Tartanleaf

Tag: open source

  • Bitaxe Community Update: Copyleft, ESP-Miner 2.15.1, HashWatcher and Mining Economics

    Bitaxe Community Update: Copyleft, ESP-Miner 2.15.1, HashWatcher and Mining Economics

    The last few weeks have moved the Bitaxe story forward without producing a single headline that explains everything. The more important developments are spread across licensing, firmware maintenance, monitoring and the economics of running small miners.

    That combination is a sign of a maturing ecosystem. Bitaxe is no longer just one clever board. It is a family of open hardware, several firmware branches, commercial products, community tools and a growing set of questions about what buyers should expect when a product is described as open source.

    Open source is more than publishing a few files

    Bitaxe Townhall #63 focused on open-source principles and copyleft licensing. The timing is useful. Bitaxe and related projects now involve designers, firmware developers, manufacturers, vendors and owners in many countries. As that network grows, the words open source need to mean something specific.

    Publishing a schematic or a firmware archive is not the same as maintaining a reproducible open project. The useful questions are:

    • Is the preferred source available, rather than only a finished binary or fabrication file?
    • Does the repository identify a licence?
    • Are changes to redistributed versions made available under the terms of that licence?
    • Can someone other than the original seller understand, repair and support the exact board revision?
    • Are the product name, hardware design and firmware being described separately and accurately?

    Copyleft licences are intended to preserve downstream freedom. A company can manufacture and sell an open design, but it cannot quietly take the community’s work, distribute a modified version and ignore the licence obligations that made that work available in the first place.

    For an owner, this is practical rather than philosophical. Good source files and documentation make it more likely that a board can be repaired, that firmware support can continue and that a product will not become dependent on one seller.

    The Gamma Hex 1300 repository, for example, identifies the hardware as a six-chip BM1370 design and publishes it under the strongly reciprocal CERN Open Hardware Licence. That does not by itself prove production maturity, but it makes the design and the terms under which it can be reused much clearer.

    ESP-Miner 2.15.1 is a maintenance release worth noticing

    The August 30 update covered the larger changes in ESP-Miner 2.15.0, including unified firmware and mDNS support. Since then, ESP-Miner 2.15.1 has become the current stable release.

    Version 2.15.1 is a focused maintenance update. Its published fixes include:

    • correcting Swarm IP discovery;
    • improving WPA2/WPA3 compatibility;
    • preventing reconnect storms caused by slow clients; and
    • clarifying the asset message on the update page.

    Those are not glamorous features, but network discovery and reconnection behaviour matter on a miner expected to run unattended.

    The same firmware advice still applies: do not update simply because a larger version number exists. Record your pool, network, voltage and frequency settings. Confirm support for the exact board revision. Download firmware from the official release page, and update one miner first if you operate several.

    There is also an ESP-Miner 2.15.2 release candidate. It adds BM1372/BM1373 driver support and colour-display support for the Naja Duo and Gamma Hex, along with several fixes. It is explicitly labelled a pre-release intended for testing rather than stability. That distinction should be taken seriously. Owners who depend on a stable miner should normally remain on the stable release unless they have a specific reason to test a release candidate and a recovery path if it fails.

    Gamma Hex moves from a repository toward firmware support

    I introduced the Gamma Hex 1300 in the previous update, so it should not be treated as a brand-new announcement. The useful change is that firmware support is beginning to catch up with the hardware repository.

    The design remains a six-chip BM1370 board with a 12-volt input, ESP32-S3 controller, colour display, adjustable voltage regulation and dual ASIC-temperature monitoring. The repository is still small and does not publish a hardware release. The addition of display support in the 2.15.2 release candidate is evidence of active integration, not evidence that the model is ready for every buyer.

    This is a good example of the stages an open miner passes through:

    1. A design appears in a public repository.
    2. Contributors review and revise the hardware.
    3. Firmware learns to identify and operate the board.
    4. Builders produce working units.
    5. Owners accumulate useful experience with power, cooling and reliability.

    Those stages can overlap, but they are not interchangeable. A repository and a firmware pull request are encouraging; production availability and field experience are different milestones.

    HashWatcher offers a broader view of several miners

    HashWatcher is a third-party Android application that supports Bitaxe and NerdQaxe++ miners alongside several larger-miner platforms. Its listing describes fleet monitoring, temperature alerts, charts, reports and custom overclock controls for supported small miners.

    This addresses a real limitation of browser-based dashboards. AxeOS is convenient when working with one miner. It becomes less convenient when every unit has a separate address and you want to see at a glance which miner is hot, offline or underperforming.

    The developer says miner data is fetched directly from the devices and that no third-party cloud is required. The Google Play data-safety declaration currently says that the app does not collect or share data. Those are useful statements, but they do not remove the need for normal care.

    Before allowing any monitoring application to change miner settings:

    • confirm that you have the correct app and developer;
    • review its permissions and privacy information;
    • begin with monitoring before using tuning controls;
    • keep a record of known-good voltage and frequency settings; and
    • remember that a convenient control can still request an unsafe setting.

    Remote visibility is useful. It should not replace local records, temperature limits or a recovery plan.

    Mining economics continue to favour efficiency

    Hashrate Index’s September 14 roundup placed spot hashprice at about US$39.25 per PH/s per day. It reported a seven-day network-hashrate average near 943 EH/s and estimated a 5.26% difficulty increase for September 19. Its six-month forward market was pricing average hashprice around US$36.92 per PH/s per day.

    These figures are dated observations, not forecasts that should be treated as certain. Difficulty, Bitcoin price, transaction fees and network hashrate all move.

    They also need to be interpreted carefully for a Bitaxe. Hashprice is useful for comparing expected mining revenue at scale. A small solo miner has a very different experience: most days produce no payout at all, while a successful block is a rare event. The expected value can be estimated, but the actual result is highly variable.

    The broader lesson is still valid. Hashrate affects the probability of finding work, while joules per terahash determine how much electricity is required to sustain that probability. Hashrate Index’s fleet figures showed substantially more revenue per unit of energy for equipment below 14 J/TH than for less efficient groups. Those are fleet-level comparisons, not promises for a desktop miner, but they explain why efficiency matters as network conditions become less forgiving.

    For many Bitaxe owners, the objective is learning, supporting open mining, experimenting with heat reuse or taking a very small chance at a solo block—not earning dependable income. A good purchase decision begins by stating that objective honestly.

    What I would do now

    For an existing owner, the mid-September priorities are straightforward:

    1. Treat ESP-Miner 2.15.1 as the current stable maintenance release and read its notes before updating.
    2. Treat 2.15.2 as test firmware until a stable release replaces it.
    3. Verify the hardware repository, licence and exact board revision when evaluating an “open-source” product.
    4. Use fleet-monitoring tools as a convenience layer, not as a substitute for safe settings and local records.
    5. Compare miners by efficiency, power, cooling, firmware support and maturity—not hashrate alone.

    The Bitaxe ecosystem is becoming more capable, but also more specialized. That makes careful documentation more important, not less. The best projects will be the ones that combine transparent licensing, reproducible hardware, maintainable firmware and honest descriptions of what is ready today.

    I will continue updating the Bitcoin Mining with Bitaxe Updates page as stable firmware and production experience catch up with the announcements.

    For a practical guide to setup, tuning, monitoring and recovery, see Bitcoin Mining with Bitaxe. The free Bitaxe Owner’s Maintenance and Troubleshooting Pack provides printable baseline and troubleshooting worksheets.

    — Greg Weir, Tartanleaf

    Sources and verification notes

  • Bitaxe Community Update: Naja Duo, ESP-Miner 2.15.0 and the BM1373 Generation

    Bitaxe Community Update: Naja Duo, ESP-Miner 2.15.0 and the BM1373 Generation

    The last two weeks have moved the open-source home-mining story forward on two fronts at once. New BM1373-based hardware is moving from prototypes and announcements toward products people can order, while ESP-Miner 2.15.0 changes the way Bitaxe firmware updates work.

    There is also a useful caution running through all of this. A product announcement, an open hardware repository, firmware support and something you can buy today are four different things. They sometimes arrive together. Often they do not.

    That distinction matters more as the Bitaxe family expands.

    The Naja Duo brings BM1373 to a Bitaxe product

    The headline hardware announcement is the Bitaxe Naja Duo 1201, launched by Solo Satoshi at the end of August. It uses two BM1373 ASICs, the newer generation of silicon associated with Bitmain’s S23 machines.

    Solo Satoshi lists the Naja Duo at about 4.4 TH/s and 42 watts at its default settings, or roughly 9.5 joules per terahash. If those numbers hold across production units, that is a substantial efficiency improvement over BM1370-based desktop miners.

    The vendor also reports an 8 TH/s overclock at about 92 watts and much higher results under experimental liquid cooling. Those figures are interesting, but I would treat them as demonstrations of headroom rather than recommended operating points. Higher clock speed, voltage and temperature all change the reliability equation. A quiet, efficient miner that runs consistently is usually more useful than a benchmark that cannot be sustained.

    Other practical changes include individual chip-temperature monitoring, a larger colour display, an XT30 power connection and cooling designed for a two-chip board. The product is described as running the mainline ESP-Miner and AxeOS stack.

    There is one naming wrinkle worth knowing. The older bitaxeorg/bitaxeNaja repository currently describes an untested two-chip BM1340 prototype, not the newly announced BM1373 Naja Duo. I have not found a corresponding BM1373 hardware repository in the Bitaxe organization as of August 30. That does not make the product claim false, but it does mean buyers should not assume that every reference to “Naja” describes the same board.

    My practical advice is simple: verify the exact model number, firmware, warranty, power supply and published design files before ordering. For a newly launched model, I would also allow time for production owners to report thermals, stability and real wall-power measurements.

    NerdAxe Gaia offers a single-chip route

    The NerdAxe Gaia approaches BM1373 from the other direction. It is a single-chip desktop miner advertised at roughly 2.4 to 2.6 TH/s and about 25 watts, depending on the vendor listing. European listings currently describe it as a pre-order product with September shipping.

    That makes it an interesting low-power entry into the new silicon generation, but there is an important firmware distinction: Gaia is part of the NerdAxe family. Its BM1373 support is in the ESP-Miner-NerdQAxePlus project, not the main Bitaxe ESP-Miner release.

    The interfaces share a family resemblance, but firmware is hardware-specific. Do not choose a firmware file because the dashboard looks familiar. Use the release and flashing instructions for the exact board and revision you own. Early Gaia buyers should also expect its BM1373 support to be in the 1.1.0 pre-release line rather than the older stable branch.

    ESP-Miner 2.15.0 simplifies Bitaxe updates

    For existing Bitaxe owners, the most broadly useful development is ESP-Miner 2.15.0, released August 21.

    The largest change is unified firmware. AxeOS is now embedded in esp-miner.bin, so the normal update no longer requires a separate www.bin upload. After installing 2.15.0, refresh the browser page so it loads the updated interface.

    The release also adds mDNS support. On a network that supports it, you can reach a miner by its hostname—for example, bitaxe.local—instead of first looking up its IP address. This is convenient, although keeping a record of the IP address or DHCP reservation is still worthwhile when troubleshooting.

    Other changes include better undervoltage information, total uptime and hash counts, multi-line charts, a restart confirmation, fixes for several memory and WebSocket problems, and further Stratum V2 work. The Stratum changes include larger frames, better handling of fractional pool difficulty and an optional per-pool authentication requirement.

    This is a meaningful release, but “meaningful” does not mean “install immediately on every stable miner.” Before updating:

    1. Record your pool, network, frequency and voltage settings.
    2. Confirm that 2.15.0 supports your exact board revision.
    3. Download firmware only from the official ESP-Miner release page.
    4. Update one miner first if you operate several.
    5. Leave it at known-good settings while you confirm temperatures, accepted shares and stability.

    If your miner is stable and you do not need the new features, waiting for more field experience is also a reasonable decision. I explain that decision process in Should You Update Bitaxe Firmware?.

    OSMU adds the Gamma Hex to the hardware conversation

    The item I found on OSMU that was not in my initial notes is the Bitaxe Gamma Hex 1300. Its new Bitaxe organization repository describes a six-chip BM1370 design using an ESP32-S3, a colour display and ESP-Miner.

    This belongs in the “watch the project” category for now. The repository is new, has only a small number of commits and does not yet publish a release. That is enough to establish that the design exists; it is not enough to treat it like a mature, widely available model.

    The distinction is important. Open repositories let the community inspect and improve a design early. They are evidence of development, not automatically evidence of production readiness.

    A more useful way to compare the growing model list

    The market is becoming harder to describe with a single list of names. A better comparison asks four questions:

    • Which ASIC and how many chips does the board use?
    • Is the hardware design published, and where?
    • Which firmware project supports the exact board revision?
    • Is it a mature product, a new production model, a pre-order or an experimental design?

    By that measure, the late-August picture is clearer:

    • Naja Duo 1201: newly launched two-chip BM1373 product; attractive vendor specifications, with independent production experience still to come.
    • NerdAxe Gaia: single-chip BM1373 product in pre-order or early-shipping status; uses the NerdQAxePlus firmware family.
    • Gamma Hex 1300: newly published six-chip BM1370 open design; still early in its repository life.
    • Existing Gamma, Supra, Ultra, Max and UltraHex designs: established reference points, although actual retail availability varies by model and vendor.

    The important change is not simply that miners are getting faster. New-generation ASICs are reaching desk-sized, open-source hardware, while firmware and product families are becoming more specialized. That creates more choice, but it also puts more responsibility on the buyer to match the model, firmware and documentation correctly.

    I will continue updating the Bitcoin Mining with Bitaxe Updates page as production experience catches up with the announcements.

    For a practical guide to setup, tuning, monitoring and recovery, see Bitcoin Mining with Bitaxe. The free Bitaxe Owner’s Maintenance and Troubleshooting Pack provides printable baseline and troubleshooting worksheets.

    — Greg Weir, Tartanleaf

    Sources and verification notes

  • What a Local Lobby Display Changed at a Nova Scotia Inn

    What a Local Lobby Display Changed at a Nova Scotia Inn

    At a busy inn, many front-desk questions are simple but time-sensitive. Guests want the Wi-Fi password, the weather forecast or the menu. Before Open Lobby Board was installed at Auberge Gisele’s Inn in Baddeck, staff generally supplied that information verbally.

    I installed the board in the lobby and had it running around the end of June 2026. It puts commonly requested information on a lobby display, runs on a Raspberry Pi and remains under the property’s control. Management can update it from the trusted local network without maintaining a cloud account or paying for another subscription.

    The useful features were the ordinary ones

    It would be easy to judge a lobby display by the number of features it offers. The more useful question is which information guests actually look for.

    Wahab Khan, General Manager, identified three practical items: the Wi-Fi password, the weather and the menu. Of those, the clearest observed change involved the weather. He reports that weather questions at the front desk have “really gone down.”

    That is a modest result, but it is also a useful one. The board does not need to replace the front desk or automate every interaction. It only needs to make routine information visible enough that guests can find it without waiting to ask.

    What the evidence does not show

    The board also includes a menu QR code. Gisele’s keeps a physical menu at the front desk, and guests usually refer to it. As a result, this installation does not show that the QR code reduced requests for paper menus.

    Khan believes the QR code would be useful where a paper copy was not readily available. That is a reasonable use case, but it is different from an observed result. The distinction matters in a practical case study.

    Easy updates and no reported reliability burden

    A display is only useful if the information stays current. Khan describes the board as easy to read and extremely easy for management to edit. He also reports that it has been “extremely reliable” and has had “zero issues.”

    Those observations support the project’s original design priorities: keep the interface straightforward, keep routine changes simple and avoid turning an information screen into another service that requires continuing administration.

    Local control is part of the value

    Open Lobby Board is designed for a Raspberry Pi connected to a display on a trusted, non-routable local network. It has no advertising service, hosted dependency or subscription requirement. It is an open-source example project rather than a managed product, and it should not be exposed directly to the public Internet.

    For a property in a high-volume tourism town, Khan sees value in any practical way to reduce repeated questions. The Gisele’s installation suggests that the strongest case for a lobby board may not be a long feature list. It may simply be dependable access to the few pieces of information guests ask for most often.

    About Open Lobby Board

    I developed Open Lobby Board and released it through Tartanleaf.com Inc. as a free, open-source community project under the MIT License. It is provided as an example for technically comfortable operators, not as a hosted or supported commercial service.

    View Open Lobby Board and its setup documentation on GitHub, or see it alongside Tartanleaf’s other resources on the Tartanleaf Tools page.

  • Bitaxe Community Update: WallAxe, Firmware and BM1373 – Mid-August 2026

    Bitaxe Community Update: WallAxe, Firmware and BM1373 – Mid-August 2026

    Bitaxe Townhall #62 put WallAxe at the centre of the latest OSMU discussion. Gio joined the town hall to explain a project that combines a Bitaxe and its power supply in a compact enclosure that plugs directly into a wall outlet.

    The idea is easy to understand. A normal Bitaxe installation has a board, a separate power supply, a cable and some way to keep the assembly stable and clear of obstructions. WallAxe aims to turn those pieces into something closer to a small appliance.

    That sounds like a packaging change, but it raises useful questions about where the Bitaxe ecosystem is going.

    WallAxe and the next stage of home mining

    WallAxe is best understood as a conversion and packaging project, not a new mining ASIC. It builds around existing Bitaxe hardware and tries to remove several points of friction for a new owner – choosing a suitable supply, managing the cable and mounting the equipment neatly.

    For an experienced builder, those jobs are manageable. For someone buying a first small miner, they are among the least polished parts of the experience. A well-designed integrated unit could make a Bitaxe easier to place and easier to explain without changing what the board does.

    The trade-off is safety. Once a product connects directly to household mains power, enclosure design, insulation, heat, clearances, strain relief and safe servicing matter more than appearance. A compact enclosure also has less room to move heat away from the miner and its power electronics.

    The practical test for WallAxe will therefore be whether it can preserve the openness and repairability that make Bitaxe interesting while meeting the expectations people reasonably have for a mains-connected appliance. Until the design is mature and independently evaluated, it should be treated as a developing open-hardware project rather than a finished consumer product.

    ESP-Miner 2.14.2 remains the current verified release

    The latest verified ESP-Miner release remains version 2.14.2, released on July 8. Its published changes include a fix for a use-after-free race condition and a correction to frequency fallback during self-test.

    That does not mean every owner should update immediately. Firmware work is a maintenance decision, not a reflex.

    Before changing firmware, record:

    • the Bitaxe model and hardware revision;
    • the current firmware version;
    • pool and network settings;
    • normal temperature, fan speed and hash rate;
    • any recurring errors or recovery behaviour.

    Then read the release notes, confirm that the image matches the hardware, keep a recovery path available and change one thing at a time. A baseline makes it possible to tell whether an update improved reliability or merely changed the symptoms.

    BM1373 parts are becoming easier to obtain

    BM1373 has also moved a little closer to practical experimentation. TinyChipHub is advertising individual BM1373 chips at US$69.99. The seller describes about 2.5 TH/s as a reference point for sustained operation and much higher figures as overclocking tests with sharply increased power use.

    Those are vendor claims, not independent finished-device benchmarks. The parts are also described as coming mainly from dismantled Antminer S23 Hydro equipment, which adds another variable for designers and buyers.

    The important development is not the headline hash rate. It is that independent builders can now obtain parts for prototypes in small quantities. Turning a bare ASIC into a dependable miner still requires board design, voltage regulation, cooling, firmware support and a supply chain that can deliver chips of consistent quality.

    BM1373 may support a higher-performance generation of open miners, but a seller’s chip-level number should not be treated as the expected performance of a future Bitaxe or NerdQAxe product.

    A broader range of open miners

    The official Bitaxe organization now includes projects such as the dual-chip Gamma Turbo and the multi-chip Gamma Hex alongside the established single-chip boards. WallAxe explores a different direction – not simply more hash rate, but a cleaner physical installation.

    That variety is a sign of a maturing ecosystem. Open home mining is separating into several practical categories:

    • low-power single-chip boards for learning and experimentation;
    • multi-chip designs for more hash rate on a desk or shelf;
    • display and interface projects that make monitoring easier;
    • packaging and power projects intended to simplify installation;
    • next-generation ASIC experiments whose real performance is still being established.

    For an owner, the useful question is not which design has the largest number in a listing. It is which design fits the available power, cooling, noise tolerance, network and maintenance skills.

    What to watch next

    Three things are worth following over the next few weeks:

    1. Whether WallAxe publishes enough design and safety detail for meaningful community review.
    2. Whether ESP-Miner reliability reports settle around 2.14.2 or lead to another maintenance release.
    3. Whether BM1373 prototypes produce repeatable efficiency and thermal results outside vendor demonstrations.

    The direction remains encouraging. Bitaxe is becoming more than a single board. It is an open ecosystem of hardware, firmware, enclosures, power systems, monitoring tools and operating practices. The next step is proving that added convenience and performance can arrive without giving up safety, transparency or repairability.

    For a practical owner workflow, see Bitcoin Mining with Bitaxe and the free Bitaxe Owner’s Maintenance and Troubleshooting Pack.

    – Greg Weir, Tartanleaf

  • HomeNetCheck: Making Home Network Troubleshooting Less Technical

    HomeNetCheck: Making Home Network Troubleshooting Less Technical

    Home network problems have a way of becoming technical very quickly. A slow or unreliable connection may be blamed on Wi-Fi when the underlying issue is DNS, double NAT, the router, or the Internet connection itself. The information needed to narrow that down is often scattered across settings screens and command-line tools.

    I originally built homenet, an open-source command-line tool that runs a series of common network checks and brings the results together in one report. It is useful for people who are comfortable working in a terminal, but feedback from friends made one problem clear: the command line was still a barrier for many of the people the tool was intended to help.

    That feedback led to HomeNetCheck, a graphical desktop version for Windows, macOS, and Linux. You download it, open it, and click Check my network. The application runs the diagnostic checks and presents the results in a plain-language report.

    What HomeNetCheck Looks For

    HomeNetCheck examines several common sources of home-network trouble, including:

    • Whether your router or network gateway can be reached
    • Whether DNS responses are unusually slow
    • Whether the connection appears to be behind double NAT
    • Network latency and available Internet speed
    • Wi-Fi information when it is available from the operating system

    The report is intended to provide a useful starting point. It identifies what appears to be working, what could not be confirmed, and what may deserve a closer look. It does not make changes to the network or promise to repair every problem automatically.

    Two Ways to Use the Same Project

    The graphical and command-line versions serve different users:

    • HomeNetCheck is the graphical application recommended for most people.
    • homenet remains available for scripting, automation, remote support, and anyone who prefers a terminal.

    Both are free and open source under the MIT License, with no subscription. They are community resources rather than supported commercial products.

    An Invitation to Try It

    The graphical version is still an early release, and real-world feedback is especially useful now. I would like to know whether the instructions make sense, whether the explanations are clear, and where someone who is not a networking specialist becomes uncertain or gets stuck.

    If you try HomeNetCheck, please feel free to send me your observations. Reports from different computers, operating systems, and home-network arrangements will help improve both the application and its documentation.

    Download HomeNetCheck and Learn More