BITAXE.BALLER

// blog · · by Nathan Baldwin

Configuring your first Bitaxe — DHCP, pool, OLED settings, and what to do about port 80

// Step-by-step Bitaxe setup — DHCP, your first pool configuration, OLED display settings, and how to handle port 80 conflicts on your network.

Plug a Bitaxe in for the first time and the OLED shows an IP address inside 30 seconds. That’s the easy part. Everything between that IP and a steady stream of accepted shares is what trips up most new owners — usually around pool config, sometimes around the AxeOS web UI fighting your router for port 80.

If you just unboxed a Gamma, this is the path that gets you to your first share without re-flashing firmware.

DHCP and finding the device

Out of the box, AxeOS asks your router for a DHCP lease and shows the assigned IP on the OLED. If you don’t see one after a minute, check:

  1. The USB-C cable. Bitaxe needs ~5V at 3A+. Cheap charger bricks under 15W will boot the board but brown out under load. Use a phone-grade fast charger or a bench supply.
  2. Ethernet link lights on whatever switch the cable lands on. If they’re dark, swap ports.
  3. Your router’s DHCP lease table. The device shows up as bitaxe-<last-4-of-MAC> by default.

Once you have an IP, set a DHCP reservation on the router. AxeOS lets you set a static IP from the web UI later, but the reservation is cleaner because it survives a factory reset. Bitaxe Baller’s network scanner pulls every device’s MAC into one view if you’d rather grab them all at once.

The OLED also shows the mDNS hostname. By default it’s bitaxe.local (or whatever you set in firmware). On a Mac that resolves immediately. On Windows you may need Bonjour Print Services installed before .local names work — that’s an old Apple thing that nobody warns you about.

Picking a pool

You can mine to almost any Stratum V1 pool, but for a single Bitaxe at 1.2 TH/s your real choices are three:

Public-Pool (public-pool.io:21496) is PPLNS, no fee, and welcomes small miners. Payouts are direct to your BTC address — no account, no signup. This is what most Bitaxe owners start on. It’s also the pool the original AxeOS firmware ships preconfigured for.

CKPool (stratum+tcp://stratum.ckpool.org:3333) is PPLNS, 1% fee, and is the longest-running pool that still treats small miners as first-class. Decent dashboard, but again, no account — just a BTC address as username.

Solo CKPool (solo.ckpool.org:3333) is for the lottery players. You pay a 2% fee, contribute your hashrate to a solo block search, and if any pool member finds a block, only that member gets the full reward. The math on that is its own post.

Whichever pool you pick, the AxeOS pool fields are:

Hit Save, reboot, wait 30 seconds. The OLED’s last line should switch from “Connecting…” to a “Best Difficulty” counter that increments. That’s your Bitaxe finding shares.

OLED settings worth touching

The default OLED rotates between five screens every few seconds: hashrate, temperature, fan, pool status, and best difficulty. For a single device on a desk, that’s fine. For a fleet of three on a shelf, it’s a lot of flicker.

A few changes worth making in Settings > Display:

If you’ve got the optional 0.42” OLED replacement, the settings carry over but the layout is tighter — you lose the second-line detail on most screens.

The port 80 problem

AxeOS serves its web UI on port 80. So does about every other device on a home network that has a web UI — printers, NAS, smart-home hubs, your router’s guest portal, the IP camera you forgot about. If two devices on the same subnet both grab .local aliases and you type http://bitaxe.local and end up on your printer’s setup page, port 80 is fighting itself.

Two clean fixes:

  1. Always use the IP, not the hostname. http://192.168.1.47 removes mDNS from the picture entirely. If you set the DHCP reservation earlier, the IP is stable.
  2. Change the AxeOS hostname. In Settings > System, set hostname to something specific — gamma-01, bitaxe-bench, baller-prime. Now gamma-01.local is unambiguous, and you can hit bitaxe.local from the same network without colliding with the printer.

If you’ve got more than one Bitaxe, the second one is exactly when you want unique hostnames anyway. Bitaxe Baller will find them either way by scanning the subnet, but humans appreciate names.

One more port 80 gotcha: some ISP-supplied routers run a “guest” captive portal on port 80 that intercepts HTTP requests for unknown hosts. If your browser keeps redirecting you to a router login page when you type the Bitaxe’s IP, that’s the issue. Use the router’s admin UI to disable captive portal for the LAN.

What to do once it’s mining

Let it run on stock settings for 24 hours before you touch anything. Watch three numbers:

If all three look right after a day, you’re ready to start tuning frequency and voltage. If any look wrong, that’s a different post — start with checking the pool dashboard to confirm shares are landing, then move to temperatures.

Try it yourself: Bitaxe Baller is a free Mac app that surfaces these recommendations automatically across your fleet — live monitoring, tuning suggestions, pool config, all in a native window. Open source on GitHub.

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