BTC Hardware Ops

Back in 2019, a BTC-aware investor approached us with an idea: run miners at home, but do it right. No off-the-shelf rigs, no janky extension cords. Real infrastructure—50 amps at 240 volts, liquid cooling, physical automation, and software that could run it all unattended.

So we built it. I bought an empty electronics enclosure and designed the entire DIN rail architecture from scratch—power distribution, relay modules, sensors, and control logic. We supported both single and dual-phase power configurations, all inside an air-controlled, watertight container. Every port, every wire, every circuit was designed and assembled by hand.

On the software side, I wrote Python and TypeScript automation that used a custom protocol on top of IRC for messaging between controllers. Grafana dashboards with Prometheus handled alerting and monitoring. The whole system could manage up to 10,000 watts of home mining infrastructure.

I led a small team of three—mostly college grads I hired—to iterate on the designs, test the automations, and push the system through real-world operation. We learned how to run Antminer machines at scale, deal with thermal management, and handle the quirks of residential power.

This project is a reminder that software and hardware aren't separate worlds. Sometimes the best solution is a Raspberry Pi, some relays, and a willingness to get your hands dirty.