I really hope they don't have CCTV at Microcenter.

Clerk: Did you find everything you were looking for.
Me: Big time! This should complete a project I've been working on forever and am really excited about.
Clerk: How exciting! What's that?
Me: It's a tabletop bitcoin miner with the iconic, "This machine kills fascists," plaque from Woody Guthrie's guitars on it.
Clerk: OK sir, please don't kill people. Have a nice day.

Of course I'm sure they do have lots of CCTV at Micro Center, and of course I hope the kid working the register knew that Woody's statement on his guitar is just a variant of the, "The pen is mightier than the sword," maxim. I figured it'd be nice to step things up a notch and actually put it on a machine that literally makes it hard to control people.

My Bitaxe

A few months back, someone in the Heatpunks forum was generously giving away a faulty bitaxe. I jumped on the opportunity since this whole bitcoin thing has led to an obsession with tinkering. Most of my tinkering has been with industrial mining machines because I think if enough home miners start harvesting this trash, we'll end of with more decentralized network security. The bitaxes are great for learning, but i already had a few industrial machines and had learned a lot from them.

My tinkering table:

My free bitaxe:

It didn't have a barrel jack, so I ordered one online since it had become immediately apparent that the usb power couldn't hold the amount of amperage the unit needed. However, the manufacturer of this particular Bitaxe Ultra had used their own PCB and the barrel jack I ordered didn't fit. So I ran the spade connectors to a barrel-to-screw terminal.

Even with the barrel jack, I had to try three separate power supplies (the first died immediately and the second couldn't hold five amps like it said it could) before I was able to get the thing running.

My Guitaxe

So I figured, that this is actually stopping fascists from doing fascist things. Let's label it properly.

I just threw some jumper wires between the machines and it's screen and was able to make this nice little facade for it.

I'm not actually a Woody Guthrie Fan

^{TLDR: I don't personally agree with Woody's ideology and don't dig his music. Feel free to skip ahead.}

While I agree with his sentiment about fascists, Woody actually endorsed other types of authoritarianism, so I had to add a little to the statement so as to be perfectly clear. I figure, if you're going to alienate people, might as well make sure they're offended by what you actually are saying.

On top of that, I really don't like his music, except This Land Is Your Land, but that's mostly because of nostalgia. Nevertheless, I recognize the guy played a big role in shaping the American folk tradition, so this is a bit of an homage and critique/clarification at the same time.

But does it scale?

So here is the state of my furnace at the end of last winter:

The primary issue was noise. So this year, I started off by seeing if cheap quiet fans could cut the muster.

The above photos are P19 Pros. I got them in bulk for $3.50 a piece. They are slightly quieter, but definitely don't do any favors to the machine efficiency.

To Infinity and Beyond

So I finally bit the bullet and got a Njord board. Shout out to IxTech! I had been avoiding this route because, while not all that expensive if it worked, I wasn't confident I could pull if off. In that case, it was more expensive than I was willing to suffer through.

But I didn't take into account that the shroud I previously used to go into the furnace plenum was the exact size as the AC Infinity exhaust.

So, I figured since I had to make another shroud anyway, it was time to get Woody involved again.

Now, I'm rocking with AC Infinity efficiency, the kids can play in literally the room next door without complaining about the noise, I'm figuratively "killing fascists and other tyrants", doing it in a way that becomes significant if it catches on with other folks, and writing run on sentences all day long.

If you made it this far, thanks for following along! Let me know if you want me to make some provocative 3d print for your home mining rig.