Send a raven. A LoRa-mesh expansion that plugs into a Bitaxe's accessory port and gives your miner an off-grid voice — telemetry, block alerts, and remote control over a Meshtastic mesh, with no internet.
Built by the Mining Hackers at D-Central Technologies — Canada's leading Bitcoin mining technology company since 2016, based in Laval, Québec. 2,500+ miners repaired, 400+ products shipped. This is the bench we use ourselves, released so every operator can own, repair, and understand their own hardware.
DCENT_Raven is a small accessory PCB for the Bitaxe Accessory Port (BAP). It rides in the same connector the Bitaxe Turbo Touch screen uses, but instead of a face it carries an SX1262 LoRa radio and its own microcontroller running the mesh stack. It speaks BAP (the Bitaxe's NMEA-style UART accessory protocol) to the miner and LoRa mesh to the world.
Bitcoiners spent a decade decentralizing one layer — the network. But sovereignty is many shades of many layers: compute, power, tools, and communication. DCENT_Raven gives an existing Bitaxe an off-grid voice over a mesh that nobody can switch off — no Wi-Fi, no internet, no cloud relay. D-Central has been a mesh-network proponent since 2012, and that conviction is 100% open source: a small accessory that turns any solo miner into one node in a network of its own. It is the accessory sibling of the DCENT_axe boards that carry a mesh radio onboard — same silicon, same mesh vocabulary, for the Bitaxes you already own.
Send a raven.
- Off-grid monitoring — hashrate, temp, power, shares, best-difficulty, block height relayed over LoRa to any Meshtastic node or phone, no WiFi/internet.
- Block-found alert — BAP exposes a
found_blockevent; DCENT_Raven fires a high-priority mesh broadcast the instant your solo Bitaxe solves a block. - Remote control (opt-in) — start/stop/retune/repool the miner from anywhere on the mesh, gated behind owner auth (off by default).
- Mesh relay — it is a full Meshtastic node, so it also relays normal mesh traffic like any other repeater.
You cannot wire an SX1262 straight to the BAP connector. BAP is a 2-wire
UART; the SX1262 is an SPI radio. DCENT_Raven therefore carries its own MCU
(ESP32-S3) that drives the radio over SPI and bridges to the Bitaxe over BAP —
architecturally identical to how the Turbo Touch screen is a co-processor, not a
dumb panel. Full reasoning in docs/FEASIBILITY.md.
| Doc | What |
|---|---|
docs/FEASIBILITY.md |
The investigation: why-it-works, why-not-direct, what you actually get |
docs/MCU_MESH_DECISION.md |
MCU + mesh-stack selection (ESP32-S3 + Meshtastic) with trade-offs |
docs/HARDWARE.md |
Block diagram, BOM, power/RF/connector notes, regulatory |
docs/FIRMWARE_SPEC.md |
BAP-host state machine, telemetry→mesh mapping, security gating |
Open-hardware design in progress. The hardware pin-mux is frozen
(hardware/DESIGN_FREEZE.md) and the portable BAP-host firmware is written and
host-tested green (113/0). Schematic capture and layout are the work ahead — an
open invitation to build one, fork the design, or follow along.
No performance or mesh-range claim is final until a fabricated board is brought up and proven on real hardware — the same honest-readiness standard as the rest of the D-Central open-source line.
Part of the D-Central dcent-mesh LoRa product line — the first member that is a
Bitaxe accessory rather than a standalone node. License: GPL-3.0 (firmware),
CERN-OHL-S-2.0 (hardware).
All under one roof at github.com/DCentralTech — decentralize every layer: mining, tools, hardware, communication.
- DCENT_OS — open-source mining firmware for industrial Antminers (S9→S21) and ESP32 Bitaxe-class miners (Avalon + WhatsMiner scaffolded).
- DCENT_Toolbox — the open-source bench tool: scan, unlock, audit, flash, and prove — from your own machine.
- DCENT_axe — open-hardware Bitaxe-class boards (Solo / Quad / Hex) with integrated LoRa mesh.
- DCENT_Raven — LoRa-mesh accessory for any Bitaxe.