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I have managed to make portable Raspberry Pi 3 mining setup that runs on an external battery power bank of 10,000mAh and uses an Android tablet as its screen, mouse, and keyboard.

https://cdn.img42.com/011ad052a595db156bbc1ae9b17a39c9.jpeg

This setup will be mainly for on the go mining, but I can also use it for staking coins if I wish. Now, all I need is a mobile hotspot and I will be complete. Also, I was thinking of changing the external power bank to a solar one (which I could buy at ebay)

What do you think about it?  :)

Can you elaborate on what it is you do with it? you mine bitcoins with it?

At the moment, I mine a very minimal amount of Bitcoin with it using a block erupter that I've borrowed running at 330MH/s. It is not much but I only use it for fun and learning. The main use will be for staking coins while I get a decent miner enough to be able to use it alongside my RPi and mine on the go. There are several things on my list such as the following:

1. External Solar Power Bank
2. Mobile 4G LTE Hotspot
3. Anker 7 port USB Hub
4. x4 usb powered fans
5. Travel Bag

If I go towards the solar power bank, then it will be a very energy efficient portable mining setup.  ;D

So this is just for the fun of it and because it's possible?

At the moment, yes it is only for fun. But I plan to get serious as I complete my portable mining setup with at least an Antminer S5 and the other parts I've listed above. In the meantime, it is being used to stake coins on the go wherever there is a WIFI access point around. It is so small and portable that I can carry it anytime, anywhere.

But the most interesting thing here, is that I can use my Android tablet (and also any other devices such as a smartphone) as a screen, mouse and keyboard to control the Raspberry Pi from within it and its mining gear wherever I go.  ;D

If/When you get "serious" (your word), portability will not be in your vocabulary. There is no serious mining hardware that is the least bit portable. The power consumption is just way too high.

While I am a big fan of Raspberry Pi hardware, in terms of Bitcoin mining, it's only useful as a controller or monitor of much larger, and not portable, hardware.

Mining Bitcoin with that, might as well mine with your watch. But I understand it's for fun. I saw something with a solar panel for one of those Pos coins.

Found it, here it goes. https://twitter.com/AvdiuSazan/status/756816182632734720

What is the reason for wanting a portable setup? Wouldn't you want minimal disruptions in your mining and or staking time? Or am I missing something here?

It wouldn't be a problem to leave the raspberry pi at home running while you are away right? This would be much more stable in terms of staking and mining time.

You can easily make a remote desktop or something to restart the mining if something is wrong.

Yeah I could set up a remote desktop for that, but I wanted to setup a portable Raspberry Pi setup just for fun & learning about Bitcoin mining and coin staking.



Exactly. It is only for fun nothing serious to make profit out of it. When I'll get really serious, I will set it up at home plus 2 more additional Raspberry Pis to serve up as full nodes.

The solar NXT mining rig definitely looks awesome.  ;)



Of course. While miners connected to the Raspberry Pi will have a high power consumption, this one would be best for coin staking which takes very minimal power usage.

That makes sense then. For learning and fun I think you created a very nice setup!

Something like this could also be very cool to show at bitcoin related events to explain people how mining or staking works. I can see a table at a conference where you put down this little portable miner.

 

That's right! The main purpose for this would be to attract people into learning more about what Bitcoin is, how it works, etc. By enabling them to see a very small computing setup which you can take anywhere (with a couple of block erupters in it), makes it a great way to help spread the awareness of Bitcoin and blockchain technology.   :D

Unless you get a really expensive solar panel or there's some new technology. You won't ROI on this.
However, if you did do it just for fun and were able to power a U3 or something with the solar panel as well or get a new BF 16nm asic configuration that runs on a low amount of power ten this will deinitely quickly reach it's ROI.
And hobbyistic mining is still quite fun.

(Just a note: connecting to a hotspot at a place like a hotel or cafe may be against their AUP and may be too slow, however, SIM cards are quite cheap for unlimited data, like $20 a month maximum).

I'm curious to know why you didn't just install ubuntu.com on the tablet, however, the rasperry pi is definitley more powerful and versitile.

Thanks for your reply. I'm planning to get unlimited data for $20 a month in order to get internet access for the Pi and be able to experiment with mining and Bitcoin wherever I go. Ubuntu would've been great on my tablet, but it appears that I'm facing some issues trying to get it to run properly on it using Linux Deploy app. Anyways, the Raspberry Pi 3 is much more powerful and in the meantime I will just use it alongside the tablet to separate processes from both the tablet and the Pi (instead of running Ubuntu on the tablet and having the load of the Android OS + the Ubuntu).

I was looking lately into a water powered power bank. Most recently, I saw one that claims to generate electricity from water and salt. Check it out: http://www.myfcpower.com/ (http://www.myfcpower.com/)

Hmm, what does that produce?
H₂O + NaCl → H₂ + Na₃OCl?
It must be something like that to produce a solution. They are correct that hydrogen gs can be produced and it's probably ignited to produce the charge so that is quite a good idea (Once hydrogen is ignited, it reacts with oxygen in the air and produces water)! Meaning that was is left in the container is an base solution (which is probably harmless).

Let me know if it works if you get one as it looks an interesting and good buy!

On the ubuntu idea, you can easily get into tablets and change the SD card, but it's probably not worth it!

Is there a way to make this portable set up to be also profitable?

Maybe i can also set mine, not portable though. i still have my raspberry pi b that i can use an old monitor. i was thinking of mining ETH but it requires gpu so maybe just another coin. still if it could mine, i will make use of it.

Yes. This battery is definitely even cooler than solar ones, making it a very clean form of energy to use on smartphones, tablets and more. Since this one is available for preorder, I might buy one ahead for when it starts shipping I could get a taste of this whole new experience. Imagine the Raspberry Pi 3 + Water and Salt power bank. It will be a very convenient and portable setup!  :D

The PIs are really versitile so connecting a gou to it shouldn't be too difficult.


The only problem is that you're not warned as to when it's going to run out of power. You could use the battery and charger that in order for it to work but that may shorten the battery life. Maybe having two batteries (one oncharge and one in operation to maximise the battery life).

Yeah that is the only flaw. They should've made sort of like a battery power indicator from within Raspbian so that it is easier to know how much power will be left before the Pi turns off unexpectedly. I have seen linux distros on PC having this feature, but I wonder why Raspbian lacks it since it is based on Debian. Anyways, a good thing of my 10,000mAh power bank is that it has a built in power meter but not all power banks have this feature which is very disappointing.

Now, I'm trying to run geth to build up my own ETC full node.  :D

It's probably not too good an idea to keep your battery always chargingas it drains the cells of teir power.
The raspberry pi doesn't have that feature in it's operating systems as they don't come with a battery.
It's a shame there isn't an opeating system dedicated to mining either, maybe one should be built for maimising the use of this. (can you not also get a battery monitor from the pi store built in to the raspberry pi os)?

Yeah. I'm not leaving it charging by the way, but the battery has a built in monitor in which I could see current charge level. Still, it is a feature that should be implemented on future versions of Raspbian, unless there is an app already for that. In the meantime, I have no problem with this as my battery has a monitor, but when I make the switch to the water and salt powered battery then that will be an issue in which I would need to solve. ;D

By the way, the reason that I chose to run an ETC full node on it, it's because I've always been fascinated with smart contracts. It will be very interesting to learn how to make my own dapps on the blockchain with it, and thus be able to use them on either ETH or ETC platforms.

Sounds like a good idea! There are some complaints that running a raspberry pi as a node is counterproductive to the network, however, it helps with the decentralisation of the network so that must be a good thing.
I found this (https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=41849) Not sure if it is of any use but looks interesting.

Do you know the price of those salt and water power generators?

It appears that there isn't a price defined yet for the water and salt generators as when I click Pre-book I get to fill out a form for them to notify me when it is ready for buy and ship to its destination. Just checked out the PiCheckVoltage and it seems that it may be pretty ideal for my little project. Once the water and salt generator comes out for purchase, I'll buy one and test it out with my Pi to see how it works. It will be pretty interesting to have one of these for practically anything from smartphones, tablets, and even SBC computers.  :D

it looks cool but what do you mean by on the go mining, surly its a novelty and cant really be in with a chance of finding anything?

Yeah. It may not find anything yet, but it can be used for fun and learning. I will continue to experiment with different power options and portability towards making it an on-the-go mining system. I am planning into getting one of those Baikal Miners as they are multi algorithm and are pretty useful for mining a variety of alt coins. The mini miner only consumes 40w so I will figure out a way to get some good power and portability at the same time in order to mine anywhere with this thing (and also teach people about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies along the way)

Also, I am planning towards getting a mobile hotspot to be able to suit this task.  ::)

First I want to say that I liked your Raspberry Pi 3 mining setup. Yeah I know it's for fun but I would be really happy to see more people have fun with things like that.

The Baikal Miner is a more serious thing and it costs $500, which is not nothing, but if you can afford it that's great. I think those Baikal Miners are pretty good for mining DASH and I also think that among all crypos DASH is one of those who probably have the bright future. At least that's a fact that the market capitalization of DASH is around 80 millions of USD, so it's definitely something.

Good luck with your projects! I will be following the progress with big interest.

nice setup man.

Yes. The Baikal miner would be of great use to me for Dash mining, and also serves as a multi algorithm miner for other cryptocurrencies. This will be something that I will work on during the following months. I will share my progress from within this thread once I get at least the miner and some additional equipment (especially the water + salt battery) to keep you all updated.

By the way, do you or anyone know of a power meter that would be recommended in order to monitor the miner's power usage?   ::)

It'll use a maimum of 42W if that's what you mean. I think that there's probably something you could install for the rapsberry pi to monitor it as I think that's where it's power would come from.
Compared to the price of a Pi, it's a fairly expensive piece of equipment for you to get.

I guess you're right. It makes me wonder how long would it take me to reach ROI with this miner and if its worth the price. Better off, I think that I can do better with my own mining rig using Radeon GPUs. I've seen that ETH is the most profitable crypto to mine right now with GPUs, so I'll give it a try. Still, the Raspberry Pi would be spared for fun and learning only as I think that I cannot accomplish something greater than just that.  ;D

It would take a while to ROI unless you picked up new coins and started mining them in the hope that they go from start-to-pump-to-dump and sell during the pump.
Ethereum was a really profitable coin to mine, however, I think the network difficulty has increased by quite a lot since it has been adopted.
I've also heard that the gerater the ram on the GPUs for eth mining, the more profitable it is. So you'd need like 16GB ram gpus in order to make the best profit and they may require separate batteries/renewable energy sources.

Thanks for the advice. Actually, I've never thought that the more RAM a GPU has the more ETH it will mine. Right now, I'm building my GPU mining rig step by step buying the parts one at a time in order to make it the ultimate ETH/ETC mining rig. I thinking of making it one that does not require an external case or tower in order to get better cooling. Liquid cooling would be best although it is much more expensive that using fans altogether.

I'm looking into buying one of those AMD Radeon Nanos. I wonder if it is good for coin mining by the way.  ::)

Really cool project for educational purposes IMO.

The payoff for this must be pretty low though, are you actually just mining Bitcoins? Altcoins are probably the way to go with such a low spec device. I am yet to purchase a Rasberry Pi, not for mining...this looks like a pretty interesting project though so would be good to have some additional information on how you set it up.

I think it was Eth that requires lots of RAM with the GPU to function better (though I may be wrong).

I think AMD radeon is one that is used often for mining.

I'd also advise you know how you could plug the GPUs into the raspberry pi (probably through research)?

Well I think that plugging external GPUs on the Raspberry Pi is not possible yet, but I'm going to give it a little research to see what I can achieve with this. In the meantime, I'm setting up a GPU mining rig with an ASROCK motherboard I have lying around using a single AMD Radeon Nano to see what would be the results mining ETH or ETC.

Based on what I have seen so far, it may be possible to connect a GPU to a Raspberry Pi using convertors that turn a USB port to ExpressCard and then plug in a PCI-E to ExpressCard convertor. However, I doubt that the performance if the GPU would be the same using this method  :-\

The GPIO pins are probably the best part of the PI for this.
I think there are live pins, neutral pins and pins to transfer data so they may be good for a connection to a GPU.
I'm not sure about this but if you research it I'm sure you can find something (BTW, the power needed to for the converters comes from one of those GPIO pins anyway).

Thanks for the info. But I think this requires some knowledge in electronics, right? Because I'm still a noob when it comes to working with electronics stuff such as soldering and working with the GPIO pins. However, if it is possible to have a workaround like this then it will be a blast! I will figure this out and keep you updated.

I'm still waiting for the price of the water and salt generator (battery) to be announced as I can't wait to try it with my little experiment. Now, I want to add sort of like a miniature printer onto the Pi to generate paper wallets instantly from within it. This last thing is optional, and mostly for fun.  :D

That would be quite an interesting concept to do to print a paper wallet once a certain amount of coins has been received. And would reduce the amount of money lost from hacking once the node and mining hardware is operational.
However, again, that printer would require more electricity which may then make it less portable.

I also have beenunable to get the GPIO pins to work as well (apart from redirecting the power of oneof te pins to the USB sockets).

I have been looking at this concept for a few months to utilise some old mining gear, some minor solar panels (~200W in total) and establish some nodes (especially PoS wallets I have had for a few years).

Mind if I get some more data of you such as Pi OS & miner you are using?

True, but maybe if I use one of those small printers used for receipts then it may use very little amount of power. I was thinking about using one of these: http://www.ebay.com/itm/58mm-Mini-Portable-Bluetooth-4-0-Wireless-Receipt-Thermal-Printer-for-Android-EA-/262163057371?hash=item3d0a22cadb:g:nw4AAOSwHQ9WWCKO (http://www.ebay.com/itm/58mm-Mini-Portable-Bluetooth-4-0-Wireless-Receipt-Thermal-Printer-for-Android-EA-/262163057371?hash=item3d0a22cadb:g:nw4AAOSwHQ9WWCKO)

It is a very small printer that uses its own battery for power. Basically, it is mainly used for printing receipts but I could make it to print small paper wallets in the form of a receipt containing both public and private keys. As for GPIOs, I think that it would be of no luck to try getting a GPU to work with it, which is why I think that it is best to stick onto external ASIC miners (or coin staking) at the moment on the Pi.



The OS I'm using is the default Raspbian OS. It has been operating under default settings, using a 32GB microSD card as its storage. The Pi is powered via an external 10,000mah power bank and the connection to the Android tablet is done via USB tethering using a VNC app to connect to the Pi with an assigned static IP address (make sure to setup tightvncserver on your Pi for this) With the VNC, I can use the tablet as both display and input (mouse, keyboard) for the Pi.

I've only been using the Pi with ASIC miners that have very low hashrate, which only serves the purpose for fun and learning. CGMiner is the mining software I've been using for my block erupter miner, and now most recently an Antminer U3 I've bought used from ebay.

Just in case, here are the instructions to setup CGMiner on the Pi:

Sounds like a great little setup you got there. Care to share a few pics about it? A NXT node would be great too as it is a really good coin with very cool features.  I'm planning on setting up a swap partition for my Pi in order to increase virtual RAM capacity.  Also,  it would be best to use an external HDD with the Pi for all the blockchain data files.  :D

Kingston are the best drives to get (In my optinion), you can usually get a good class 10 128GB micro sd for a cometative rate.
Hard drives are cheaper but do require lots more power and also require mounting on the raspberry pi with specific commands.
You could always get something like a USB stick an backup the information on the SD to it and put that onto a hard drive so you don't have to do the re-initialization of the blockchain once the (micro sd) drive fails each time.

Yeah. I wouldn't risk myself putting the external hdd without case when using it solar. That Samsung microsd is certainly a deal, although I think that the Raspberry Pi 3 supports up to 32gb microsd card? (or maybe I'm wrong) Still, this could be used as an external drive by putting the microsd card into an USB adapter for use with my Pi. Looking forward for those pictures of your setup.



Thanks for the tip. Kingston is one of the best drives out there, as well as SanDisk for high performance, and reliability. Right now, I would look for cheap solutions in order to have all my blockchain files into that external drive and at the same time protect the lifespan of the Pi's microsd card being used for the Raspbian OS.

I think that at least a 64GB to 128GB HDD or SSD would be ideal for this operation.  ::)

HDD use a lot of power so sad is probably best!
Kingston are a great company to use and I personally prefer them to SanDisk. My phone has been using a 32gb micro SD card from them and it's lasted for over 2 years with intense daily use.
Also, if the raspberry pi says it only supports up to 32GB it means that 32 GB or less is optimal. But adding more than 32GB may mean it takes slightly longer, but shouldn't cause too many bad effects.

Yeah. I currently have a Kingston 32GB microsd card on the Pi being used for the loading of the OS. This microsd has been used before for my smartphones and it has 3 years since purchase. Up to this date, it works perfectly fine and continues to serve its task on my Raspberry Pi 3. Now, I'm not sure if the Pi could really support the 128GB microsd card but if it does, they it will be very suitable for my little project. I have the cheap Samsung 128GB on my watch list, to purchase it later and try it with my Pi. If it doesn't work, then I'll just use a USB adapter for the microsd card connected to the Pi externally.

For the moment, the Pi is very efficient for coin staking where it requires very minimal power for you to earn coins. I am testing this now with OKCash.  :)

Interesting.  Here is the real reaction from their web site  http://www.myfcpower.com/pages/faq (http://www.myfcpower.com/pages/faq)


The big question is:

How much does each puck cost ($) and how much energy is release (KWh).

Given those two numbers you can find out how much the electricity from these pucks is costing you in $/KWh and compare it to your normal electricity costs (residential rates usually between $0.05/KWh and $0.12/KWh in the US).

I am betting you will find this to be a very expensive source of energy because you buy the pucks, use them once, then throw them away.  There is no way this process can compete with burning dirt (coal) or better yet hydroelectric.

Actually I was thinking about the same thing as you. This solution wouldn't be worth it at all, since you would need to buy pucks each time to use the water and salt generator thus making it practically about the same expense as using electricity. As of now, there is no price announced yet but once it becomes available for purchase, we will be able to see the price in order to calculate the costs. Better yet, I think that it would be great to make a hydroelectric solution for the pi. I'm going to research more about this.  ;D

Be interesting if you could use that water as a cooler for the miner (the same water used to power that miner)!
I thought the puck was for the older models and not the newer ones?

(Also, the contents of the "puck" would not be too expensive to buy individually - I don't think)

(silicon, water and boron are probably really cheap as there is lots of them. Not sure about sodium though, that might be slightly more expensive).

Yeah that would be great for maximum coolness of the miner. Maybe the pucks won't be that expensive after all, but we will know once its price is announced. One thing that has gone though my mind, is the ability to make a hand crank powered Raspberry Pi.  :D

Better yet tie the output of all the exercise bikes, stair climbers, treadmills, etc. to a generator.  I have always thought the energy output of all that cardio workout equipment around the world should be harnessed to do something...

Great idea mate. By doing that you can rest assured to have a better healthy life, while at the same time producing energy for all your devices. In addition to this, I was thinking of producing power with your sweat as well. There are so many ideas out there in order to create a cost effective energy solution to power your devices like, in my case, the Pi.  ;D

I was thinking that as well. Gymns could power their tread mills from energy produced from things like rowing machines and exercise bikes.
Also, I'm not sure hand crank raspberry PI would be a good idea as so much effort would be needed just to power it. You may also be sat there for around 8 hours a day just spinning the thing to charge it (Trust me, it does get boring doing it for more than 5 minutes)!

Are the pucks definitely needed for the newer models of the power generator? Older models did need on, but I thought the new one were just salt and water and nothing else?

Yeah the new models need the puck too (as stated on their website) so it is one time use and then you will have to replace it with another puck. Depending on the price of each puck, it will be determined whenever you will save more energy by using this method or not. Still, once I finish my college courses this semester, I will have time to experiment even more with my Raspberry Pi. First, I will try the solar charger, then the water and salt generator, and finally figure out a way how to make a GPU to work with the Pi via GPIO or USB.

I have so many ideas and perhaps if I put them all together, I can come up with something big. Just wait and see.  ::)

some mr robot shit going on here

cheers

How long does it run on the battery.

Second I think you should mine Burstcoin instead of bitcoin. The miner is built into the app now.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=burstcoin.com.burst

Yeah. I own some BURST and have been mining it with my laptop's HDD. However, I wouldn't risk myself doing it with the Raspberry Pi's microsd card as it will shorten its lifespan (and also they are not designed for constant read/write like HDD) I'm looking into setting up an external HDD connected to the Pi for this task.

The Pi runs almost all day with the 10,000mah battery so I can leave it for a couple of hours and mine some coins. But, I think that this depends on the processing power being used at the Pi, which will cause even greater power consumption. Imagine running the Pi with a 20,000mah battery. It will last even longer!  :D

I have a few raspberry pi's I should try something like this. Thanks

It'd be interesting ty try to mine burst with that definitely.
It isn't good to mine burst on an SD/micro sd card. It is probably also good to use NAS specific hard drives as this task is quite intensive on them.
A bigger battery does mean more power! However, i this currently profitable or are you just charging the battery from your home and paying for the power?

Definitely a cool project.
While you can't really get a lot of value mining Bitcoin on a CPU,
you could use it for some other things like a controller you could remote into and manage your hardware miners.
Or, as mentioned, running some kind of node server with very little space/ power consumption.
Very cool to see projects involving Raspberry Pi! I need to think of something I can build so I have an excuse to finally buy one!  ;D

Well, it is not very profitable at all since you would pay more for an HDD and take quite some time to reach ROI. There is a BURST calculator around which tells you how much BURST you would earn with your current space, but since I have only a 128GB external SSD then I will use it to mine BURST only for fun.

Currently, I do not pay for power usage at my home since I live with my parents and they're the ones who pay it but once I plan to have my own place for this, then I should consider all ways possible in order to save electricity.

NAS is a pretty good idea to earn lots of BURST.  ::)

I meant more like nas specific drives which are probably faster and more durable.
You can get a 4 bay hard drive enclosure for around £20 (which can hold a maximum of 20TB)!
Also, SSD is useless for this a burst is not really reliant on speed of the drive and you'll end up destroying your ssd.

Great! This 4 bay hard drive enclousure will really serve the task to help me fulfill my little project of coin mining with the RPi. Being said, I will only use WD HDDs for this task and see if I can mine BURST with these drives accessed remotely.

By the way, 20TB really is a lot of storage and will probably make me a hefty sum of BURST. But for starting, I'll leave it with 5TB in total until I can keep purchasing more drives.

I will post some pics once I accomplish many of the things that I have proposed for my Raspberry Pi project, here.  :D

WD sound like a good company (from what I heard). For the price, i'd suggest Seagate hard drives which are really cheap!
External drives are also cheaper than internal ones.
It's probably easier to start with just one five terabit external hard drive and get a rack when there's enough drives to fill it.

Sounds like the most viable option right now. I would definitely get started with the 5TB HDD from WD to get started with this task. I chose WD because I have seen many good reviews about it, including the fact that it is most reliable than Seagate drives.

According to Burstcoin.biz calculator, I would earn the following Burst amount:


According to my calculations, I would earn $12.40 a month mining BURST with a 5TB HDD. Let's see what I could achieve with this.

I will post more pics as soon as I finish college work this semester. On December, I would have more free time to work deeply on my little project and put the Raspberry Pi 3 to good use.  :D

I used the Raspberry Pi and i did not understands some concept of till know .

Hi mate. Glad you have found this thread very interesting to you and could serve as a basis to help you learn more about mining with Raspberry Pi and other stuff. You may not make that much with it (as mining nowadays could be seen more of like a hobby and for fun instead of profit) but at least it will help you learn more about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

The best Pi right now, to get started would be the Raspberry Pi 3, but you can also try this with a Raspberry Pi 2. The newer the model, the better as it will have more performance in order to suit specific tasks such as full nodes, among other things. If you need help about specific stuff, feel free to PM me and I will reply to you whenever I have the time available to do so.  :D

If you run external drives with stock factory enclosures they will most likely overheat and die.  Take them out of the enclosure at a minimum.

Yes. Thanks for this helpful advice mate. With this in mind, I would leave the external HDDs exposed out in the open without the use of the case, in order to maximize air flow and coolness. I'm saving a lot of money in order to buy a couple of hard drives and some gear necessary to get started with this thing. It will be pretty interesting how everything will work with the Raspberry Pi 3 once I finish the setup.

The Synology DiskStation DS414Slim 4-Bay 2.5" Diskless 2xGbE NAS has really brought my attention. It is perfect for those spare 2.5 laptop hdds I have lying around. You can check it out here: http://www.mln.com.au/product/?itemID=5686 (http://www.mln.com.au/product/?itemID=5686)

Yes, they will overheat really easily if you keep then in the enclosure purchased with the drive.
I initially suggested external ones as they're slightly cheaper and the casing merely pops away from the drive. Then, put them into a NAS enclosure or an old server and that will keep them cool enough to function.

Thanks for the advice mate. Perhaps, mining with HDD would be more accessible than with ASICs. HDDs can be found even much cheaper than ASIC hardware, in my opinion, and more accessible and easier to find. For cooling, I had this crazy idea of using USB powered fans connected to a USB Hub to cool off the HDDs.  :D

This is more of mining with external ASICs (or stick miners) with the Pi. Also, it is possible to mine coins with the free space of your hard drive. The coin is called BURST (among many others like Siacoin) which allow you to mine them with your storage device. I will post pics of my Pi with the other equipment doing mining tasks once I finish ordering all the required hardware (and finish this college semester).   :)

I have the same setup too and plus i got a nice portable sun panel which can charge my powerbank in the daytime. It is pretty much invincible but then i realize i have an iphone and i do whatever i need with it.

I bought the raspberry pi 3 with so much hype and it just sits in my closet now. Don't have any idea what to do with it, maybe i ll use it as a cold wallet. :(

Glad to see that you own a Raspberry Pi 3 too, mate! There are many things that you can do with it like use it as cold wallet, mining, staking, full nodes, and many more. I have found out, that it is very fun to mine and learn more about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies with the Raspberry Pi 3 (even though mining nowadays is not very profitable at all) It is a great educational tool to help you reach new heights. Right now, I own 2 Raspberry Pis which are the Pi 2 and the Pi 3.

The one that I'm using for this project is the Raspberry Pi 3, as I'm planning to leave the Pi 2 at home to serve as a full node for an altcoin.  ;D

The USB powered fans would work, but they'd have lots of wasted energy involved (and you'd have to position them so they allow air to flow in one direction through the entire drive).
HDDs are definitely cheaper, easy to source and quite cheap to fix (but asics can potentially produce more profits).
You can't mine with a Pi. Well, you can, but it'll produce around 1MH/s maximmum which is useless to even attempt as you'll burn the CPU before accomplishing anything and it'll be unprofitable.

Also @abiky, I'd suggest you test the function on a regular computer to check you can set it up correctly.

It's so hard to main. Who can tell how this make easier? Or mining goes worse day by day and it doesn't worth it?

Of course. I'm building up a desktop PC in order to use it as a mining rig (with multiple GPUs) as well as to use it for experimenting with this stuff. I wouldn't risk doing it with my laptop since it tends to overheat very quickly and thus reduce the lifespan out of it. Once I get a desired result, I would be ready to implement it into my nice little Raspberry Pi setup.  ;)


Well, mining could get worse day by day when the difficulty increases, making mining a block even difficult than it was before, thus forcing you to upgrade to a better ASIC miner with a bigger hashrate (or in the case of hard drives, bigger capacity). With this in mind, you might never profit but it could be seen as a fun way of learning (and more of like a hobby)

One good coin that I have seen that you can mine with your computer's CPU is called Coin Magi. This one is both mineable, as well as stakeable in which you can earn coins by just holding them into your wallet long term! Check it out here: http://coinmagi.org/ (http://coinmagi.org/)