Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

The CRIO has an FPGA, so could one theoretically program the FPGA to mine bitcoins during the offseason to make money for a team?

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

Recycling the bottles and cans you consume during build season is virtually guaranteed to make you more money.

Unless you partake in pooled mining, it is almost certain that you will spend more money on electricity than you will make in bitcoins (if you make any at all).

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

FPGA mining from what I have heard is quite efficient, so the power draw should not be an issue. The CRIO would draw what, 10W max? What I am wondering is whether it would be possible to program the FPGA for mining.

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

The cRIO does not stand a chance unless you get extremely lucky. Take a look at the article below.

http://gizmodo.com/5994446/digital-d...t-mine-bitcoin

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

I lol'ed even at the concept of this. Pretty clever idea though, although not ideal for mining haha

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

This isn't a joke, apparently people have made FPGA miners using the same FPGA chips that are in cRIOs.

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

This sounds like a project to try! Though I know fully well that I could never convince my advisors to allow me to do this lol :)

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

I laughed because it was a unique idea, not that it was a bad one :p . I would say go for it, a couple btc in the offseason can't hurt

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

So, does anybody know how to program the FPGA directly? There are already mining programs available for the family of FPGA chips being used, but they are meant for dev boards where you can upload the code directly.

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

::rtm::

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

My neighbor works in the financial markets and was recently talking about FPGA based trading bots -- and how his firm doesn't do this despite the success of some firms. So when I read this, I thought you were wanting to put team money into pork belly futures and ...

The tools for programming the FPGA have been granted in the past to teams looking to do offseason projects. Your options are to program in LV or in VHDL. I would assume that IP for the hash is readily available and you'd replicate it to the brim to fill up the FPGA, wait out the compile, and then use LV or RIO drivers to load it into the FPGA on boot. You then write a small RT program to seed and harvest the FPGA registers you are interested in.

If you succeed, you can spend them on this ... sweet ride.


Greg McKaskle

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

one of my good friends and team members has a really successful business mining bitcoins. If you have any real questions about it I would ask him.
http://cognitivemining.com
message him here or email him at garrett@64.name
explain who you are and tell him Adam Crandall sent you from CD (i've got connections)

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

If only there were 2500+ robotic teams with 1 or more cRios then we could have an FRC pool of FPGA miners. But seriously were would we find 2500+ robotic teams with 1 or more cRios? :rolleyes:

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

Robotics underground fundraising?

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

I don't know about you, but our cRIOs are constantly in use on robots year round...

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

We keep 1 or 2 robots functional year round. That would give us 4 cRios left over for bit-coin mining.

I don't know all the details of FPGA mining but would 2500 pooled miners be worth while? What about 5,000 or 10,000? Just curious at what point it would start to become worthwhile or if it ever would.

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

They have to be the new 4 slot cRIOs to be worth it. The older 8 slot models have much weaker FPGAs.

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

They are actually pretty comparable size wise. I haven't looked into what type of computations are involved in bit coin mining, so I'm not sure if the dsp blocks would make a big difference.

Joe

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

You're right. ;) I agree with saving soda cans making more money. One of our school programs makes around $500 a month doing so. Probably more than Crio mining will get your team. :)

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

Bitcoin?? Didn't the bottom just fall out of this ridiculous scheme anyway?

Distributed computing has been around for a long time - RC5-64, SETI@home, F@H... Projects that are intellectual or beneficial to mankind.


Sell your scrap aluminum to a recycler. You'll make more money.

Find a fundraiser that's worthwhile, that your entire team can participate in.

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

Right now Bitcoin is still in a speculative mode. Like any other form of currency, it takes awhile to establish a more consistent exchange rate. Right now people are using it as a type of speculation, but since its only four years old you can't expect it to be 100% steady. All new currencies are volatile. I wouldn't consider a ~$120 equivalency rate as of today to be a ridiculous scheme either, especially if you have the hardware to mine

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

It looks like using the crio II Spartan-6 fpga you get about 100 Mhash/s so if 2500 teams do 100 Mhash/s you would do 250 Ghash/s or ~$56,975.96 a month

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

True. In addition, you're recycling waste rather than wasting the world's resources trying to generate ones and zeros.

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

You're not accounting for the opportunity cost (of whatever those resources could be used for alternatively), the operating costs (like power and labour) or the externalized costs (such as the environmental impact of consuming that power).

Also, 2 500 teams? Not particularly likely.

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

Also, with the $57000 a month, if you divide it evenly among the theoretical 2500 teams who participated, each team gets a net income of $22 a month. Wohoo, sign me up for my team's Jackson! :D

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

That is likely the largest Spartan-6. The cRIO's FPGA is 1/3 the size of the largest Spartan-6, so you can expect 1/3 the performance. My guess is it is probably not clocked at the maximum rate for the Spartan-6, so you get even worse performance.

this is all very true I simply did a rough kinda sorta calculation based on the specs of the pci Spartan-6 dev board with the biggest baddest fastest spartan-6 fpga (the only kind clocked by anyone using bitcoin mining software)

Re: Use CRIO to mine bitcoins?
 

"The bottom fell out" his a highly relative term.

It dropped about 40% ($80 or so) after having skyrocketed by three times that. It's not something to put all of your life savings into, but it's not entirely without merit either.

Keep in mind it's only a few years old now, it may very well stabilize in the future.

That said, there's absolutely no reason to attempt to use the cRIO for mining. ASIC (application-specific hardware) silicon has completely dominated bitcoin mining even though it's only been available for a few months. There's not a snowball's chance in hell of competing against that.