Mining coins with Single Board Computers is a interesting concept, power consumption is low, specifications getting better with each board that is released, hardware investment is low and because it is a single board computer you don't need to buy all the loose parts that a average mining pc uses such as, memory, power supply, hardisk, cpu fans etc.
Building a minimalist mining pc will easily cost around 300,- / ~ 400,-+++ usd
Benefit form single board computer mining
- Price of boards from 10 ~ 100 usd
- Small form factor
- Low power consumption, energy efficient
- Very scale-able
- Silent (use passive cooling)
Biggest downside
- Proccesing power for mining is not very competitive with other high end miners.
With the SteemPi TV-box it is already possible to get rewarded by browsing with the build in Chromium browser to Steemit.com and the Busy.org and other similar website initiatives and the user can contribute to the system and get rewarded , but it would be nice if there where more ways of generating rewards for the SteemPi users, there are multiple ways that can be looked into and one of them is to run a miner on it, and that made me hunt down options, tutorials and projects but i wanted to try Mining coins with Orange Pi PC boards because they are even more cheap compared to the other single board computers, and have slighty better specs. (and i have a few of them to try)
After searching for some time now i came across the recent released tutorial from NovaSpirit and decided to give it a try to gain more experience with mining on a Pi, but i would want to run it on multiple Orange Pi boards, to speed up the results of mining and to be able to make calculations based on the results. the results i found before where that mining would not be very profitable but his result where more positive so i decided to give it a try with less boards.
Building
After researching and seeing Raspberry Pi mining setups with stacked Pi's i wanted to make a tower of Orange Pi board, people often use hexagon pcb standoffs to make space between the Pi's and stack them and makes it easy to build a tower that saves space, and if needed it makes it easy to cool the boards, but the store i had in mind that could have them was closed and i wanted to start with this project, and those standoffs would give a nice base to work with, and would limit the cable madness and possible negative effects from cables running everywhere.
I thought of designing some kind of spacers by myself and 3d print it but found on Thingiverse online, customize-able Standoffs which let you make a custom standoff and download the result in no time, and i decided to use those for the time being. i Printed 12 pieces and after a bit of sanding, the 3D printed pieces fitted in each other nicely and i could continue building the Orange Pi Mining rig.
Online standoff creator
Made by Eriqjo on Thingiverse
The standoff i created with Eriqjo's template
One of the Orange Pi boards i had installed with the latest version of SteemPi during printing of the standoffs, and installed with the mining software and additional packages as stated in below video tutorial. and i could now finish the hardware part and install the software on the other two Pi boards.
The suggested coin to mine in the video tutorial by NovaSpirit is Magi (XMG) because this coin can only be mined with CPU's, and that in combination with not so many other miners mining it makes it possible to have some chance to mine this crypto coin. CPU only coins is the most suitable to try to mine on a Pi Single board computer.
Hardware list:
- 2x Orange Pi Lite boards
Allwinner H3 SOC, ARM Cortex A7 quadcore 1.2ghz / 512 MB
1x Orange Pi One
Allwinner H3 SOC, ARM Cortex A7 quadcore 1.2ghz / 512 MB2x Sandisk "Ultra" Micro SD 32GB
1x Toshiba "Exceria" Micro SD 16GB
3x Power cable (DIY cable, Powering the board through the GPIO ports with a Regular usb cable)
Software List
- SteemPi Version 2 - Armbian OS http://steempi.com
- cpuminer https://github.com/novaspirit/wolf-m7m-cpuminer
Results:
Around 1 Khash per core (depending on room airconditioning on or off)
Total around 4khash for one board
Without airconditioning
With airconditioning on in the room
| Number of Boards | khashes/s |
|---|---|
| 1 | 4+/- |
| 3 | 12 +/- |
Miner specifications
| Recieved XMG | USD |
|---|---|
| 0.09437 | 0.04 |
| 0.09007 | 0.04 |
| Pending | Pending |
Transfers received (One transfer did no reached the minimum payout of the pool within the test period of 3 days.)
(The results will be more accurate if the time of the test is longer)
i left the 3 boards mine Magi coins for 3 days and this resulted in a profit of around 4 cents per day for all 3 boards, with Magi being worth at that moment +/- 0.30 cent (currently it is at around 0.46 cents), that seems at that moment maybe not to be so interesting and after 3 days i stopped the test, but the test is something to improve on and i will continue, and started testing this same setup again (and the coin is rising a bit more) and will gather more data and other options to look into as well.
Perspective
But although the profit for mining this coin is not to be amazed by, i did learn from it and the boards do make a small profit and on the way i did find other initiatives like Vertcoin that have CPU only mining and they even split up CPU mining in difrent networks based on the used Processing power, to make mining profitable for lower end systems, this maybe is worth to recalculate and try ,and maybe there are also other coins with similar mining characteristics that can be looked into.
It is maybe wishful thinking but it would be awesome if Vertcoin would add one more "Vert coin network" for lower end systems like Single board computers and mobile phones to mine on.
Beside mining there are also alternatives like perhaps wallets that can stack, or a other way is to rent out storage in exchange for crypto some of those could run on a Pi or be made compatible. More ways are being worked on and released and they could possibly help in paying back the investment cost of your single board computer / SteemPi TV box.
Beside that ideally the SteemPi TV-Box pays its users in Crypto for using the box in some way, and new upcoming initiatives are also a nice way to contribute (24/7) to a crypto related project, a project you like and maybe want to contribute to, and you could start with super low investment and low maintenance cost.
One user comments on the the youtube video tutorial from Novaspirit a installation script which makes it more easy to setup the miner, you could consider to use this script, if you may encounter any problems with the video tutorial. (but always use those scripts with caution. )
Video Tutorial: Mining Magi with a Raspberry Pi
Do you know of any upcoming or already released projects that could benefit the users of single board computers and SteemPi?
Please share suggestions in the comments, or if you own a single board computer and want to test and try the options you may have in mind, than you could get rewarded for it by contributing your results to Utopain.io
Let's make the best possible TV-Box software
(That help you pay bills, instead of make bills)
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors