Connection & Accessories
In particular, to operate with a Raspberry Pi, the miner requires a USB hub with an active power supply that is able to provide at least 3 A per USB port. We have had good experiences with USB 2.0 devices from Anker and Orico. Our 7-port USB hub has self-resetting fuses on each port and can provide up to 6 amps per port.
The Compac A1 hardware design is geared towards high performance and requires good cooling. Although the Compac A1 is the first USB stick miner to have a thermal fuse, I recommend good cooling to increase the lifespan of the components. We have had good experiences with the Arctic Breeze Mobile 92 mm. Very quiet, powerful and durable.
Alternatively, we also offer the Compac A1 with a snap-on fan, which can be powered directly on the circuit board. The Sunon 40 mm fan installed here provides sufficient cooling at a noise level of just 23 decibels.
Software
The Compac A1 USB Stick Miner requires a special branch of the mining tool CGMiner, which is available for download here as a 32-bit binary for Windows systems (recommended: Windows 10 or higher):
The miner registers itself in the Windows Device Manager as “Compac A1 Bitcoin Miner”. Under Windows 10 and higher, we recommend using the Zadig USB driver tool (http://zadig.akeo.ie/) and using the included WinUSB (libusb) driver:
Tip: After installation, activate the menu item “List all Devices” in the “Options” menu.
The Zadig tool must be run with administrator rights. If your device is connected but you cannot see it, use the menu: Options -> List all devices. Select the “Install or replace driver” option and select WinUSB.
If the USB miner is a composite USB device such as the Compac A1, after selecting the “List all devices” menu option, you may need to uncheck the “Ignore hubs or composite parent” menu option to view the miner.
If you are switching a device to WinUSB for the first time using Zadig and it shows this correctly on the left side of the Zadig window but there are still permission errors, you may need to unplug and re-plug the USB miner. Some users may need to reboot at this point.
You can use the following command to check whether the miner has been correctly detected:
cgminer.exe -nSetup
I recommend setting up a configuration file, it is much clearer than starting CGMiner with console parameters.
Example of a gekko.conf configuration file:
{
"pools" : [
{
"url" : "stratum+tcp://stratum.kano.is:3333",
"user" : "benutzername.worker",
"pass" : "x"
}
],
"gekko-compaca1-start-freq" : "300",
"gekko-compaca1-freq" : "300",
"gekko-compaca1-corev" : "300",
"gekko-compaca1-detect" : true,
"gekko-r909-freq" : "450",
"gekko-r909-detect" : true,
"gekko-compacf-freq" : "400",
"gekko-compacf-detect" : true,
"gekko-tune2" : "60",
"suggest-diff" : "442",
"failover-only" : true,
"api-listen" : true,
"api-port" : "4028",
"api-allow" : "W:192.168.1.0/24,W:127.0.0.1"
}How to start CGMiner with configuration file:
cgminer -c gekko.conf This is how the command line looks like without a configuration file
cgminer --o stratum+tcp://stratum.kano.is:3333 -u 1BURGERAXHH6Yi6LRybRJK7ybEm5m5HwTr -p x --suggest-diff 442 --gekko-compacf-freq 400 --gekko-compacf-detect trueIn the examples above, please replace the pool data as well as the user name and worker with your own pool data, user data and worker.
