Avalon Q Firmware & Update Guide: The Quiet 1.7 kW Home Miner

Short answer: the Avalon Q is Canaan’s quiet, roughly 1.7 kW home Bitcoin miner that runs the same industrial-lineage firmware (Avalon_mm) as Canaan’s big data-centre rigs, packed into a living-space form factor. Its firmware updates through Canaan’s own K230 tooling — the Avalon Remote app, the network Upgrade Tool, or a signed .swu image — and, for the moment, no aftermarket firmware ships for it. This page is the honest map of what firmware the Q runs, how you keep it current safely, what the custom-firmware scene actually looks like for it, and where the open-source alternative D-Central is building stands today. For the full spec table, profitability estimate and where-to-buy, see the Avalon Q spec page; this guide is about the firmware.

What the Avalon Q Actually Is: A Home Unit on Industrial Silicon

Most home ASICs are scaled-down home designs. The Avalon Q is the opposite: it takes Canaan’s industrial control platform and wraps it in a quiet chassis meant for a home office or utility room. Canaan’s own app treats the “Q” as its Quiet home device, and that is the useful way to think about it — a home-class machine built from industrial parts.

The essentials worth pinning down before any firmware work:

Attribute	Value	How solid
Algorithm	SHA-256 (Bitcoin)	Verified
Hashrate	Around 90 TH/s	Verified
Power draw	Approximately 1,674 W (about a 1.7 kW class)	Manufacturer-stated
Efficiency	About 18.6 J/TH	Manufacturer-stated / derived (not independently confirmed)
Control SoC	Kendryte K230 (RISC-V)	Verified
Firmware line	Avalon_mm (source-available under BUSL-1.1)	Verified
On-board storage	512 MB NAND	Verified
ASIC	A3197S-family / A322x-class (exact part not independently confirmed)	Unknown (part number)
Positioning / era	Home “Quiet” unit, 2024 / CES 2025 home lineup	Verified

Two numbers deserve a caution flag. The ≈1,674 W power figure and the 18.6 J/TH efficiency it implies are manufacturer-stated: they match Canaan’s published spec but we have not independently bench-measured them, so treat them as the vendor’s claim, not a lab result. And the exact ASIC part is not something we will state as fact — the Q’s chip is in the A3197S family / A322x class, but the precise part number floating around the internet is not confirmed, so we will not print one. Voltage, weight, noise and dimensions live on the spec page; where those are Canaan figures rather than measured, treat them the same way.

The Firmware Inside: Avalon_mm on K230

Here is the detail that separates the Avalon Q from its smaller siblings, and it matters for everything downstream. Canaan’s little home miners — the Nano 3, Nano 3S and Mini 3 — run the Avalon_Nano3s firmware, which Canaan publishes as open source. The Avalon Q runs a different line: Avalon_mm, the same firmware family as Canaan’s industrial AvalonMiners, released under the Business Source License 1.1 (BUSL-1.1). BUSL-1.1 is source-available, not fully open: you can read it, but redistribution and production use carry time-and-use restrictions until the license converts. In plain terms, the Q is a home-class machine running industrial-class firmware, and its firmware is more locked down than the Nano/Mini open line.

All of it sits on the Kendryte K230, Canaan’s RISC-V system-on-chip. That single fact explains most of the custom-firmware picture below: the entire aftermarket firmware industry grew up on Bitmain’s ARM/Xilinx control boards, and nothing in that world drops onto a RISC-V K230 without a from-scratch port.

How to Keep an Avalon Q’s Firmware Current (Safely)

Canaan ships several ways to update the Q, all built around the K230 platform. We describe them so you understand the machine; always follow Canaan’s own current instructions for your exact unit, and download firmware only from Canaan’s official portal — never a re-hosted file.

Avalon Remote / Avalon Family app (iOS and Android). The simplest path for a home unit: the app can check for and install firmware over your network. Good for a single quiet miner on your home LAN.
Network Upgrade Tool / web UI (Windows). Scan the LAN, select the miner, and push a firmware file from a Windows machine. This is the path most people use when they manage the Q from a desktop.
Signed .swu image over SWUpdate (port 9090). The K230 accepts an RSA-verified .swu package delivered to the miner’s SWUpdate service on port 9090. Because the image is signature-checked, a tampered or wrong-model file is rejected rather than flashed.
K230 BurningTool (recovery only). If a unit is bricked, Canaan’s BurningTool can reflash the SPI-NAND at a low level (typically a pinhole recovery button plus a direct USB connection). This is a recovery procedure, not a routine update — reach for it only when the normal paths fail.

One clarification that saves grief: the AvalonMiner Upgrade Tool you may have read about is for Canaan’s older K210 industrial rigs (the A12xx generation and similar). The Avalon Q is a K230 machine, so it uses the K230 paths above, not the K210 industrial tool. Mixing the two is a common way people confuse themselves.

Whichever path you use, the discipline is the same on every Canaan machine: confirm the exact sub-model and control-board generation before you flash, keep power stable throughout the update, and verify the miner afterward — all hashboards present, temperatures sane, error rate low, and the pool showing your expected hashrate. If you are unsure, the safe move is to leave a working miner on its working firmware. A firmware update is not worth bricking a 1.7 kW machine over.

Custom Firmware for the Avalon Q: The Honest Reality

If you came here hoping to flash Braiins OS+, VNish or LuxOS onto an Avalon Q for tuning or a lower dev fee: that firmware does not exist for this machine. None of the five best-known aftermarket firmware projects — Braiins OS+, VNish, LuxOS, ePIC and Hiveon — lists Canaan’s K230 home line among its supported models. They were all built around Bitmain’s control boards (and, for a couple, MicroBT’s), and porting a tuning firmware to Canaan’s RISC-V K230 is a new toolchain and a from-scratch ASIC driver, not a recompile. For the Avalon Q specifically, the aftermarket is empty.

A community custom-firmware scene does exist around Canaan’s K230 home miners — but read the model names carefully, because they are not the Q:

A community firmware called Kratos (associated with Mineshop / SoloBlocks) ships for the Avalon Mini 3. It targets the Mini 3, not the Avalon Q.
A well-known jailbreak published by orca.pet targets the Avalon Nano 3 (via an early firmware bug). Again, that is the Nano 3, not the Q.
For the Avalon Q itself, we are aware only of speculation that a Nano-3-style drop-in could be adapted — we have not verified any working Avalon Q custom image, and no such image is shipping. Treat any “custom firmware for Avalon Q” you find as unverified until proven otherwise.

We describe these projects as third-party facts; we do not walk you through installing any of them. Flashing unofficial firmware or exploiting a jailbreak voids your warranty, can brick the machine, and on a signature-checked platform like the K230 can fail closed and leave you needing the recovery tool. Know that the scene exists; do not treat its existence as a recommendation. Our fuller, caveated write-up lives on the Avalon custom firmware page.

Where DCENT_OS Fits: The Open-Source Alternative We’re Building

D-Central is building DCENT_OS, a GPL-3.0 open-source firmware effort, and Canaan hardware is one of its targets. We want to be precise about status, because the honest version is more useful than a hype version:

For the Avalon Q, DCENT_OS is in development. There is no public image, no install route, and no mining claim — you cannot download it and run your Q on it today, and we are not asking you to try.
Our most concrete milestone so far is on a different machine: DCENT’s userspace reached first light on a real Avalon Nano 3, with Canaan’s own btcminer still owning the hashing. That is genuine progress, but it is a Nano 3 result — we do not generalize it to the Avalon Q, whose K230 industrial firmware and A322x-class silicon are a separate driver problem.
A clean-room ASIC driver skeleton and the flash stack exist on the bench, and a BUSL-1.1 blob in the vendor stack is one of the reasons a redistributable public image is not simply a matter of flipping a switch.

If you want the open-source path for Canaan hardware to arrive sooner, the useful thing to do is follow and contribute, not flash. Our roadmap, current status and how-to-help live on the DCENT_OS for Avalon page. When bench mining proof lands, the story changes and we will update it honestly.

Home or Industrial? Where the Avalon Q Belongs

The Avalon Q sits in an unusual spot: quiet enough for a home, powerful enough to feel industrial. At roughly 90 TH/s and about 1.7 kW it out-hashes Canaan’s tiny Nano and Mini home miners by a wide margin, but it is a single-phase, wall-friendly unit rather than a data-centre rig that demands 240 V three-phase infrastructure and hearing protection. If your goal is meaningful hashrate in a home or small office without a dedicated mining room, the Q is squarely aimed at you. If you are filling a warehouse, Canaan’s K210 industrial AvalonMiners are the better tool — and they use the different update flow noted above.

D-Central sells and services Canaan hardware from Montréal, including hashboard-level repair, so the Q is a machine we stock, support and can fix rather than one we only write about. That is also why we can hold the honest cross-vendor view on this page: we have no firmware of our own to oversell you and no incentive to pretend the aftermarket is something it is not.

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Last reviewed August 22, 2026.