Hi y’all, Mujina firmware dev here looking for mechanically-gifted collaborators. For the upcoming 256 Foundation Telehash Fundraiser, NEMS, and Heatpunk Summit events; I’d like to demo our full 256 Foundation open-source mining stack in a heat-reuse application—a sous vide cooker. That’s right, Bitcoin-purchased pasture-raised beef cooking live on stage with open-source mining hardware and software.
I envision a system with at least three open-source emberOne/00 100W hash boards with water blocks, delivering heat at ~54 degC to a water bath with the meat. I think it’s feasible if we size the bath appropriately, insulate, and expect a long pre-heat time. Thermal guys please chime in.
The emberOnes are driven by our open-source Libre-Board control board, running Mujina firmware of course. And did I mention the system is hashing to our open-source pool software Hydrapool as well?
The problem is: I’m a software and electrical guy, not a mechanical guy. I could really use some collaborators on:
Water block design and construction, and
Hydronic system design: liquid, pumps, tubes, exchangers, etc.
Wow, this looks really interesting! Are you against using immersion instead of hydro? It seems much easier and faster to iterate on than hydro(maybe i’m wrong here).
I guess the major advantage of hydro in this application is that you could reduce complexity by just using the sous vide water as the coolant(single loop). There are of course drawbacks to that, but not if the product is to used infrequently.
But immersion has already been proven out for this use case. RevHodl was sous viding rabbit last winter directly in immersion oil(vegetable oil in his case)
Anyway, can’t wait to see some of this tech in action!!
I am a mechanical engineer by trade, with some experience with pump systems from my last work. I can commit a few hours per week to hashing out a design, hope I may be of help.
Good idea, but in this case yes, I’m opposed. The open-source hardware is sort of the star of the show, so I don’t want to hide it in a tank. Plus, it’s scarce development hardware, so I want it to remain accessible for probing, repair, etc. and not get permanently gunked up.
Welcome to the forum @alro, and thanks for volunteering! Please give me a few more days to see what develops in terms of help, and we’ll come up with some kind of plan.
Mechanically, I’m thinking it might be nice to gut, hack, or replicate one of these sous vide heaters and put a heat exchanger (and pump?) inside. I have a few. They have a propeller inside them which circulates the water bath. And they would conveniently clip onto the water tub.
Adding to my comment about immersion above: the closer this looks to an end-user product—the less an observer has to use their imagination—the better. Immersion seems less like a product to me.
Yea the main thing that’s needed is a water block for the Ember One hashboard. Have you chat with Ryan Ramminger from http://cryobytelabs.com ?
I’m sure there are other services that could mock one up relatively quick from the dimensions in the KiCAD file! I might take a stab at this if I find the time.
My CAD skills are… “juvenile”, in that I pretty much only use Tinkercad. I can, however, bend it to my will to accomplish some reasonably impressive things.
I’m also multi-disciplined in that I know my way around a soldering iron, electricity, some plumbing stuff, etc. (I was a Nuke ET in the USN many years ago.)
I’d be happy to lend my skills if you’d like them on the project. At the very least I’m good at rapid prototyping and getting functional designs done. Aesthetics aren’t my strongest point, but I don’t have a lot of ego there either so I’m happy to hand off an engineering-focused design to someone else to pretty-up.
I’ll definitely reach out to Ryan Ramminger; that’s a good idea.
Schnitzel said that under 1 kW, we’re in a good position to reuse PC cooling gear, readily available on Amazon. So a custom water block that fits the e1/00—that’s compatible with the PC-cooling ecosystem—is probably what we need.
What do you all think about the system design? I’m imagining a loop through the water blocks into some kind of exchanger in the water bath. What liquid should we use in the loop? What is needed for a good heat exchange into the water bath? At what points should temperature be measured? I don’t need a secondary place to dump unneeded energy because this is Mujina, so I can modulate the energy production at the source.