Bitaxe

The Bitaxe is an open-source Bitcoin miner: a small circuit board with one modern mining chip, an ESP32-S3 microcontroller that runs it, a fan and a tiny screen. It describes itself as “a Bitcoin miner based on an open-source design and a modern mining ASIC,” and it does something warehouse miners never do: it mines solo, trying to find a whole block on its own, from a desk, on under 20 watts. Cole runs one at home. It is the hands-on half of the Bitcoin page, and like that page, this is not financial advice.

What it is

Every Bitaxe pairs an ASIC (a chip that does nothing but Bitcoin’s SHA-256 hashing) taken from Bitmain’s commercial miners with an open board design and open firmware, so anyone can build, modify or sell one. (Monero went the other way and designed its mining so that ordinary computers stay competitive.) The name and logo belong to the bitaxeorg project, the firmware is maintained by Open Source Miners United (OSMU), and there is no official store: bitaxe.org links to vetted resellers. The current base model starts at from $61 (Bitaxe Gamma 602) (as of Oct 28, 2026, solosatoshi.com).

The model numbers track the chip:

Model	Chip	Notes
100 “Max”	BM1397	The first design
200 “Ultra”	BM1366
400 “Supra”	BM1368
600 “Gamma”	BM1370	The chip from the Antminer S21 Pro, which Bitmain rates at 15 J/TH
650 “Gamma Duo”	BM1370	Reuses lower-binned S21 chips instead of discarding them
801 “Gamma Turbo”	Two BM1370	Twice the chips

A current Gamma (the 602 revision) hashes at about 1.2 terahashes per second and draws 18 to 20 watts, per the reseller listing behind the price above. Running all year, 20 watts is about 175 kWh of electricity.

Setting one up

1. Power it and join its network. On first start the firmware brings up its own setup Wi-Fi network. Join it from a phone or laptop and open the AxeOS page.
2. Give it your home Wi-Fi. It restarts on your network, and from then on you reach AxeOS by its address on your network.
3. Point it at a pool. For solo mining the pool is only a coordinator, and the “user” field is the Bitcoin address that would receive a block reward (a fresh receiving address from a wallet like Sparrow or Cake Wallet), plus an optional worker name after a dot. Public Pool is a fully open source solo pool with an official instance and the option to host your own; CKPool’s solo server is another common choice. Current firmware also speaks Stratum V2.
4. Watch the dashboard. AxeOS shows hashrate, chip temperature, power, fan speed, uptime and the best difficulty: the hardest share your miner has found so far, which is how solo miners track how close they came.

Only an address goes into the miner. Never a seed, never a private key.

The AxeOS API

AxeOS has a small HTTP API, documented in the firmware’s README and its OpenAPI file, so a script can read or change everything the web page can:

curl http://YOUR-BITAXE-IP/api/system/info                  # hashrate, temperature, power, pool, uptime
curl http://YOUR-BITAXE-IP/api/system/statistics/dashboard  # the dashboard's history
curl -X POST http://YOUR-BITAXE-IP/api/system/restart       # restart the miner
curl -X PATCH http://YOUR-BITAXE-IP/api/system \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"fanspeed": 80}'

The JSON from /api/system/info is all a status panel needs. Cole’s login dashboard, Porchlight, turns any command that prints JSON into a panel, which is the easy way to see at a glance whether a miner on the home network is up. The same firmware also flashes over USB with bitaxetool, a Python tool, when you need a factory reset.

The odds, honestly

Solo mining is a lottery where every hash is a ticket. Each block goes to whoever finds it, and your chance of finding any given block is your share of the network’s total hashrate.

At the end of October 2026 the network runs at about 1,075 exahashes per second (mempool.space). A Gamma’s 1.2 TH/s is about one billionth of that. With about 52,560 blocks a year, a single Gamma at today’s difficulty expects about 0.00006 blocks a year: roughly a one in 17,000 chance in any given year. Difficulty tends to rise as the network grows, so the odds tend to shrink over time.

Pool mining (sharing rewards with many miners) would pay a Bitaxe a tiny, steady trickle instead, which is why most owners choose the lottery. Either way, don’t expect it to earn back what it costs. What it buys is participation: a real miner, on the real network, with open hardware you can read top to bottom.

Living with it

• Heat and air. All of its power turns into heat at the chip. Give it airflow and keep an eye on the chip temperature in AxeOS.
• Tuning. AxeOS exposes the chip’s frequency and core voltage. Raising either raises heat and power with it, so change them in small steps and watch the temperature.
• Firmware updates. ESP-Miner ships often (version 2.15.4 came out on October 21, 2026), and AxeOS can update itself over the air from a downloaded release file.
• Keep it at home. The web interface and API are meant for your local network. Do not forward them to the internet; to check on the miner from elsewhere, reach your home network over Tailscale instead.

Gotchas

• Your address is visible to the pool. The address you mine to identifies you to the pool, and on many solo pools its statistics page is public. Use an address meant for this, not one that ties back to everything else you own (see what the public ledger reveals).
• Flash the right image. Factory images are built per board revision; flashing the wrong one can leave the miner misbehaving until you flash the right one.
• bitaxetool and esptool versions. The README notes bitaxetool does not work properly with esptool 5.x; version 0.6.1 of bitaxetool pins a compatible esptool.
• Shares are not blocks. A high best difficulty is a fun number, not a near miss you can bank. Only a share that beats the network difficulty is a block.