David’s Status Report for 2-26

Last week, I encountered a blocker where I was unable to connect to mining pools because they no longer support HTTP and getwork, but instead use the stratum protocol. In working around this, I have decided to use a stratum mining proxy that will bridge the gap between the protocols. This was the result of first researching the deprecated getwork method and postulating how to request work from pools. After some literature review of another project using the same FPGA miner, I decided to use their solution to the same problem. The mining proxy is more generally for testing mining when using a computer as the middleman with a mining pool. However, we want to use a Raspberry Pi as that middle connection, so I also looked into multiple existing miners that either use FPGAs or CPUs so that I can use them to figure out how we want to communicate to mining pools. These include repositories of bfgminer, cpuminer-multi, and btcfpgaminer. For my task to create and test a module for the RPI to communicate with a mining pool, we are still waiting to receive our Raspberry Pi. I also have the task in figuring out web synthesis, but we have since decided to pass the configuration as an input to the FPGAs, so we don’t need to resynthesize anything. I worked on my slides for the design review presentation and provided a script to the presenter. I also began working on the design review report. I am now slightly behind on my task to simulate mining locally because I had only recently discovered the work around, but I have access to the mining proxy now, I just have to figure out either how to get Quartus on my mac or how to sudo on the 240 machines. In regards to other tasks, I am pretty much on track.