Fun with old Gridseed ASIC miners

Publish date: 2017-06-22

I purchased an old Gridseed G-Blade scrypt miner last year which I've been running on and off (I've at least gained back my purchase cost of $60 USD). Since then, a number of my friends that I've introduced to cryptocurrencies have also gotten the mining bug. These old Gridseed units (and individually sold blades) were abundant on aliexpress.com during the first quarter of the year but are now hard to find unless you like paying outrageous prices for antiquated tech on ebay. Each blade runs at approximately 2.6 megahashes per second. I now have a total of 4 blades, 2 of which are in a regular Gridseed mining unit as seen below.



The other 2 blades I have running on top of two normal case fans on stand-offs which push air up through the ASIC chips. They are powered by 12-volt, 6-amp LED strip adapters which I purchased from amazon for $15 each. Very simple and cheap setup. Believe it or not, these blades work perfectly fine with no heatsink at all. There is also no need for the powerful but noisy fan that comes with the real Gridseed units... regular 2-pin, 12-volt case fans work just fine to keep the chips cool enough.



One of my friends has put his 4 blades in a fluorescent lighting enclosure, again with just regular case fans and no heatsinks.



Another made this nice wooden case for his 2 blades. They are actually attached to a chunk of hollow aluminium which acts as a heatsink.



And finally, this friend made the ultimate build for his gridseed units. Custom built casing with power supplies and raspberry pi hidden in the middle section. Fuses on top for safety and easy access.



You have to understand that these were all done as fun projects, nobody is going to get rich mining with these old machines but they are handy for mining any newer scrypt coins that come along (and to keep unpopular/personal-interest-only coins blockchains moving).

For anyone else interested in trying out these old miners, we are all using the latest cgminer software (from https://github.com/dmaxl/cgminer compiled using the --enable-gridseed --enable-scrypt configuration parameters) running on Linux.

To list all the attached Gridseed mining devices use the follow command:
lsusb grep "STM" cut -c5-7,15-18

Use cgminer with parameters as follows (replace some parts with your own appropriate values):
cgminer --gridseed-options=baud=115200,freq=838,chips=40,modules=1,usefifo=0,btc=0 --scrypt -o stratum+tcp://poolurlgoeshere.com:port -u yourusernameorwalletaddress -p yourpassword --usb=001:007

Have fun!