New Hardware - March 2022

To keep the creative ball rolling, I've decided to create this little write up to sorta document where we're at with recent (public) developments in immersion mining. I'm going to cover a few new products that have come to market and some promising immersion projects that are in the works.

PSU's

Flow plates / My next build

I've started to model up my next build. It will be a compact dual loop S9 (1.6kW) system. I will try use as many transparent materials possible because it will serve as a demonstration model - it is important for people to whats going on inside the tank. It's more engaging and educational that way. Plus, RGB LEDs can't shine through metal. Anyway, what I wanted to share was the flow plate pictured below. What I did in my last build was drill holes in a pipe that ran under the hashboard. What more people are doing now is creating drilled plates that their hardware sits on. It should be easier this way to just get it laser cut where we need holes.

Actually what I really really wanted to show was the fact that the PSU on the left has far less holes than the hashboards on the right. The power supply is 90% efficient which means that 10% of the power it draws is dissipated as heat. This means that 10% of 1.6kW, 160W will be dissipated in the PSU space and 1440W will be dissipated as heat in the hashboard space. Long story short, the PSU space has 10% of the total holes. Just thought it was a nice bit of visual information to tie into the theory.

Alpha Miner's new PSU

Alpha Miner is a company that develops and sells aftermarket PSUs for ASIC miners. Their current offerings include a 4000W PSU for use with S19's and other miners. The stock S19 PSU is supposed to deliver ~3000W to the S19's. You can drive the hashboards harder if you overclock and cool appropriately, but you would need a gruntier PSU. They're releasing a 5000W model soon, which is huge step above 3000W. Fun fact: the S19 hydros which have just been released are powered by ~5.5kW PSUs.

Alpha Miner are currently seeking suggestions from immersion miners to influence the chassis design. Below is a concept of their chassis design. Looks pretty cool but personally I don't think it will happen. Punching all these holes will add production cost for little gain since most immersion systems have the fluid flow up and over the heatsinks - it wouldn't matter much if there are holes in the side of the PSU case. That, and putting more holes in my charcoal bbq reminded me of this Simpsons gag.

VNISH PSU mod

With all that said, there is a mod out there that will let you overclock your Bitmain APW12 PSU (stock 3250W) beyond 5kW with the removal of some resistors on the PCB 🤯 obviously if you're overdriving a PSU, you're playing with fire, but if you're cooling appropriately then it sounds like fun. A guide can be found here.

New Products and Companies!

Quite a few mining products have been announced lately which is exciting, because it means someone else has spent the money doing the design for manufacturability. It's good to see what works and what hasn't - we can draw inspiration from their design choices.

Big Black Box

We'll start with something that isn't immersion related. The Black Box is a product from upstreamdata. It is a sound attenuation chamber which serves to quell the loud drone of an ASIC miner, unlocking more domestic mining opportunities! Simply drop your ASIC miner into the box and plug it in. I believe the current Black Boxes out there (Ohmm model) can fit 2x S19's, whereas this bigger model would hold 12.

Whatsminer M36S

This product got leaked to me in a special little group chat that I'm in a while back, and I still can't for the life of me figure out more about it other than it runs at 7kW with 380V input and is designed for immersion. Here it is for sale.

I would really like to know what kind of mounting or racking system it is designed to be used with. Perhaps a 3U or 4U cassette thingy. It's about time these ASIC manufacturers began using established hardware standards. I also hear that Whatsminer are intending to launch their own proprietary (cringe) mounting system for these units.

EDIT: All evidence of this miner has been removed from the Whatsminer website 👀

Cryptotherm

A new company made its debut within the Immersion Tech talk group chat, Cryptotherm. They offer a very slick configurable dual loop system for 4x S19's and an equally slick shipping container system.

Fog hashing

Another new company has appeared, named Fog Hashing. I guess the name is derived from fog computing: an architecture that uses edge devices to carry out a substantial amount of computation. I'm hesitant to report on these folks because most of their images on their site are renders but I did spot a unit in a Bits Be Trippin youtube video. They mention they will review their brand new Fog Hashing C1 immersion cooling kit which can house a single S19.

Having nothing but renders on your site is usually a bad sign, so I look forward to the BBT review. I think smaller units are cool because they cater to people who don't have the capacity to run larger systems. This is the only system I've seen on the market that only has single S19 capacity - I wonder if there is a good reason for that.

Hotbox Liu

In December @coinheated revealed the first Hotbox Liu prototype. He really thinks outside of the box by using air to water heat exchangers in the place of fluid to fluid HX's. I'm excited to see how these perform. Aiproenergy are beginning production of the Hotbox Liu and are selling some of their first steel production prototypes.

By using a technically inappropriate heat exchanger in this way, coinheated eliminates the need for extra fittings and interfacing hardware, however it will still require 2 pumps, one for oil and one for water. However it seems much more simple in this configuration - your oil pump wouldn't be working hard to push oil through a plate heat exchanger, it would have a much easier job of pushing oil up and through the fins of the air to water HX that coin heated is using in this design. Coinheated is also working on a design called the Hotbox Duo which uses the air to water HX like a cold plate. The HX will be placed at the bottom of the tank and the theory is that convection currents will do the rest to pump colder oil up and over the hashboards, eliminating a pump from the system - really looking forward to seeing what comes of this design.

The hardware space is heating up quickly (pun not intended). There are a lot of interesting systems out there that I haven't covered here, perhaps in the future. I would like to touch on immersion cooling system integration with hot water systems for, applications like central heating, and other various heat recycling methods. I would also like to shed light on sound attenuation chambers and how I believe they will be at the forefront of bringing mining back to domestic environments.

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