Introduction

Official and DIY Miners

Pine64 Miner with Sopine Modules

Skywire is Skycoin’s vision of a new internet, which is private, fast and without censorship. During the testnet, which is fast approaching, Skywire will run on top of the current internet. After that test phase, the Skywire mainnet will be launched, which means that Skywire will run as an independent mesh network. To realize this vision, Skywire needs to run on top of a multitude of servers, spread all over the world. These servers can either be bought directly from the Skycoin Project, who aim to develop the best hardware possible for Skywire or they can be built by users themselves, who want to participate in the network. I chose the second option and created a so-called DIY miner.The first generation of Skyminers, that were built by the Skycoin Project, contain eight Orange Pi Primes.In the first batch of production, only 300 Skyminers were built,due to bottlenecks in the production process.The demand is certainly higher, by the end of March 4000 people have already registered in the official mailing list to purchase a Skyminer.Fortunately, you can participate in the Skywire network with your own custom-built miner.However, there is a manual whitelisting process for DIY miners, if you want to be eligible for rewards.The only requirement for the DIY miners seems to be, that they need to use solely 64 bit processors, since this is a core requirement of Skywire’s underlying programming language Golang.So, since I registered way too late in the official mailing list, I sat together with a friend and we decided to create a DIY miner. We wanted to create a more compact version of the Skyminer, which should be equal in terms of computing power to the official Skyminers. The PINE64 clusterboard suited perfectly for that.We could use it as a basis for the miner and just plug seven modules into it, with each of them powered by a Quad-Core ARM Cortex A53 64-Bit Processor with 2G LPDDR3 RAM memory and an integrated MicroSD slot.Therefore, each module possesses the same computing power as the Orange Pi Primes used in the official Skyminer.However, in our miner there are just seven processors built-in, while eight are used in the official Skyminer. We also bought seven SanDisk Micro SD cards with 16 GB storage capacity, that were plugged into the modules. As a case, we chose the Chieftec IX-03B-OP, which fitted perfectly. As operating system, we used Armbian for SoPine64. If you are looking for pre-configured images for the Pine64 Skyminer, Skyguy from skywug.net has something for you . With just a size of 22.0cm x 19.7cm x 6.3cm,we created a very compact custom Skyminer. Take a look: