Setting up mining software

In order to mine with an ASIC miner, we need to connect and configure it with a controlling computer. Most ASICs connect to a computer via a USB; therefore, with the use of USB hubs we can usually connect a large number of ASICs to a single computer. We will, of course, need the appropriate software and drivers to use our ASICs to mine.

Drivers

We will present our tests here using a Butterfly Labs (BFL) ASIC; however, most popular ASICs connect and configure the same way.

Mining software

There are many mining programs out there. Our favorite is cgminer. The GitHub repository can be found at: https://github.com/ckolivas/cgminer. The downloadable versions (for both Linux and Windows) can be found at the author's website: http://ck.kolivas.org/apps/cgminer.

We recommend using the latest version of cgminer to mine with ASICs; currently, (August 2015) the latest version is version 4.9.2.

Note

Note that the version of cgminer that we used for GPU mining was an earlier version...