minerstat mining tutorial #39: Profit switch with Blackminer F1 FPGAs

Published in

minerstat

6 min readDec 19, 2019

There was a lot of talking about Blackminer FPGAs in these past weeks and we got many inquiries and questions if this miner is supported with minerstat and if it also allows profit switching. The answers are yes and yes: we support Blackminer FPGAs from May 2019 and profit switch is available for all supported mining hardware.

Since Blackminer can be used for mining different algorithms, the configuration for profit switch needs to be entered manually for each profit switching option. In this tutorial, we will show how to do it from start to end.

Blackminer FPGA: Monitoring and management

To use the profit switching function for Blackminer FPGAs you must first set up the monitoring and management system. At the moment of writing, Blackminers are supported through ASIC Hub SSH, which means the software must be installed directly on the machine. Detailed instructions are available on this page and a blog tutorial is available here.

Add a new worker on the minerstat dashboard with type ASIC and system Blackminer. Enter correct local IP, username root and password root.
SSH login to your machine with username root and password root.
Run the following command where the ACCESS_KEY is your access key and the WORKER_NAME is your worker’s name.

cd /tmp && wget -O install.sh  http://static.minerstat.farm/github/install.sh && chmod 777 *.sh  && sh install.sh ACCESS_KEY WORKER_NAME

💡 Hint: If you decide to install ASIC Hub to other machines as well, you can use bulk installations from Windows, Mac, or Linux.

✏️ Note: We are working on the ASIC Hub (Non-SSH) support for the Blackminer FPGAs.

When your machine sync for the first time, a basic configuration will be loaded and saved as a backup template.

Blackminer FPGA: Preparations

For the purpose of demonstration, we will add three options to the profit switch, but following this guide, you can add even more of them. The profit switch will be between CKB (Nervos Network), the zpool Tribus algorithm, and the zpool Lyra2REv3 algorithm.

First, we will prepare address editor and config templates to make the procedure of setting up profit switch faster and more organized.

1. Address editor

In the address editor, we will prepare tags that we will use in our config templates. You don’t have to use tags at all, but we believe that they are good for keeping things organized and in case you want to switch to another pool or another wallet, tags make it really easy to do it.

First, we will save pools for all three profit switching options:

CKB: stratum+tcp://ckb.f2pool.com:4300
Lyra2REv3: stratum+tcp://lyra2v3.eu.mine.zpool.ca:4550
Tribus: stratum+tcp://tribus.eu.mine.zpool.ca:8533

Next, we need to save wallets for all three profit switching options. For CKB we need to use the CKB wallet, and for zpool Tribus and Lyra2REv3, we will use the BTC payout option.

2. Config templates

The next destination is config templates. As already mentioned, you must have a backup template already prepared in your config templates. You can use it as a base and copy it to create other templates, but we will list all three templates for all three options here as well.

Don’t forget that Blackminer uses the “coin-type” parameter where you need to define which algorithm is being used. You can find this parameter at the end of the config.

💡 Hint: You can also download all three config templates here and import them to your config templates list.

2.1 CKB config template

Config template for CKB would look like this. The “coin-type” parameter is in this case “ckb”.

{ "pools" : [ { "url" : "(POOL:CKB)", "user" : "(WALLET:CKB).(WORKER)", "pass" : "x" } ] , "api-listen" : true, "api-network" : true, "api-groups" : "A:stats:pools:devs:summary:version", "api-allow" : "A:0/0,W:*", "use-vil" : true, "freq" : "420", "coin-type" : "ckb" }

2.2 Tribus config template

Config template for zpool Tribus would look like this. The “coin-type” parameter is in this case “tribus”. Also, don’t forget to set the password to “c=BTC” as you are mining on zpool and the payout will be in BTC.

{ "pools" : [ { "url" : "(POOL:TRIBUS)", "user" : "(WALLET:BTC).(WORKER)", "pass" : "c=BTC" } ] , "api-listen" : true, "api-network" : true, "api-groups" : "A:stats:pools:devs:summary:version", "api-allow" : "A:0/0,W:*", "use-vil" : true, "freq" : "420", "coin-type" : "tribus" }

2.3 Lyra2REv3 config template

Config template for zpool Lyra2REv3 would look like this. The “coin-type” parameter is in this case “lyra2rev3”. Also, don’t forget to set the password to “c=BTC” as you are mining on zpool and the payout will be in BTC.

{ "pools" : [ { "url" : "(POOL:LYRA2REV3)", "user" : "(WALLET:BTC).(WORKER)", "pass" : "c=BTC" } ] , "api-listen" : true, "api-network" : true, "api-groups" : "A:stats:pools:devs:summary:version", "api-allow" : "A:0/0,W:*", "use-vil" : true, "freq" : "420", "coin-type" : "lyra2rev3" }

Blackminer FPGA: Profit switch

Now that everything is prepared the last step is to set up a profit switch.

1. Target

Select your worker as a target.

💡 Hint: Even if you want to set up a profit switch for multiple ASICs, first set it up for one and when you see that you have set up everything correctly, include other workers to the target list and save changes.

2. Coins

Add coins one by one and don’t forget to select ASIC as a mining client as you will need to edit the config of each option.

Even though the settings defined here won’t be used as we will load custom config, it is good to have them saved to know what is being mined on first look.

Now, edit the config of each option by clicking on the wrench icon and loading the appropriate config template.

3. Hashrate and consumption

Enter hashrate and consumption for each algorithm or fill the fields from our database.

4. Electricity costs

Enter your electricity costs.

5. When to switch?

Define the minimum difference when you want profit switch to switch to a better option and minimum mining time. To avoid too frequent switching, we suggest starting at 10% and 3 hours. SSH version of ASIC Hub is slower than Non-SSH as it requires a reboot of the machine. Additionally, mining at PPLNS pools such as zpool, too frequent pool switching is not recommended.

6. Reward method

You can apply the reward method that you think will fit the best your profit switch setup. Since mining at zpool is included, we suggest activating buffer.