Custom firmware. Hand-built infrastructure. Visual interfaces for hardware that was never supposed to have one. We build with what exists — and we make it look like it matters.
Read the Manifesto ↓Technology doesn't have to come shrink-wrapped. The most powerful tools in computing history were built by people in kitchens and spare rooms — not boardrooms. That lineage is alive.
Undergroundroots is a document of that work. DIY hardware. Self-hosted infrastructure. Repurposed machines given new purpose. Solar-powered nodes humming in the dark.
We believe in the mycelium model — a distributed network with no single point of failure, where knowledge travels freely between nodes, and where every organism benefits the whole.
And the work should look like it was cared about. A firmware dashboard on a 320×170 display deserves the same design attention as a consumer product. An ASIC controller should have a UI worth staring at while it hashes.
You don't need a data centre. You need time, curiosity, and a willingness to get your hands dirty.
A single-board Antminer S9 with 63 BM1387 chips, a custom Braiins OS overlay, and per-chip voltage autotuning. Stage 4 complete at 7.942 V, 29 iterations, 0 slow chips. Then we rebuilt the entire UI from scratch.
ESP-NOW peer mesh over a NerdQAxe++ master and up to 8 ZombieOS BitAxe slaves. Self-healing registration, nonce-space partitioning, auto-calibrating job intervals, and the fixes it took to keep all 8 nodes alive at once.
A full Stratum V1 server in Go — desktop app, headless edge node, and admin panel in one repo. Solo mode talks directly to your own node. Proxy mode relays to an upstream pool with per-miner pass-through. VarDiff, share validation, SQLite history, six UI themes. No pool operator. No fees.
A custom firmware overlay on Braiins OS Legacy for a single-board S9. Per-chip voltage autotuning across 29 iterations landed at 7.942 V with every chip passing Stage 4 verification. Paired with a fully custom web UI — Vault-Tec themed, WebGL globe, live autotuner pipeline visualiser, and a bioluminescent glow that pulses when hashing. No cloud. No vendor lock-in. Just a recycled ASIC doing real work.
View on GitHub ↗The hardware, software, and philosophy we actually use. No sponsorships. No affiliate links.
The work spans firmware, web, desktop, and embedded displays — but the design thread runs through all of it. From a 128×64 OLED to a full WebGL globe built in raw GLSL, every interface gets the same care as the hardware underneath it.
LVGL on SPI panels. Custom Vault-Tec image themes for NerdAxe and ClusterAxe displays. Big-endian RGB565 image pipelines. Interfaces designed for a screen smaller than a business card — and taken just as seriously.
Full-stack pool dashboards with Pip-Boy config generators. A six-theme desktop mining app in Svelte and Go. A WebGL globe with Phong shading, atmosphere rim glow, and live signal arcs — written without a single graphics library.
If it has a chip, it can have a personality. Custom firmware for Antminer S9 boards, ESP32-S3 cluster nodes, NerdAxe miners, and anything else with a UART and a power rail. The vendor UI is always a starting point, never the destination.
"The interface is not a skin over the machine. It is the machine, from the user's perspective — and that perspective deserves to be beautiful."