Silencing the iPollo V1 Mini Ethash/ETChash ASIC Miner Among Other Things

Mining

A couple of days in the past, now we have shared our First Impressions from the iPollo V1 Mini Ethash/ETChash ASIC Miner and now it’s time to dig slightly bit deeper into this compact and fairly highly effective home-oriented miner. One of many first issues that got here to thoughts when now we have opened this 300 MH/s Ethash/ETChash ASIC miner was how you can try to make it silent whereas working. Nano Labs have made superb job in making this a really compact and durable machine that’s nicely constructed and works below much more hostile circumstances. Nevertheless because of the small dimension they made a variety of customized issues contained in the miner which makes it a little bit of an issue to work round them attempting to switch the machine like when attempting to make it silent but cool.

We’ve already mentioned the server type heatsink that’s used that sadly isn’t any commonplace dimension for mounting on the ASIC chip and for cooling followers. The small and highly effective 60mm cooling followers discovered inside are managing to maintain the machine cool, however making it a bit noisy even when they’re operating at sub 5000 RPM (they will go as much as 7000 if wanted). And if you wish to use this at dwelling in your front room or another room the place individuals shall be current the noise degree with the followers operating at automated mode protecting the miner at round 50 levels Celsius shall be noisy. So what will be completed?

Two 60mm followers, how about changing them with a single 120mm fan and can that maintain issues cool sufficient. Nicely, you are able to do it with a single 120mm fan, however you should have related noisy miner similar to with the default 60mm followers. The rationale for that’s that fins of the heatsink are solely about 60mm tall, so basically half of the 120mm fan is not going to be utilized thus half the effectivity. Should you nonetheless do two 120mm silent followers corresponding to Arctic Cooling F120 or P120 in a push-pull configuration on each side of the heatsink you’ll handle to get a fairly silent operation and sufficient airflow to maintain the miner cool at across the 50 levels Celsius degree. Sadly, the fan mounting is just not very simple and you’re nonetheless going to be losing half of the fan’s airflow because of the low heatsink utilized by the miner. And one other doable drawback with this setup is when the ambient temperature rises above 25-30 levels Celsius, it will be an issue for already maxed out F12/P12 followers to maintain the ASIC working at round 50 levels C.

What involves thoughts right here is to make use of a bigger 140mm fan as an alternative with larger airflow and stack two of the iPollo miners on prime of one another in order that you’ll get the 140mm fan cowl each miners and supply sufficient airflow. This could work fairly nicely in principle, although we’re at the moment unable to check it as we solely have one iPollo miner out there. However there may be one other catch, the within metallic body that holds the boards of the miner is only a bit shy of having the ability to correctly match a 140mm fan inside, so you must take away the metallic body and that leads to exposing a variety of the PCB. You would wish to think about a customized case in an effort to safe issues and it higher be metallic in an effort to stop any doable interferences for the WiFi sign (in case you are utilizing the WiFi module). This might nonetheless work out very properly in making a single 600 MH/s machine cooled by a single or possibly twin Arctic Cooling P140 or Noctua NF-A14 followers (push-pull twin fan setup ought to work fairly nicely). We have to safe one other iPollo miner to proceed engaged on that concept, however you probably have multiple such machine already and are feeling as much as the duty you may work on it as nicely and share your outcomes.

After we initially shared out first impressions from the iPollo V1 Mini Ethash/ETChash it didn’t work with Nicehash, however at just about the identical time the platform has simply introduced that iPollo will really work on their platform. All you needed to do is add “--nicehash” (with out the quotes) within the Extra Choices area within the Miner Configuration web page within the internet interface. And don’t forget to take away the choice from there in case you are switching to a different mining pool as is not going to connect with different swimming pools should you overlook the choice there. You may also strive further instructions right here that shall be handed on to the back-end miner software program (extra particulars on that beneath), nonetheless you can’t monitor the output from the mining software program immediately by means of the web-based interface of iPollo.

One other helpful factor right here is that the actual gold iPollo V1 Mini ASIC miner is provided with 6GB of reminiscence (the Basic collection of V1 miners from iPollo are with simply 4GB!), so it is possible for you to to mine ETH with it. Moreover, iPollo miners do help twin mining ETH/ETC and ZIL, so some further revenue in case you are mining a appropriate Ethash or ETChash coin together with Zilliqa. Take a look at this put up on Twin Mining ETC, ETHW or ETHF plus ZIL For Higher Revenue you probably have missed it, the 6GB iPollo miners are in a position to mine the ETH forks that break up on the Merge when Ethereum switched from PoW to PoS as their DAGs are a bit over 5GB at the moment.

Additional digging into the iPollo miner we related to the machine over SSH, it has full root entry with root:root as username and password, so if you wish to discover and mess around with it you will get to it. We’ve shortly found that iPollo makes use of a modified model of cgminer so excellent news for anybody that’s acquainted with this old style miner and its big selection of choices that can be utilized, however may not be applied within the internet interface of the machine. There are some fascinating further instructions out there for the miner’s cgminer (word the nicehash choice and the poolhub one), although they don’t seem to be documented and the choice for setting the voltage doesn’t appear to work, however you may wish to attempt to discover extra, so right here they’re:

--ipollo-hmode iPollo hash mode(0:1.1v, 1:1.2v)
--xignore xcmd ignore the native goal test
--xhrate xcmd hashrate for recommend problem from pool
--xfacworker xcmd employee title for fac check
--xndiff xcmd native problem for the chips
--xcmpll xcmd cmp setting
--xcmp4w xcmd cmp4w setting
--xcv xcmd cv setting
--xkey xcmd key setting
--xse xcmd se setting
--nicehash xcmd help nicehash stratum
--poolhub xcmd help poolhub stratum
--xigncc xcmd ignore chips with capability

Right here is the default command line that’s used for dual-mining ETC + ZIL utilizing the cgminer by means of SSH if you wish to experiment and most of all to have the ability to see the complete miner output… one thing that’s form of missing within the web-based interface though you have got three totally different logs out there for viewing:

cgminer --lowmem -a and so on --ipollo-fans 1-100-50-100 --xndiff 28 --ipollo-hmode 1 -o us-west.ezil.me:4444 -u ETC_WALLET.ZIL_WALLET.WORKER_ID -p x --api-allow W:127.0.0.1/8,W:10.0.0.0/8,W:172.16.0.0/12,W:192.168.0.0/16 --api-listen

Simply just remember to have you ever ETC_WALLET, ZIL_WALLET and WORKER_ID set within the command line above to ensure that the miner to truly begin mining to your deal with. Additionally, since cgminer will in all probability already be operating when you connect with the miner over SSH, simply be certain that to first cease it with “killall -9 cgminer” (with out the quotes). There’s a course of monitor that can fireplace up cgminer should you don’t begin it up for some time after you kill the method. Glad digging and don’t overlook to share any fascinating findings with the remainder of us…