Objective:

– Testing the Raspberry PI 3 Model B for mining

Requirements:

– Raspberry PI 3 Model B

– SD Card (around 4 gb is enough)

– Some way to connect the SD Card to your computer (need to format and install software to it)

– USB Stick (around 4 gb is enough)

– Micro USB Phone charger (2.0 A or more, 5v)

– Has basic ubuntu knowledge

– Has an AEON Wallet address

– Has basic pool mining knowledge or has read through Basic knowledge of pool mining

Disclaimer:

– I am not a professional, some parts of this guide can be improved and be done in a more professional way.

– The pool mining software shown in this guide is personal preference, you are of course free to choose any other software.

– I am not affiliated to the PiNode Website and I dont receive any compensation from them

Table of contents:

– Introduction

– Expectations

– Installation

– Results

– Summary

– Thanks





Step 1: Introduction

While reading through the subreddits, I noticed an interesting post in the monero subreddit. It was about the creation of a monero node on a raspberry pi. Heard a lot about the raspberry before and it sparked my interest. Could you use it to mine AEON?

After a quick google research session I learned, that it has been done before for monero. So technically it must be possible to do for AEON….

Sooo thanks to this subreddit post, I got pulled into the raspberry pi world….damn it….oh well here we go





Expectations

– Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, passive cooler and SD card equals a Hardware cost of 50 USD

– using my own phone charger

– Basic installation guide: http://pinode.co.uk/

– At least 10 H/S mining power

– Typical Ubuntu software installation

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B is around 38 USD, a passiv cooler around 2-3 USD and a SD card 4gb with preinstalled Raspbian is around 9 USD. So a total of 50 USD for a mining machine, sounds fair for me. A case for the raspberry is not necessary, since it costs only and increases the heat…only plus i saw, was the ESD protection while fiddling with it.

For power supply I would use my phone charger, so I would have to spend extra. The opinions in the internet split apart on this topic since it heavily depends on how you use your raspberry (i.e. how many USB devices you connect to it and how powerhungry they are, for example external HDD). Raspberry can run on a normal phone charger 2A 5V, but if you use all USB ports or have a powerhungry setup, you will need a special charger which provides 2.5A 5V (the official raspberry charger for example).

Saw in a subreddit post, that someone managed to get 10 H/S while mining monero on a raspberry. Means in AEON i should get even more than that.

For the basic installation of raspberry (since I was new to the whole raspberry world) I would use http://pinode.co.uk/ guide on “how to create a node for monero” and for the installation of AEON mining, I would just follow the usual procedure for ubuntu since raspbian seemed to be an ubuntu fork.





Installation

– Basic installation guide: http://pinode.co.uk/

– AEON Miner installation guide: https://www.reddit.com/r/Aeon/comments/5tjkxw/installing_aeon_miner_on_ubuntu/ddpnpsw/

As soon as the raspberry arrived, I was eager to try it out. I opened http://pinode.co.uk/ , went to the “how to make a monero node”, clicked on Getting Started, skipped the whole about SD card preparation (since it was preinstalled by seller) part and went straight to the network part. As soon as i connected the raspberry pi to the LAN + power cable, the raspberry was visible on my router webinterface. Here I saw the IP of the raspberry, which I then used in combination with putty to remote connect (hint: default user is pi and password is raspberry, upon first login use passwd to change password). All worked fine, I continued to follow the guide and it all went fine….until i reached the part about the OS transfer from the SD card to the USB stick….Here i experienced a lot of problems (boot from USB stick didnt work, raspberry didnt boot anymore), at first I thought, the guide must be wrong but after some second thoughts, i realized that maybe I really have to follow the guide from the start. So i overwrote the SD card like in the guide suggested and went through the guide step by step. Now all worked fine and as described by the website. I followed the Getting Started guide and continued on the “how to make a monero node” guide. Once the wifi was activated, I could even remove the raspberry from the LAN cable and move the raspberry to my office room where i placed it on a glass coaster (if the raspberry runs 24/7, I dont wanna burn a black mark into my desk).

I stopped the guide right before the monero installation part.

It was time to install the mining software. I followed my own guide but ran quite fast into some compiling problems that were very specific to raspberry. As a workaround i used another installation guide: https://www.reddit.com/r/Aeon/comments/5tjkxw/installing_aeon_miner_on_ubuntu/ddpnpsw/

For some reasons, this worked like a charm and i managed to install an AEON miner.





Results

Now that the miner was running, I could finally see the result of my labor.

The miner runs with around 10-20 H/S and a difficulty of between 2000-5000. Havent found the best difficulty yet and so I leave it up to the pool to find a good difficulty.

Here you can see the average H/S and the waves it has.





Summary

All in all I am quite happy with my project. The raspberry is a very powerful and entertaining device that is only limited by your imagination. You can attach sensors, displays and even battery packs (in case you need your raspberry to go) to your device. You can use your raspberry as cheap NAS/fileserver (add some external HDD to your raspberry), simple webserver, to play rocky theme when movement sensor is triggered or to play music with banana and apples (no joke, there is videos on youtube about it). Basically you can attach a full OS to anything you want.

But most importantly to me, you can use it to mine. Its a very cheap way of having an Ubuntu miner that uses almost no power and can run 24/7 without making any noises. All you need to do is to connect it to a powersupply (wifi required).

Beside AEON, you can even try to mine several other coins and compare the output. In the end it must fit your desire.

Is it financially worth it? If you are looking for a shortterm profit then definitly not. It mines a very low but steady amount and the power comsumption doesnt even out the gains. On a longterm perspective, it could be worth it. Imagine you mine small amounts nonstop without much hassle and then the coin spikes in price. By that time you have already some amount of it.

Thats why its rather recommended to mine some coins, that are easy to mine and have great potential. Since I love to dream, i like to scout new coins. It also helps to gain knowledge of techy stuff in a cool and passionated way.

So if you love to play with techy stuff and have longterm mining goals, the raspberry pi could be fun to have for you. If you are looking for shortterm profits, then stay away from it.





Thanks

At this point I would like to thank my donators. I really appreciated the donations and this post was made possible by it. Used the donations + my own pocket money to buy this raspberry and to do this research.

Also learned for the first time the bad side of an anonymous coin…I dont know who donated to me and therefor i can not personally thank them. Thats why i want to thank them in generally at least and those I know personally (thanks again /u/Lespristy 😉 ).

As always

regards

thehihoguy





