NerdOctaxe Solo Mining Setup Guide

This is the end-to-end setup guide for the NerdOctaxe — from opening the box to seeing your first share land at a solo pool. The web UI is the same ESP-Miner / NerdMiner-derived firmware that ships on the rest of the Bitaxe family, so if you've configured a Bitaxe before, you'll move through this in about ten minutes.

Solo mining is all-or-nothing: you earn the full block reward (~3.125 BTC) or you earn zero. With the NerdOctaxe's ~10–12 TH/s, your daily odds are roughly 6–8x what a single Bitaxe gets you, but still firmly in lottery-ticket territory. You can sanity-check your real-time odds at the Moken ASIC calculator.

Before You Power It On

You'll need:

• The NerdOctaxe + the included PSU (don't substitute a random adapter — this thing pulls ~140W).
• An ethernet cable, or a 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network you can join from a phone. The firmware doesn't speak 5GHz.
• A Bitcoin wallet address you control. If you don't have one yet, grab a wallet you trust (Phantom, BlueWallet, Sparrow, hardware wallet — whatever) and copy your receive address before you start.

Pick where the unit lives before you plug it in. The NerdOctaxe pushes ~140W of warm air and has audible fan noise. Garage, utility room, basement, workshop — yes. Bedroom, closed cabinet, on the couch — no.

Step 1 — Power Up

Plug the DC barrel into the NerdOctaxe first, then the PSU into the wall. The fans will spin up immediately and the front display will boot through the ESP-Miner splash. Give it about 30–60 seconds to fully come up.

Step 2 — Join the Setup Wi-Fi

On first boot the NerdOctaxe broadcasts its own Wi-Fi access point — the SSID looks something like NerdOctaxe or ESP-Miner. From your phone or laptop:

1. Connect to that network.
2. A captive portal should pop automatically. If it doesn't, open a browser and go to http://192.168.4.1.
3. Use the scan/magnifying-glass icon to find your home Wi-Fi (2.4GHz only), enter the password, and submit.
4. You can keep the hostname as NerdOctaxe or rename it — useful if you're running more than one and want to recognize them on your router.

Press Save, then Restart. The unit will drop the setup AP, reconnect to your main network, and the front display will eventually cycle to show its new IP address.

Step 3 — Open the Web UI

Type the IP from the display into any browser on the same network. You'll land on the ESP-Miner dashboard — hashrate graph at the top, temperatures, share counts, fan RPM, and a sidebar with Pool, Settings, and System.

Click Pool.

Step 4 — Configure a Solo Pool

We recommend solo.ckpool.org — the OG solo mining pool. No account, no signup, your wallet address is your username. Fill in:

• Stratum host: solo.ckpool.org
• Stratum port: 3333
• Password: x (just the letter)

Fill the same values into the fallback pool fields so the miner has somewhere to go if the primary stratum hiccups. (Or use public-pool.io on port 21496 as your fallback — both are reputable solo pools.)

Step 5 — Set the User (Your Wallet)

This is the part that matters. The User field uses the format:

<your bitcoin wallet address>.<devicename>

For example: bc1pfng0esd5eg2qafmfa0xyzxyz.nerdoctaxe01

The wallet address is where the block reward gets sent if you hit. Double-check it. Triple-check it. If you typo this, you've donated to the void. The device name after the dot is just a label for your own bookkeeping.

Set this for both the primary and fallback pool entries.

Step 6 — Save and Watch It Hash

Hit Save, then Restart. The unit will reboot, reconnect, and within a minute or two you should see:

• Hashrate climbing toward ~10–12 TH/s on the main dashboard.
• Accepted shares incrementing in the share counter.
• Chip temperatures stabilizing (usually under 70°C with stock cooling).

You can now monitor your miner remotely at solostats.ckpool.org — paste your wallet address into the search and bookmark the page. That's your live odds dashboard.

Firmware Updates

The ESP-Miner firmware ships under active development. New releases (better tuning, UI improvements, bug fixes) drop on the ESP-Miner GitHub releases page. To update:

1. Download the latest esp-miner.bin and (if listed) www.bin from the release notes.
2. In the web UI, go to System → Firmware Update.
3. Upload the binary, wait for the flash to complete, let the unit reboot.

Always read the release notes before flashing — occasionally an update wipes saved config and you'll need to re-enter your pool/wallet.

Troubleshooting

The unit won't connect to my Wi-Fi. Confirm you're on 2.4GHz. The ESP32 radio doesn't support 5GHz. Some mesh routers also need you to temporarily disable band steering during setup.

It connects but I don't see any accepted shares. Almost always a wallet-address typo or wrong stratum URL. Re-open the Pool screen, copy the wallet address again, save, restart.

Hashrate is way under 10 TH/s. Check chip temperatures. If chips are throttling (above ~75–80°C) you need better airflow — move it somewhere cooler, or aim a USB fan at it. Stock cooling is fine for ~10–11 TH/s in a normal room; pushing to 12 TH/s usually needs help.

Fans are at full blast. Same answer — it's protecting itself from thermal throttle. Ambient temp matters a lot.

Display is blank but fans are spinning. Reseat the display cable (small ribbon on the side), or check the front face for any pinched wiring after shipping.

I bricked it flashing firmware. The ESP32 can be recovered over USB-C with esptool.py. The ESP-Miner GitHub has the exact flash command in the README.

If you're truly stuck, email us — support@heliumdeploy.com — with your order number and a photo of the unit. We'll figure it out.

That's It

You're now hashing on the Bitcoin network, solo, from your home, with a real 8-chip ASIC. The expected daily yield is zero — that's the lottery. Check solostats every few days. Check your wallet too. If a block lands in there, you'll know.