SUPPORTED DEVICES Currently supported ASIC devices include Avalon, Bitfountain's Block Erupter series (both USB and blades), a large variety of Bitfury-based miners, and Butterfly Labs' SC range of devices. AVALON ------ Currently, Avalon boards are supported only by connecting them directly (or via a hub) to a regular PC running BFGMiner. It is also possible to install the OpenWrt packages of BFGMiner to the Avalon's embedded controller, but this is not a simple task due to its lack of available flash space. To use the Avalon from a regular PC, you will need to specify two options: First, add the -S option specifying the avalon driver specifically. For example, -S avalon:\\.\COM9 Next, use the --avalon-options copying the command as used by the internal router used by the Avalon. eg: --avalon-options 115200:24:10:45:282 The values are baud : miners : asic count : timeout : frequency. Baud: The device is pretty much hard coded to emulate 115200 baud so you shouldn't change this. Miners: Most Avalons are 3 module devices, which come to 24 miners. 4 module devices would use 32 here. Asic count: Virtually all have 10, so don't change this. Timeout: This is how long the device will work on a work item before accepting new work to replace it. It should be changed according to the frequency (last setting). It is possible to set this a little lower if you are trying to tune for short block mining (eg p2pool) but much lower and the device will start creating duplicate shares. Sample settings for valid different frequencies (last 2 values): 34:375 36:350 39:325 43:300 45:282 47:270 50:256 Frequency: This is the clock speed of the devices. Only specific values work, 256, 270, 282 (default), 300, 325, 350 and 375. If you use the full curses based interface with Avalons you will get this information: AVA 0: 22/ 46C 60%/2400R The values are: ambient temp / highest device temp set fan % / lowest detected fan RPM. Use the API for more detailed information than this. BFSB, MEGABIGPOWER, AND METABANK BITFURY BOARDS ----------------------------------------------- Both BFSB and MegaBigPower (V2 only at this time) boards are supported with the "bfsb" driver. Metabank boards are supported with the "metabank" driver. These drivers are not enabled by default, since they must be run on a Raspberry Pi in a specific hardware configuration with the boards. To enable them, you must build with --enable-bfsb or --enable-metabank. Do not try to use these drivers without the manufacturer-supported hardware configuration! Also note that these drivers do not properly support thermal shutdown at this time, and without sufficient cooling you may destroy your board or chips! To start BFGMiner, ensure your Raspberry Pi's SPI is enabled (you can run the raspi-config utility for this). For Metabank boards, you must also load the I2C drivers (do not try to modprobe both with a single command; it won't work): modprobe i2c-bcm2708 modprobe i2c-dev Then you must run BFGMiner as root, with the proper driver selected. For example: sudo bfgminer -S bfsb:auto BIG PICTURE MINING BITFURY USB ------------------------------ These miners are sensitive to unexpected data. Usually you can re-plug them to reset to a known-good initialisation state. To ensure they are properly detected and used with BFGMiner, you must specify -S bigpic:all (or equivalent) options prior to any other -S options (which might probe the device and confuse it). BLOCK ERUPTER BLADE ------------------- Blades communicate over Ethernet using the old but simple getwork mining protocol. If you build BFGMiner with libmicrohttpd, you can have it work with one or more blades. First, start BFGMiner with the --http-port option. For example: bfgminer --http-port 8330 Then configure your blade to connect to your BFGMiner instance on the same port, with a unique username per blade. It will then show up as a SGW device and should work more or less like any other miner. BLOCK ERUPTER USB ----------------- These will autodetect if supported by the device; otherwise, you need to use the '--scan-serial erupter:' option to tell BFGMiner what device to probe; if you know you have no other serial devices, or only ones that can tolerate garbage, you can use '--scan-serial erupter:all' to probe all serial ports. They communicate with the Icarus protocol, which has some additional options in README.FPGA --- This code is provided entirely free of charge by the programmer in his spare time so donations would be greatly appreciated. Please consider donating to the address below. Luke-Jr 1QATWksNFGeUJCWBrN4g6hGM178Lovm7Wh