hashrate can push these to around 3.75TH/s, although the fans get a little noisy so it seems happiest (and quietest) around 3TH. This is most comparable to the Gamma Turbo with only two 1370 chips, and is right around the same price

At 199usd, it’s also only slightly less expensive than a 6.5TH Nano 3S or two Duo 650’s equaling around 5TH/s, so the appeal here is really having something that just looks wildly cool sitting on your desk. All TinyChipHub’s miners have unique stands and enclosures, and are instantly recognizable since no one else builds devices anything quite like this.

So while it may not cheapest, latest, greatest, or even quietest miner on the block, it’s still one of the few miners that wouldn’t look out of place sitting on some CEO’s desk in a fancy high rise overlooking Manhattan.

I wanted to find a way to effectively manage my home miners, and see every imaginable data metric without it being overwhelming. So my friend and I spent hundreds of hours developing, tweaking, and testing until we found a solution.

The goal was simple, really. Create a mining management system that included absolutely everything we wanted, but make it entirely customizable so other home miners could make it exactly how they wanted. So we made a bunch of modules, made them expandable, and added the ability to arrange them any way users want.

In current configuration, we’ve got support for a wide range of home miners from my little Bitaxe 602 to my slightly larger modded Antminers running Lux. Soon, we’ll also have support for our hosted miners so our entire fleet is at our fingertips.

Thank you to the over 500 home miners who thought this was cool enough to download the first day we launched it. We’re going to keep working hard to make it better and better, and we’ve also got some other fun things in the works.

I won’t mention the name, include any links, or try to convince anyone to download it. Just wanted to show off something we’re proud of that we’ve built for the home mining community. Would love to see what others are working on as well.

I wanted to find a way to effectively manage my Bitaxes, and see every imaginable data metric without it being overwhelming. So my friend and I spent hundreds of hours developing, tweaking, and testing until we found a solution.

The goal was simple, really. Create a mining management system that included absolutely everything we wanted, but make it entirely customizable so other home miners could make it exactly how they wanted. So we made a bunch of modules, made them expandable, and added the ability to arrange them any way users want.

As an added bonus, we realized that the device we were using for remote access to a different mining app also works with the app we made—with no additional config or setup needed. Two different teams, but still good friends. We’re still working on our own remote bridge of course, and easy access for Tailscale users on a variety of nodes and devices.

Thank you to the over 500 home miners who thought this was cool enough to download the first day we launched it. We’re going to keep working hard to make it better and better, and we’ve got some other fun things in the works.

Hashboard just had a major update, with a wide range of pretty interesting features. One of the coolest aspects in my opinion is that it’s infinitely customizable. Makes things easy for new guys starting out wanting to avoid data overload, while also keeping the data nerds like me happy with robust, configurable data modules.

Where it gets really interesting is Smartminer feature, which uses smart plugs to get exact efficiency and cost-to-run data. I did an experiment a few weeks ago that was fairly enlightening as to how inaccurate AxeOS and others tend to be. Avalon miners are the exception to this, but my Axe devices were all over the place with some using far more power (NerdQAxe++) and some actually using quite a bit less (650 Duo) than the dash and connected apps were reporting. Exact data is always preferred to best guesses, and this is one of the things that really sets Hashboard apart.

Customization is key. Beyond the pretty colors, data-rich modules, or things like allowing for Canaan pool changes (I know this is a Bitaxe group, but it’s notable because this is the first all that allows this) is the ability to make it entirely your own. Write access can be disabled to make it read-only (good if kids get ahold of your phone), modules can be rearranged, added, or removed. Everything is there, and it’s wherever you want it to be.

The fleet overview provides a nice “at a glance” view of the fleet with essential data, overview section provides a leaderboard so you can see which of your devices is either the all-time or session’s high achiever, and miner share tracking shows proof of work as miners hash away submitting hashes to your pool of choice.

As for the “other” home mining app which I can’t name since the autobot will assume I’m looking for support and flag my post, I’m still a fan. I was a contributor to that project and a friend of the developer, and one of the first ones to ever promote it. Hashboard is something I’ve had significantly more involvement with. It’s one of several projects the BlockFound team is launching, and I’m really proud to see how it’s turned out. The App Store version is currently available to try out, and Android users will have access to this latest big update later tomorrow.