There is nothing obvious about Bitcoin mining. With its own specialized hardware, software, and even lingo, the world of Bitcoin mining can appear at first to be a scary place for the Newbie cryptocoin miner. As with most new things, there is much to learn, and also much to get bitten by. While search engines are helpful, sometimes it can be challenging to find the particular information you need. Nowhere else is this more true than when it comes to finding information to properly setup and configure the ASIC Erupter blade.
When I first purchased my blade, I came to the table as a system administrator and a veteran programmer. Having built both computer systems and the networks that connect them, I felt fairly comfortable that I could get my board "up and hashing" relatively quickly...
I was wrong. In the absence of *any* documentation, I ended up scratching my head for a week before I had my blade hashing and generating bitcoin.
After working with the hardware for a short time, I could tell that it was bleeding edge technology in that it behaved as a "right off the presses" product. The HTML web interface was unpolished and syntactically incorrect (more on that in a later article). The rig itself looked more like something that belonged in a research lab than on a consumer's desk. In short, this was the "hard" of hardware.
Fortunately, I was not the first to travel this treacherous path, and now neither are you. After a week in the wilderness, Google searches and email exchanges with the vendor that I bought the board from finally yielded results. I encountered some very well done tutorials on the net (which I will include in the reference section of this series) and found good advice via valuable conversation on bitcointalk.org. For the most part, the bitcoin community has been both helpful and welcoming. It is that spirit that I wish to uphold in these articles.
With that said, before we start down our yellow brick road together I would like to add the following advice:
While there is something both attractive and appealing about the DIY (do-it-yourself) aspects of putting together your own bitcoin mining rigs, resist the temptation to make life harder on yourself by trying to do too much. Ultimately, I would guess that most of you bought your bitcoin rigs to make money by mining bitcoins. The more time you spend building or customizing your rig, the less time it will spend doing what you actually bought it for. With the ASIC Erupter Blades version 2, I highly (highly) recommend that you also purchase the companion backplane and power supply. They are matched to your hardware and are very easy to assemble. If you are also a fan of aesthetics you can purchase the backplane and open air case available from http://bitcoinrigs.org. I certainly do *not* recommend powering the boards from the top power connector and/or adapting a regular computer case and power supply to house them.
For the first version of the boards (Version 1) this was required, the additional custom hardware that came as an option for Version 2 was definitely an improvement that will most likely lead to fewer short circuits and more reliable operation. Going the McGyver route will almost surely (unless you are extremely careful) introduce future problems that may prove difficult to diagnose and resolve quickly.
In part 2 of this article we will get down to the business of assembling our rig. Stay tuned.
DP
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