They Could Have Built This Years Ago. Nobody Did.

Michael Schmidt, better known as Schnitzel, bought a hundred S19J Pros for $40 each. Machines that used to cost $15,000. He's bringing them back with open-source firmware he built in his garage, with help from an AI agent and about eight burned hashboards along the way.

Michael is one of the lead engineers at the 256 Foundation, and he's back on the show to talk about Magina. It's an open-source firmware that does things Braiins, Luxor, Vnish and stock firmware simply won't. You can ramp a miner from 3,000W down to 1,000W in three to five seconds, where other firmware takes half an hour. You can follow a live solar curve. And you can run hashboards from completely different machines together in one rig, which no proprietary firmware will let you do.

We talk about why nobody built any of this before, why the 256 Foundation wants open rigs but not open chips, and what happened when Michael handed an AI agent an S19 and a power meter and told it to figure things out. We also get into why your miner's power API is lying to you about wattage, what he learned from destructive testing across eight different hashboard variants, and where he thinks this all goes over the next two or three years.

👤 Guest: Michael Schmidt (Schnitzel), Lead Engineer at the 256 Foundation

256 Foundation: https://www.256foundation.org

Follow on X: https://x.com/schnitzel

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro: Schnitzel, Teddy the Swiss mountain dog & proof of dog

3:04 The 256 Foundation: Libreboard, Ember One, Magina & Hydro Pool

4:13 Heat reuse goes commercial: the Swiss solar monetization project

5:00 The solar problem: chasing a production curve that never sits still

5:31 Why existing firmware takes 30 minutes to change wattage

6:35 Why nobody built sub-minute ramping before (and why it isn't malicious)

9:18 Proprietary hardware: the tire manufacturer who only sells whole cars

10:57 Open rigs, not open chips: what the 256 Foundation actually wants

13:52 What Magina is and how it differs from Braiins, Luxor & Vnish

15:06 Handing an AI agent an S19 and a Shelly power meter

17:03 Zero to 500 MHz: the board that died and the ramping fix

19:21 Destructive testing: 8 hashboard variants in a single S19J Pro

20:22 Physical vs digital: 2,900W on the API, 0W on the wall

22:10 Microphones, temp sensors and eight burned boards

24:13 Why the power API guesses, and why the PSU already knows

27:09 S19J + S19K on one control board: 130 TH/s from mismatched hardware

31:30 Building a Frankenstein miner from two dead machines

32:25 The $40 miner renaissance and bringing dead hardware back

34:04 Magina on a Canaan Nano, Proto chips and the wildfire moment

35:08 Get involved: dev calls, donations and hardware you're not using

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#BitcoinMining #OpenSource #Magina #256Foundation #Heatpunk #HeatReuse #SolarMining #ASIC #S19 #Firmware #AI #BitcoinMiningFirmware #Bitcoin #HashrateUp