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Since I own two FPGA:s I want to get started mining. It doesn't matter which currency I am mining, only that it works. I would prefer to do mining of Bitcoin, Ether, Dash or LItecoin but anything that works with my FPGA will do.

My FPGAs are Altera DE2 and Altera DE2-115. I already checked out one project that was too old (it used the getwork call which has been deprecated.

Any suggestions what I should do? I know C programming and some electronics and VHDL so I can find my way around a complicated installation or building it.

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    Possible duplicate of bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/5481/… ?
    – meshcollider
    Commented Nov 2, 2017 at 9:42
  • @MeshCollider please, that question is five years old and any specific technology mentioned in there is likely outdated and deprecated.
    – Niklas Rosencrantz
    Commented Nov 2, 2017 at 9:46
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    The information contained in the answer is non-specific to any particular FPGA or currency, its more of a general introduction to getting started. But I assume then that you are looking for specific software to install on yours
    – meshcollider
    Commented Nov 2, 2017 at 9:53
  • @MeshCollider Yes please!
    – Niklas Rosencrantz
    Commented Nov 2, 2017 at 9:57

1 Answer 1

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I'm a total newbie but so far the problem appears to be solvable. This is what I did with my Altera DE2-115 hooked-up to a Windows 7 machine:

  1. got fpgaminer's open source FPGA bitcoin miner on Github
  2. got mining proxy on bitcoin.cz
  3. set up an account with slushpool.com (had to use VPN because my ISP apparently blocks connections to slushpool over http :((( )
  4. registered an online BTC wallet with blockchain.info
  5. updated config.tcl to connect to localhost:8332 port and reflect my slushpool-related credentials
  6. downloaded miner's bitstream into DE2-115
  7. launched mining proxy
  8. and finally ran mine.bat

Illustration: FPGA miner accepting jobs via Stratum rather than thru getwork protocol

FPGA miner accepting jobs via Stratum

The hashrate was indeed around 50 Mh/sec but after ~10 seconds the Cyclon IV chip got rather hot, so I decided to play it safe and stopped mining. As the next step I'm planning to install an active cooling system to continue experiments such as switching from my Windows rig to Raspi, mining altcoins, etc.

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  • I just want to add to this guide that in 2021 this doesn't work as getwork() is no longer supported by slushpool. I just tried it out of curiosity to see if I could do it :)
    – Catsunami
    Commented Feb 25, 2021 at 4:06

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