This article is part of a series about Steiger, a Software-as-a-Service platform to manage all aspects of professional mining farms.
Articles in the series:
- Getting Started With Steiger
- Using Steiger’s Pre-Recording System (this article)
If you haven't read the first article yet, we recommend to do so before you proceed.
As professional miners you probably faced that problem at some point: You got your shipping from China and now you need to set up a few thousand machines as quickly as possible. Every minute those rigs sit on palettes and not on shelves, mining for you, you're losing money on your investment.
Avid miners ourselves, we realized early on, that this is a colossal opportunity to be faster than the ever growing competition. So we developed a solution that enables you to do just that: have your miners getting configured automatically the moment you connect them to the network and also inventorize each machine — quickly & easily:
What does it do?
Like mentioned above, the process has 2 main goals: Make the process of configuring your miners as easy, fast and safe against errors as possible and properly inventorize your machines, so you know what's what for each and every machine you run.
During the process, a label is being printed which contains the miners ID as text as well as QR code. This enables you or your laborers to quickly identify each miner using the mobile app. Scan the QR code and see
- the history of the miner (when and by whom it has been configured, restarted etc.)
- the current firmware version
- temperature and hash rate
- tickets assigned to this machine
You can even assign fixing tickets to laborers and track their time accordingly. We talk about this feature in a future post, here on Medium!
Locations
During the initial setup wizard of Steiger, you create your first location. Locations are a way to describe your physical setup to the system. This digital representation of your racks allows you to
- quickly locate faulty machines
- identify temperature hot spots
- keep track of huge, distributed operations with ease
How do I use it?
The process is designed in a way that adds as little time as possible to the overall process. As you can see in the video above, it's as quick as 30 seconds per machine, even including fiddling with the label 😉.
Using the Steiger mobile app, you wirelessly connect to a label printer (e.g. Brother P-Touch Cube plus) and one of our Eisen. This is done with Bluetooth, so accessing both devices is as easy as pairing your mobile to your headphones.
Once connected, you attach the running miner (only the mainboard needs to be powered on most ASICs) to Eisen using their respective network interfaces. After a few seconds, the app will confirm that a unit has been found — all you need to do is press a button in the app to print the label and put that on the miner.
As soon as the label has been printed, the miner is registered in the database of Steiger. You can now put it on a rack, connect it to the network and Steiger & Kumpel will configure it automatically, exactly the way you set it up.
Using Eisen
Like mentioned above, all you need to do, is connect your smartphone to a label printer and Eisen using the mobile app:
Conclusion
Steigers setup process using Eisen is a method to quickly inventorize ASIC miners. It also aides the automatic configuration of each machine. The process itself is quick, straight forward and does not require detailed knowledge, so unskilled laborers can do it without lots of training or supervision.
If you have further question, check out our documentation on docs.steiger.app or join our Discord!
