Post
Topic
Board Hardware
Re: GekkoScience Compac BM1384 Stickminer Official Support Thread
by
notlist3d
on 09/09/2015, 16:00:14 UTC
I don't have my sticks yet, but I'm configuring the software to get ready. I'm using Minera on a Raspberry Pi, but ran into some problems this morning. If anyone else is using Minera on a Pi, hopefully this info will be helpful.

The version of bfgminer that comes with Minera is too old to use with the sticks. It has to be at least v5.3.0. Unfortunately my attempts to build the latest bfgminer have not succeeded. When using the Minera script (i.e. "build_miner.sh bfgminer"), I ended up with a very old version of bfgminer being built. And when I manually built bfgminer from the git trunk, I ended up with 5.2.0, which is also too old.

I've posted on the minera and bfgminer threads, but decided to move on and try Novak's cgminer-gekko.

Novak's instructions on this thread (the usual configure, make, sudo make install pattern), work fine. You should ssh in as the minera user (password "minera" if you didn't change it) then follow Novak's instructions to build and install.

Once built, you have to make the binary "visible" to minera by copying it to the "custom" minera folder (you also have to use a different name than "cgminer"):

Code:
cp cgminer /var/www/minera/minera-bin/custom/cgminer-gekko

Once copied, enable this binary as a custom miner by going to Settings -> Custom miners in the minera web GUI. There should be an entry for "cgminer-gekko" which you just have to turn on. If there is no "cgminer-gekko" entry, refresh the page so that minera will take a fresh look a the "custom" folder.

Once the new cgminer-gekko is configured as a custom miner, you can select it from the popup list under Local Miner Settings. Then you can specify your frequency under Manual options (e.g. --compac-freq 150). You would also set up the usual options using the web GUI, like your pools.

When you start up your miner, you can see the log in the Minera GUI, if logging was enabled. You can use the log to troubleshoot as needed. I typically disable the log after things are working just to reduce wear and tear on the SD card. If you want to get super fancy, you can install ramlog to put the log files in on a ram disk. I have a tutorial for that on the forum, but I have to admit that I don't bother setting this up any more.

Once I've resolved the bfgminer version issues, I might set it up as an alternative local miner. But first I'll probably try the above "cgminer-gekko" configuration (once my sticks arrive).

Hope this helps...

To make this very easy what could happen is one person does it.  Then make an image of the SD card anyone can download.

If a image was provided and could be put to card it would be more "dummie" proof for lack of better term.