SUPPORTED DEVICES Currently supported devices include the Avalon, the Butterfly Labs SC range of devices and the ASICMINER block eruptors. The BFL devices should come up as one of the following: BAJ: BFL ASIC Jalapeño BAL: BFL ASIC Little Single BAS: BFL ASIC Single BAM: BFL ASIC Minirig BFL devices need the --enable-bflsc option when compiling cgminer yourself. Avalon will come up as AVA. Avalon devices need the --enable-avalon option when compiling cgminer. ASICMINER block eruptors will come up as AMU. ASICMINER devices need the --enable-icarus option when compiling cgminer. GETTING STARTED WITH BUTTERFLY LABS ASICS Unlike other software, cgminer uses direct USB communication instead of the ancient serial USB communication to be much faster, more reliable and use a lot less CPU. For this reason, setting up for mining with cgminer on these devices requires different drivers. WINDOWS: On windows, the direct USB support requires the installation of a WinUSB driver (NOT the ftdi_sio driver), and attach it to the Butterfly labs device. The easiest way to do this is to use the zadig utility which will install the drivers for you and then once you plug in your device you can choose the "list all devices" from the "option" menu and you should be able to see the device as something like: "BitFORCE SHA256 SC". Choose the install or replace driver option and select WinUSB. You can either google for zadig or download it from the cgminer directoy in the DOWNLOADS link above. LINUX: On linux, the direct USB support requires no drivers at all. However due to permissions issues, you may not be able to mine directly on the devices as a regular user without giving the user access to the device or by mining as root (administrator). In order to give your regular user access, you can make him a member of the plugdev group with the following commands: sudo usermod -G plugdev -a `whoami` If your distribution does not have the plugdev group you can create it with: sudo groupadd plugdev In order for the BFL devices to instantly be owned by the plugdev group and accessible by anyone from the plugdev group you can copy the file "01-cgminer.rules" from the cgminer archive into the /etc/udev/rules.d directory with the following command: sudo cp 01-cgminer.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/ After this you can either manually restart udev and re-login, or more easily just reboot. AVALON DEVICES Currently all known Avalon devices come with their own operating system and a preinstalled version of cgminer as part of the flash firmware, based on the most current cgminer version so no configuration should be necessary. It is possible to plug a USB cable from a PC into the Avalon device and mine using cgminer as per any other device. It will autodetect and hotplug using default options. You can customise the avalon behaviour by using the --avalon-options command. 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 different frequencies (last 2 values): 43:300 45:282 (default) 47:270 50:256 Frequency: This is the clock speed of the devices. Only specific values work, 256, 270, 282 (default) and 300. 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. --- 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. Con Kolivas 15qSxP1SQcUX3o4nhkfdbgyoWEFMomJ4rZ