32 thoughts on “Crypto Miners in Tray – Slim Universal Cryptocurrency Mining Front-End”

1. Hi,

   I saw your app on Bitcointalk forum, but since I’m still a newbie I can’t answer you on the forum.

   The upcoming feature looks very interesting.
   If the app could have a software exclude list it would be great, like “if abc.exe is running stop all miners (or a specific miner)”.
   (the ideal example is the Boinc client)

   I have a little request about the “balloon tooltip”, an option is the config file to disable it 🙂

   Thank you,

2. Hi!

   I will include the tooltip disable option in the next release. May I ask you why you would want to disable it? As it is now, it only appears for 2 seconds when you hover over the icon and does not interfere with double-click or right-click. Your reason for wishing to disable it may influence how it is implemented.

   As for the app-watch list, I need to think how to design it to be useful. It is most probably best to have it on a per-miner bases as some people run multiple miners against different hardware, some of which might not be affected by the excluded programs.

3. I’m using Bitcoin Miners in Tray at work for mining Litecoins (pooler cpuminer), I recently decided to put it on more computer than my own. Ok it’s not completely stealthy but the balloon tooltip is very annoying, even if you’re quickly sweeping the taskbar for another software, the balloon tooltip comes up.

4. He-he. At uni, I did for a short time something similar with Seti@home in the good old pre-Boinc days (modifying YASC on Unix). I’ll see if I can make BMT a bit more stealthy. 🙂

5. I saw your update on the forum, I haven’t yet tested. It’s awesome !!

6. Hi,
   the gui is very useful, but “keep alive” feature doesn’t work in case of GPU driver crash. Is it any way to detect 0 hashrate (in guiminer) and then restart it?

7. Hi.
   Thanks for the fedback.
   You mention guiminer. Bitcoin Miners in tray is not meant to run guiminer, but to replace it, running the miners (e.g. poclbm) directly.
   KeepAlive currently checks for two conditions: if the process is running and, if yes, if it outputs anything of its stdout and stdin.
   I can try to modify KeepAlive feature so that it is configurable and can check for a user-defined set of conditions, including 0-hashing speed.

8. Hi,

   I’m interested in use your program, but I get an “BtMinersInTray.exe is not a valid win32 application”.
   I have tested 2 latest version with same result.
   I’m running in WinXP 32bit.
   There is any special requeriment to run it?
   Thank you for your attention.

9. I build the program on a 64-bit Win7. However, I used a 32-bit configuration and tested it on a 32-bit Vista. The program targets .Net framework 4.5. Check Windows Update and ensure that you have the latest .Net framework runtime installed. I don’t know what is the highest supported framework version on XP as I haven’t had an XP machine for some time.
   Alternatively, you can wait for the next release, where I will lower the target framework version number to 4.0 as I use no features of the latest framework.

10. hi.

    this hide the “bitcoinminerintray program itself” in the tray, which is really nice, but the “GUIminer.exe program itself” is not hidden, it is visible in the tray.

    How i can put the GUIminer programm hidden ???

    plz help 🙂 btw: your program is nice, but the config is hard.

    one error:
    if i dont delete ”

    d:\Bitcoin\cpuminer
    mining_proxy.exe
    >-pa scrypt -o coinotron.com -p 3334

    c:\windows
    notepad.exe
    newfile.txt

    c:\windows\system32
    ping.exe
    pool.50btc.com

    ”

    i can NOT LOAD the config.xml

    any ideas? im using win7 64bit. thx a lot.

    ^^ sorry i mean this code has to be deleted, if i want load the config, without errors:

    prerequisites

    ……

    prerequisites

11. 1) Guiminer is a front-end in itself – you don’t run a front-end from a front-end. What you run from Bitcoin Miners in Tray, are the commandline-based miners themselves: poclbm.exe, cgminer.exe, cpuminer.exe, etc. The only reason you would want to get Guiminer is for the bundled latest build of poclbm.exe (in case you have 7900 series AMD card).
    2) The included example file is just that – an example, that’s why it is called .example.txt 😉 It is there to document all configuration settings and their values. You write your own configuration, using the bits from the doc-file that you need. The minimum configuration requires only miners->miner section, give it an id and specify workingDir, application and arguments nodes.
    3) Prerequisites is just a section with programs, which are run before the miners themselves are launched. You can, for example, run mining-proxy from there if you use a miner which only supports Getwork protocol (e.g. poclbm) against a pool, which only supports Stratum (e.g. OzCoin)

12. Any chance to make this program autostart with Windows? I know I can just put the link into Startup folder by myself, but its much of a hassle, create lnk, copy..

13. I just create a shortcut in the Startup menu myself 😉
    Having said that, adding a Start with Windows option would be an interesting exercise…

14. It would be very helpful to be able to set the checkHashrate manually. I’m doing port80 mining at work and it often gets stuck, but the rate does not go to zero.
    For example, “24-4-2013 11:05:35 [GPU Miner]: port80.btcguild.com:80 [0.402 MH/s (~0 MH/s)] [Rej: 0/0 (0.00%)]”. It would be great to be able to set a process to restart if the hash rate is below 0.6 or so.

15. I guess I could add a threshold attribute on that option. Currently the threshold is hardcoded to be below 0.0000000000001 😀

16. All-in-all this is a great program though 🙂 Thank you for all the development, it’s definitely a major improvement over guiminer and others.

17. hi, thx a lot for your big answer.

    after 3 hours i dont get it. if i use cgminer, alway the cgminer WINDOW is shown.
    btw: i can only open cgminer via the path to the “start_mining.bat” . i know this is double. but if i pointing to the cgminer.exe —> [kevin: averageWindow size: 0 samples
    27.04.2013 14:49:49 [kevin]: Redirection is not supported.

    if i use guiminer, it worked …but the guiminer WINDOW is alway visible. i understood your explaination about the gui in the gui.

    how to get the cgminer window invisible?! the BCMinTray is invisible perfectly 🙂
    “Run with window” (hack) dosent any effect by me.

    thx a lot.

18. I mentioned in the Compatibility section that you should start cgminer with the following options:

    --text-only --log 1

    No need to go via a batch file. Starting a bat-file, you launch a command interpreter, (which my program will not show), which in turn launches cgminer (which will remain visible).
    “Run with Windows” will launch Bitcoin Miners in Tray on Windows start-up.

19. #1#
    is there a way to start with windows, invisible. so noone can see the cgminer? in tray hidden, too?!
    my goal is to run (autostart) BtMinerInTray+cgminer absolutly hidden on win7, ATI card. and use the human activity control, too.

    srry but i dont get it 🙂

    #2# –text-only –log 1 <— some example. plz, i have not a clue 🙁

    #3# do u know an other miner (CGminer has too many problems), that worked better in unvisible modus compared with your BtMinerTray ??

    thx for your replys, anyway. must be a very good programm, but maybe for noobs like me, should have more tutorials. (video TUT on youtube maybe?)

20. #1: Add <stealthMode value=”TrayIcon” /> in the top-level configuration section. (See .example.txt file) Launch the program once, and tick “Run with Windows” checkbox in the GUI. On next boot, the program will be launched at Windows start-up, but will not show up in the system tray.
    #2: Those are cgminer arguments. add them along with the other arguments that you pass to cgminer
    #3: Depends on what you mine. For LTC cgminer is the best (unless you are CPU-mining); for BTC, I prefer using poclbm (either stand-alone build for the older cards, or the one bundled with GuiMiner for 79xx series). See links in the Compatibility paragraph of my post.

21. Thanks so much for adding the checkHashRate option. Another useful feature would be the ordering and prioritizing of miners and adding an option to automatically move on to another once one of them stop working. An example of this would be if the pool server is down. I have account on three mining pools and they sometimes shut down port80 mining, I have to check on them manually.

22. Zoltan, what you are looking for, already exists in most major miners (e.g. poclbm and cgminer), and is called backup pools. They are better position to know when a pool is down, than my GUI will ever be, so it is better to use the miners’ capabilities for such fail-overs. Check you miner’s help/readme to see how you specify multiple pools and fail-over conditions on a command line.
    As for ordering, the miners appear in the GUI in the same order they are listed in the config file.

23. Hi,
    I just installed the program and found a few issues but I can live with them.

    I would like to have 2 new features.
    * Accepted shares, the same way that you parse the speed, it would be nice if you could parse the accepted shares. Or add a way to put the text to look for in the config scrip if it is too difficult due the different miners.

    * A way to put variables in the config file. When you are repeating the same values over and over in the different miners is a pain if you have to change any value later on. It could be nice if you could defile variables like:

    and later on start the miner with something similar to:
    –url=${url3} –userpass=${user}:x

    Cheers
    Maxocoin

24. Request 1: As you say, the way miners report (or not) accepted shares varies too greatly to write a consistent algorithm. What I can do is to add a custom-reported column to the miner list and allow the user to provide RegEx expression to use for value extraction. Still, what to do with that value: treat it as a string and display the last one, parse it to double and accumulate or parse and calculate average… I’ll try to implement the first option in a future release.

    Request 2: This is a good idea, I’ll add it to the next version (implemented in 7.10).

25. Great to see the variable feature implemented!!! THANK YOU.

    I’m still trying to fine tuning my setup and another possible addition could be adding a “execute” action to the watchers.
    My idea is to send commands with an external application to cgminer.exe using the JSON API (e.g. change the intensity without needing to restart it) .

    Do you think that having a output tab (maybe a logingWindow=”name” attr) for each miner is a good idea, it gets confusing to check the output when all the miner are sending the output to the same window.

    Thanks again for your great work
    Maxocoin

26. The execute action is a good idea and would be fairly easy to add – I designed watchers to be extensible with new conditions and actions in mind. The applications launched from the watcher will have their output redirected, but will otherwise not be tied to Crypto Miners in Tray.

    As for multiple output tabs, I need to investigate. This would require some inner rewiring of how the output is handled. I might include it in a future release, but I am not sure if it would be worth the hassle. In my experience, running 4 mining rigs, I seldom open the GUI after the initial configuration stage. The program justifies its name and sits for weeks in the tray keeping the performance close to 100%, all by itself. If you have many pieces of hardware (GPUs) on the same rig, you can configure them one at a time to minimise the clutter.

27. Great stuff, thanks for for looking into it…

28. Added Execute action and logging to file.

29. Thanks once again for those new features ….

    Trying to configure a miner i ran into another requirement… 😉

    Could it be possible to put others miner ID in the condition of “RunningApplication” instead of just a process name?

    I want that one particular miner stops if a different miner starts due any reason

    Cheers
    MC

30. I am on the verge of abandoning any further development of the program due to time constraints and little interest in the application judging by the amount of donations (exactly 0) and the number of comments on the forums.
    Are you sure you cannot achieved what you want, using the existing functionality? Maybe what your are after is the “Profitability group”? If not, what is the use case for your scenario?

31. Hi,
    I’m sorry to hear that 🙁

    I’m really enjoying your tool, sorry for not be able to be more grateful in a more “material” way.

    I think that the tool is not suitable for any one (you need some background for be able to deal with the xml) but it is a GREAT improvement over “GUI Miner”

    If you decide to continue, two ways that I can think to improve the visibility are:

    * Update the main post on bitcointalk.org every time you do an update.
    * Do an extra version of the configuration example, ready to use, that some one new only needs to replace the values in some of the variables for start using it. (I’ll try help with that)

    After taking a look at the “Profitability group” is kind of what I have in mind, but what the triggers the miner change is not the profitability, but the ending of the previous miner.

    Two use cases that I have in mind are:

    * Implement a pool change when there are connection/pool problems (with minerd.exe, that doesn’t implement its own pool change)
    The idea is having a group that when a miner exists (minerd –retries=3 –retry-pause=60 …) it starts the next in the group, and keeps looping over then. Something like a “Batch Group”

    * I usually have the miners set up that automatically puts themselves in a non intrusive way during working hours. I would like to have an extra miner configuration to put them in “full steam” when I know that I’m not going to use the computer for some time. The idea is to put the “full steam” miner ID in a “RunningApplication” watcher of the “normal miner” to stop it automatically when I start the “full steam” miner. If I just put the miner name in the “RunningApplication” it never starts because it detects it self 🙁

    Cheers
    MC

32. I removed your last two comments with malformed XML, as I understand what you are aiming at. To post XML, you can use “& lt ;” and “& gt ;” symbols (remove spaces), like this: <xml>

    Now, to answer your points:

    – When I update with a new version, I always posted a reply on that thread, bumping it up. The screenshot changed automatically, once I updated it in the blog.

    – I actually made something like that in the next to last post on the forum to demonstrate profitability groups. Might include a few ready-to-use samples with the next release, if I find time to update the program.

    About your use cases:

    – This might actually be a candidate for keepAlive node expansion. If keepAlive detects that a miner needs to be restarted, it can rotate through a set or arguments, defined within keepAlive node. Hmm…

    – What you describe here is a RestartWithArguments on HumanActivity/TimeInterval/DaysOfWeek watchers, unless your full steam miner is different from a down-throttled one.

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