⚡ Browser flasher — no install

Flash DCENT_axe
in your browser

Plug your ESP32-S3 miner into USB, pick your board, hit flash. DCENT_axe firmware is the ESP32-S3 member of the broader DCENT_OS source family: a clean-room, experimental mining firmware by D-Central Technologies — and it installs straight from this page in about a minute.

16 board images listed Nothing to install Published SHA256 on every image GPL-3.0, source on GitHub

Pick your board

Choose the board you physically have. The wrong choice loads the wrong pin map, so match it to the silicon in front of you — not the one you wish you had.

Bitaxe

◆ 100% OPEN SOURCE 6 boards

The original, and openly licensed with it — skot's Bitaxe hardware under CERN-OHL-S-2.0, stock AxeOS under GPL-3.0. Schematics, board files and firmware all published, for anyone to build on. Every other board on this page exists because this one was given away.

Lucky Miner

◇ CLOSED VENDOR FIRMWARE 3 boards

The LVxx boards are the Bitaxe design with the serial numbers filed off — they reuse the Bitaxe pinout and peripherals exactly, and the vendor firmware is a fork of AxeOS. What they don't reuse is the openness: they ship locked and proprietary, and a stock LV08 won't even report its own identity honestly. DCENT_axe firmware is the open alternative the vendor never shipped. We'd rather these boards came home to their open-source roots — until they do, we'll keep building the way back.

Hammer Miner

◇ LOCKED — SECURE BOOT 7 boards

Same idea as the Bitaxe, same silicon class, none of the openness — and locked down harder. Hammer ships proprietary firmware behind Secure Boot and an obfuscated update container, on its own undocumented board layout. We reverse-engineered it so the hardware you paid for can run something you're actually allowed to read. Open alternative today; these projects back toward their open-source roots tomorrow.

SelectedBitaxe Gamma
⚠ Your browser can't flash — use Chrome, Edge, Opera or Brave on desktop. ⚠ WebSerial needs a secure (HTTPS) connection.
or grab the image: ⬇ factory .bin

↑ Confirm you understand the risk to enable flashing.

SHA256
Public beta. Flashing erases the device and installs a fresh factory image. Over-the-air updates with cryptographic signatures do not exist yet — they arrive with the ESP key ceremony. Until then the SHA256 above is the only integrity check we can give you, so use it. You can always go back to stock AxeOS the same way.

Hashrate figures are nominal class figures at stock settings (per-chip class × chip count) — not measured by D-Central, and not a promise about your unit.

What you're installing

DCENT_axe firmware, v0.3.0 — sixteen board-specific images with explicit maturity labels.

AI-native by design

A built-in MCP server at /mcp on the device. Point an assistant at it and let it read telemetry and tune the miner directly on your LAN — no cloud service in the middle.

Per-chip telemetry

A local dashboard with live hashrate, per-chip health, temperature and fan control — served from the board itself, over your own network.

Open source, GPL-3.0

Every line is on GitHub. Read it, fork it, build the same image yourself and check it against the hash on this page.

Never one-way

USB flashing is the recovery path too. Stock AxeOS is always one browser session away, and we'll cheerfully tell you how.

Heads up: 2% donation routing is ON by default. The DCENT_axe ESP branch ships with a voluntary time-sliced donation that points 2% of your mining time at D-Central's pool — it funds exactly the work that put your board on this page. It is not hidden and not sticky: the dashboard shows the address and lets you change the percentage or switch it off entirely at any time. We'd rather you read it here than discover it later.

These boards exist because skot's Bitaxe open-source hardware project (CERN-OHL-S-2.0) and the wider Open Source Miners United community put solo-mining silicon in the hands of ordinary people. We didn't invent this hardware — we're writing firmware for it, and we owe the people who did. Stock AxeOS from bitaxeorg/ESP-Miner is excellent, actively maintained, and the right choice for most miners. On a Bitaxe, DCENT_axe firmware is an alternative, not a replacement.

On the boards that took that open design and shipped it closed, it's something a bit different: the only firmware for your miner that you're allowed to read. That's the whole point of putting Lucky and Hammer on this page. We're not trying to take anything from those projects — we're trying to give their owners the freedom the original design came with, and to leave the door open for those vendors to walk back toward it.

Verify before you flash

Don't trust a binary because a website told you to. Hash it yourself. Every image we serve is listed below with its SHA256 and exact byte count. Download the .bin, hash it, compare. If the digest doesn't match, do not flash it — tell us at shared source repository issues.

sha256sum dcentaxe-bitaxe-gamma-0.3.0-factory.bin

Machine-readable lists (standard sha256sum format): Bitaxe + Lucky · Hammer

All 16 images

SHA256 digests and file sizes for the sixteen DCENT_axe firmware factory images (six Bitaxe and three experimental Lucky Miner, beta build 20260709; seven experimental Hammer Miner, build 20260728)
BoardFileSHA256BytesCopy
What this proves, and what it doesn't. These digests are self-attested: we computed them, and we serve them from the same origin that serves the binaries. That is genuinely useful — it catches a corrupted download, a truncated transfer, or a CDN serving you something we didn't build. It is not independent third-party attestation: an attacker who owned this server could change the binary and the hash together. We're telling you this instead of dressing it up. The fix is to publish these same images as GitHub release assets, where GitHub computes its own digest we don't control — that's how upstream ESP-Miner does it, and it's on our list. There are no code signatures on these images yet, and we won't pretend otherwise.
Known cosmetic bug (0.3.0). The serial console banner prints DCENT_axe v0.1.0 — a stale hardcoded string in the source that never got bumped. The artifact really is 0.3.0; the filename, the flasher manifest, and the hash above are the authority. Ignore the banner. Fixed in the next build.

After flashing

Roughly two minutes from a flashed board to a miner on your pool.

  1. Join the setup Wi-Fi. The device reboots into its own access point — connect to it and enter your Wi-Fi credentials and pool details.
  2. Open the dashboard. Browse to the device's IP on your LAN for live hashrate, temperature, fan and chip telemetry.
  3. Point your AI at it. DCENT_axe firmware exposes a built-in MCP endpoint at /mcp, so an assistant can read telemetry and tune the miner directly — no cloud in the middle.
  4. Read the source. Firmware and docs live at github.com/DCentralTech/DCENT_OS.
  5. Changed your mind? Flash AxeOS from bitaxeorg/ESP-Miner with the same browser flow. No hard feelings.

Questions people actually ask

The short, honest answers.

Do I need to install anything?

No. Everything runs in a Chromium-based desktop browser (Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave) over the WebSerial API. Nothing is installed on your machine, and your firmware is never uploaded anywhere — the image downloads from this site and is written to the board locally by your browser.

Firefox and Safari have no WebSerial support, and neither do mobile browsers.

Will this brick my miner?

Flashing over USB is the recovery path, not a one-way door — an ESP32-S3 can always be re-flashed over the same USB port, including back to stock. The real risk is picking the wrong board, which loads the wrong pin map. That's why the model list is explicit and why every experimental board asks you to confirm.

What does EXPERIMENTAL mean here?

It means exactly what it says: the image is built and host-tested, but it has no live-hardware proof yet. Lucky Miner support is written from vendor sources; Hammer support is reverse-engineered from vendor firmware. Flash those only if you can recover the board yourself.

We could quietly ship them as "supported". We'd rather you knew.

Why do you support boards that copy the Bitaxe?

Because the people who bought them deserve firmware they're allowed to read. The Bitaxe was given to the world under an open licence; the boards that borrowed from it came back closed. Building an open alternative for that hardware is the most useful protest we know how to make — and an open invitation to those vendors to come back toward their open-source roots.

None of this is a knock on the hardware itself. It's the licensing we'd like to see change.

Is the firmware signed?

Not yet. Signed OTA updates arrive with the ESP key ceremony. Until then the published SHA256 is the only integrity check available — and as noted above, it's self-attested, not third-party attestation.

Does DCENT_axe firmware route a contribution?

Yes — 2% by default, and we'd rather say so plainly than bury it. It's a time-sliced donation to D-Central's pool that funds the firmware work. The dashboard shows the payout address, and you can change the percentage or turn it off completely whenever you like. Nothing about it is sticky or hidden.

Why would I run this instead of AxeOS?

Mostly for the AI-native angle: a built-in MCP server on the device, so an assistant can read telemetry and tune it directly. If you don't want that, stock AxeOS is excellent and we'll happily point you at it.

My board isn't listed. Now what?

Open an issue at shared source repository issues with the board name and, if you can, a photo of the silkscreen. Unsupported hardware is unfinished work on our side, not a permanent state — most of this page started as somebody's issue.

Support this work ♥

DCENT_axe firmware is free, open and GPL-3.0, and it always will be. If this page just saved you a bench session, consider throwing something in the hat — it buys the hardware that turns EXPERIMENTAL into proven.

♥ Fund D-Central