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For this month’s Rig of the Month, check out the latest ASIC Scrypt miner, Gridseed Blade Mining Rig!

Based on 80 Gridseed chips, Gridseed Blades are ASIC Scrypt miners capable of 5.6Mh/s at only 100 watts of power. These currently (as of April 30th 2014) cost around $1500-1600 with ROI of around 6 months at $15/day. (You can use CoinWarz.com to see profit at the moment.)

In other words, these are the best rigs to use to mine Scrypt coins such as Litecoins and Dogecoins “right now”. My graphic card rigs are actually losing money at this point, I am barely breaking even or losing money. Unless you have free or really cheap electricity, graphic card rigs are really starting to lose its merits (but this may change if coins like Vertcoins start going up.

Gridseed Blades use the same chips as regular Gridseeds, except you have 40-chips per blade instead of just 5-chips per Gridseed unit. I find the new Gridseed Blades much more efficient, bring higher ROI, and takes less than 20-minutes to setup. I hope the original Gridseeds die a horrible death as they are not efficient and take a long time to setup or diagnose faulty units. Around 20-30% of my original Gridseeds have died on me, I am so sad.

Of course, there’s also many new ASIC Scrypt miners being designed at the moment, ready to be released near end of May 2014, so I would not place all your bets on Gridseed Blades just yet, but let me stop rambling and show you how to make a Gridseed Blade Mining Rig in about 20 minutes.

Parts List

Gridseed Blades – I got my blades from ZoomHash.com and Hash-Master.com. Both have pretty good prices and you should be able to negotiate a better price than listed if you are ordering in bulk.

Raspberry Pi and Case– You can probably run at least 8 GridSeed Blades per Raspberry Pi.

Class 10 SD Card– Get at least Class 10 SD Card, I found cheaper SD cards can die suddenly and they go corrupt easily, also makes writing images a breeze due to faster speeds.

12V Adapter – Get 2 12V adapters per Gridseed Blade. Each of these provide up to 84 watts of power and each blade of the GridSeed Blade unit takes 50 watts.

Mini USB cable – You will need 2 mini USB cables per Gridseed Blade unit.

1 Micro-USB power adapter – You probably have one of these laying around for your smartphone, if you don’t, just get one on Amazon for cheap.

USB Hub – You can get any type of USB hub, just make sure they are powered ones, I used these, which work well.

Step 1. First, connect the 12V adapters to your Gridseed Blades, there should be 2 adapters per Gridseed Blade unit.

Step 2. Connect mini-USB cables from your Gridseed Blades to your USB Hub. (You can also just connect directly to Raspberry Pi for initial testing then later use the USB Hub to connect all of your Blades.)

Step 3. Connect micro-USB power adapter and ethernet cable to your Raspberry Pi.

Once everything is connected, don’t power on anything yet but should look something like this:

Step 4. Next, download the HighOnCoins Gridseed Blade image and flash to your SD card using Win32DiskImager. (You can also use DD with Linux/Mac but that’s outside the scope of this tutorial, just Google it.)

Download HighOnCoins Gridseed image with Pre-built CGminer

Download Win32DiskImager

Step 5. Put the new SD card with HighOnCoins Gridseed Blade image into your Raspberry Pi and turn it on by connecting a micro-USB cable to it.

You can connect to the Raspberry Pi by connecting a DVI cable to a monitor and a keyboard via USB. OR my preferred method is to connect an ethernet cable to your router then remotely SSH (using Putty or terminal), you can check for the IP address by checking your router’s LAN status.

Connect to Raspberry Pi using the following credentials:

id: root

password: raspberry

*Note – I used root user for Raspberry Pi as the USB-based Gridseeds require a lot of root access and it’s just pain in the butt to enter your password everytime you use sudo.

Step 6. Once connected, you can type “nano cgminer/cgminer.conf” to edit the cgminer configuration files. There you will be able to change the pool info to yours. Save when done.

Step 7. To start the cgminer, simply type, “sh test.sh”. If you see “FAILED!”, it means it’s successful. (Sorry I forgot to edit that part while writing the script.) This will run cgminer in the background.

Step 8. To actually see cgminer running, type “cgm”. To get out of it, press Ctrl + a + d.

Step 9. Once you get everything working great, you can enable auto-start script, which will start cgminer automatically upon boot, power-failure, lock-up, etc…etc…

Type “nano /etc/cron.d/saupdate” and remove the “#” from the first line and save.

Once that’s done, cron job will automatically check every minute for cgminer and start it if its not running.

I’ve also enabled the watchdog timer on the Raspberry Pi so your Pi will restart upon any lock-ups, which was crucial to getting my new rig running 24/7.

I found that the Gridseed Blades run best at 838Mhz but you can try running them higher with a big fan blowing to your blades to cool them more.

MANDATORY UPDATE April 30th 2014: There’s a way to prevent freezing Raspberry Pi for good, do:

sudo nano /boot/cmdline.txt

Then add the line at the end of the line (do not make a new line!!):

slub_debug=FP

After that reboot by typing:

sudo reboot

This prevented most of reboots on the Raspberry Pi so you should get more hashing power!

Q&A

Q: What is the ROI on this Gridseed Blades?

A: ROI on Gridseed Blade is around 6 months at the moment. But with introduction of Zeus Scrypt miners at the end of May 2014, you may be better off waiting for that. If you must start mining “right now”, Gridseed Blades are the way to go. I would definitely be cautious about your investment right now as things change quickly around cryptocurrency world.

Q: Is it worth investing in mining rigs “right now”?

A: Well, if you have a good amount of investment, mining rigs are still probably the way to go but if you don’t, it may just be better to buy the coins instead of mining. That’s just honest truth I can tell you. Of course, mining may mean more exponential profits but at the same time, new ASIC Scrypt miners are being introduced at least once a month. That means whatever you buy today may be worth only 50% for every month you have it. All of these complexities are also crippled by the fact that cryptocurrency has dropped over 50% in last couple months.

Now, if coins do regain their value in the next few weeks (or even months), miners who invested now will surely benefit more than just buying coins. But if that’s not the case, you may end up mining much less coins than buying them straight with fiat cash.

That should do it!

Credits

I compiled Cgminer by JMordica which is specifically modified for Gridseed blades. If you know how to compile stuff, you can grab the source code and compile it yourself.

Like my stuff? You can send me coins!

Want to Contact Me? I am on Twitter 24/7!

BTC: 15ZgN5mFaK2cK2wbR6yAm2CvdWZu3xmXmUFirst time to digital currency?Please see What is a Litecoin? FIRST!!!