Improving Cooling on Fury Miners

Over the summer, I began adding more miners. The weather had started to warm up about the same time so the Furys started to increase in temperature.  In our area most places do not have air conditioning, so we are up to the mercy of the weather. Most of the year it's a cooler climate off the central coast of California, but this year it has been much warmer. Even without the weather, the Furys ICs would get hot but not the casing, which is a giant heat sink anyway. That told me there is poor thermal transfer. I had to do something about it. Cooler ICs means less hardware errors which means more accepted shares.

Upon research I narrowed down to these two items:

• Prolimatech PK-3 Nano Thermal Paste (comes with spatula) - Amazon
• ArctiClean Thermal Paste Cleaner - Amazon
• .6in Heatsinks - AliExpress (My first purchase from AliExpress)
• Came with extra Raspberry Pi heatsink sets

Wait, err, make that three items - the cleaner was one of those things on Amazon "people also bought." The stuff works great but I ended up only using it on the first one so I could conserve paste.

DIY: Miner Rack

Over the last few weeks or so,  I decided to build a rack to hold my ASIC miners. This way they are nice, tidy and not all over my desk! Commonly, GPUs miners make a wooden open air case so I decided to design something similar. Total power usage from the wall is 377-379W. Not bad for 11MH/s. One thing to note is the Gridseeds don't get very hot so in turn their fans keep the Raspberry Pis cool which are zip tied above them.

Parts:

• 5x 4ft Strips of wood
• Pack of finishing nails
• Wood glue
• Zip ties
• Gray primer spray paint
• Black gloss spray paint
• Small nails (keep miners in place)

Mining Hardware:

• 8x Fury's: GAWMiners
• 2x GridSeeds: GAWMiners
• 1 RM750 Corsair ATX PSU (62A 12V Rail, Zero Fan, Gold)
• 1 pack of PCIE-X to DC power cables: eBay
• PCIE\Molex to DC power cables http://superhash.myshopify.com/

A beautiful mess!

ZenMiner: RPI Temps

The first week of the Fury's (Zeus Blizzard) Scrypt miners from GAWMiners came with a free ZenController. It's basically a Raspberry Pi, case and a memory card that is setup ready to mine using ZenMiners cloud service. Simplifies the process of setting up mining without a computer.

Adventure in Bitcoin: GridSeeds

Part  1

Potato chips. You can't just eat one, am I right? That's how mining has become for me. It's always just a little more mining power. Like reaching in and grabbing a couple of extra chips and before you know it, the entire bag is empty. But in the case of mining, there will always be something left in the bag. You can trade various coins, set up more rigs or upgrade your current hardware.

Adventures in Bitcoin

Part 2
Over the last few months, I decided to try my hand at mining Bitcoins\Cryptocurrency. Recently, I found the best way to get started is to mine what are called Altcoins. Bitcoins and a few others are based on SHA256 hashes which are easier to verify transactions and therefore there are ASIC or Application Specific Integrated Circuits that can mine very fast. Because of this, the network difficulty becomes very high and therefore takes more power for the same reward. Basically you get a reward for mining which is providing processing power to verify transactions. Once the network agrees that a transaction is valid, it then confirms the transaction. Altcoins are based on Scrypt mining which is more memory intensive, so using your GPU to mine is still profitable. Profitability meaning you receive enough to cover your cost of hardware, power usage and a little extra for the wallet. Covering your cost of hardware can take a few weeks to a few months depending on how much you invest and your hash rate. One thing to keep in mind is even if you are not receiving very much, you are also mining for future profits. The idea being that the few Bitcoins/Altcoins you acquire now, will be worth much more in the future. (Some people have become wealthy due to mining Bitcoins a year ago.)  In most cases I wouldn't have any expectations of getting rich or anything but it is a fun learning experience.

Bitcoin Now Accepted!

We are happy to announce that FriedCircuits Shop now accepts Bitcoin! Products are still shown in USD but when you check out you have the option of selecting Bitcoin and it will show the total at the current exchanges rates. We are using Coinbase.com as the payment processor so if you have a Coinbase account you pay directly that way. If not, you can scan the QR code to pay with your mobile app, of course you can just copy and paste the wallet address and the amount to pay to use with your desktop app. Once payment is sent, just click confirm. It's that easy!

We are all for supporting the Bitcoin community. We'd like to help it grow to become a more dominant currency for everyone, not just for us Tech savvy types.