Bitcoin Forum

Hi folks,

I've been wanting to get my feet wet in SHA-256 mining as a hobby, so I went with the Raspberry Pi 3 with USB ASIC miners.  I originally started within a $300 budget, but was able to spend only half that.

ASIC miner:
2x 2Pac Miners $60.00 + $10.00 shipping
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1718358.0

Raspberry Pi 3:
CanaKit Raspberry Pi 3 Complete Starter Kit - 32 GB Edition - $74.99 + $0.00 shipping
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01C6Q2GSY/ref=ox_sc_act_title_5?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A30ZYR2W3VAJ0A
**Includes 32GB, Class 10 Micro SD Card with NOOBS and CanaKit 2.5A USB Power Supply with Micro USB Cable

HDMI Cable:
Premium HDMI-HDMI Cable,1 meter 3 feet - $2.24 + $0.00 shipping
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000M87F0I/ref=ox_sc_act_title_4?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A1DUHA28EIRWGN

USB Fan:
ARCTIC Breeze Mobile, USB-Powered 92mm Portable Fan, Portable Cooling Solution, Quiet Fan, Mini USB Fan, Mini Gooseneck Fan for laptop and PC - $7.99 + $0.00 shipping
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003XN24GY/ref=ox_sc_act_title_3?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER

USB Hub:
Superbpag 7 Port Portable Multi USB Charger 70Watt 14A with USB 3.0 Hub - $35.99 + $0.00 shipping
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013OK10YM/ref=crt_ewc_img_dp_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=AX8GYIG6RXC4

MicroUSB to USB 2.0
AmazonBasics Micro-USB to USB 2.0 Cable - 3 Feet (3 Pack) - $6.99 + $0.00 shipping
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013PVKQHC/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER

Keyboard & Mouse
Logitech MK270 Wireless Keyboard/Mouse Combo, Logitech Wireless Mouse USB (Black) - $24.99 + $0.00 shipping
https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-MK270-Wireless-Keyboard-Mouse/dp/B00BP5KOPA

All in, this setup should have cost ~$220, but $70 was taken off due to signing up for and using Amazon's credit card, so it ending up being ~$150.

After getting a crash course in Debian/Raspian, everything is up and running!  In hindsight, I didn't end up needing the microUSB cables because some came in with the Raspberry Pi kit, and the powered USB hub connects by USB 3.0.  Oops.  The RPi3 kit is pretty neat since it comes with some accessories and the NOOB, but I find that the case included to be a bit too wide to plug in the power cable without taking the RPi3 out of the case.

The "2pac" ASIC miners, at 125Hz, are cranking out about 13-15GH/s each but I hope to upgrade in the months to come.

I would REALLY look at a different option on some.  You will never make near what the 180 is on this were talking not even close.  You could use a RPI 3 without kit and just get parts you need. 

I think you could find a powered hub for cheaper, and for one compac unless OCing you will not need the fan.   On Compacs it appears secondary market is pretty high to spend 70 dollars on it.  If you can wait you can look at sidehacks current project for about 1/2 the price - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1718358.0 . 

So that would be my advice streamline the RPI and get just what you need.  Wait for sidehack on his next project as it just makes financial sense.  And look at hubs and see if you can find one for lower price.  But you can do something to learn much much cheaper then 180 dollars for a learning setup.

I agree with notlist3d, you could save a few bucks by changing what you get, and unless you hit a lottery solo block, you will never earn anything with the miner. Definitely look into getting on the list for one of sidehack's new 2Pac miners. Check out the thread that notlist3d provided for details. There is also this thread with more info: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1651958.0 and somewhat more of a roadmap of his USB home/hobby miner project(s).

I don't think that the USB hub that you have chosen will be sufficient to power the Compac miners. According to the description on Amazon: "Each USB port on our 12 Port hub will only provide 5 volts 250 Milliamps," which isn't a lot of power per port. The good powered hubs can provide 5 volts and more than two amps per port.

I have a Superbpag 7-port USB hub:
https://www.amazon.com/Superbpag-Portable-Charger-Transfer-Samsung/dp/B013OK10YM

It is not the cheapest, but it works great and my Compac, which has the voltage turned up to 0.800 and is overclocked to 325 MHz, has been hashing away since 29-November without a single hiccup. It would have been up for longer, but I was helping -ck test his new pool code, and that required stopping and restarting the miner.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1173963.msg17225686#msg17225686

Cheers,

- zed

Thank you both very much for your advice!  I will look into Sidehack projects as well as substitutes to bring the costs down on what I listed above.  

FWIW, I forgot to say in the OP but I plan on joining a pool for either Bitcoin or other SHA-256 currencies.  Also, my plan would be to start off with one USB miner and pick up miners along the way.

Sidehack sticks are well worth it- bought one so far and I plan on buying one of the BF16s (if you want better bang for your buck wait for the BF16 as it's cheaper per GH and more efficient). You're also supporting the community instead of some company more focused on profit than the miners.

I started with S3's in 2015 and now I have 2 S7s and a S5 in my house hashing away. Glad to see someone taking a similar path as me :)

Sounds good!  I will be buying two 2Pacs instead of the Compac that I listed in the OP.  I figured that getting 2 of these will be about the same price as the Compac after shipping, and I'm still going with Gekko. :)  I'm glad to see that you've been able to upgrade over the last 1-2 years, I hope I can do the same!

Good luck. The challenge with most of the USB stick miners is that they don't have a high hash rate. Yes, multiple gigahash may sound like a lot, but in the grand scheme of the bitcoin mining universe it's almost unnoticeable.

This site gives you a reasonable idea of what the bitcoin network looks like:
https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

In the top left corner is the bitcoin network stats, and in the top right is a way to estimate how much you might earn before factoring the cost of your electricity. Here is a screen capture of the details for my Compac that has been overclocked to 325 MHz and turning out ~17.8 GH/s:

https://i.imgur.com/IpCz0M3.png

I updated the price per bitcoin (BTC/USD) to 1021 which I got from this web site:
http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/views/all/

As you can see my Compac miner might earn me 10.07 US cents per week before I factor in the power to run the hardware miner and the power to run the computer where the mining software runs. If you look at the fraction of a bitcoin/day, 0.00001409, please note that's not much at all. It's considered "dust", and in fact wouldn't be paid out by most pools.

So what I, and a number of others do is use these Compac miners as "lottery miners" running them on a solo pool, I use solo.ckpool.org (see the link in my sig) and "play" in the gekkoscience fun-run on gekkorun.de:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1452817

Cheers,

- zed

I started with CPU/GPU mining in late 2011/2012 at the cusp of FPGAs and ASICs in bitcoin, but went down the path of litecoin which I could mine with my computers with crappy GPUs. I came back to the bitcoin world about a year ago and now have a Gekkoscience BM1384 Compac and a Bitmain Antminer S7LN that sidehack tweaked to adjust the power so it draws 450 Watts and generates 2 TH/s relatively quietly (fans at 20%). I, too, will be looking to purchase some of the BF16s as well.

I'm waiting for a full bitcoin node to complete downloading/syncing the blockchain and then I will start my own P2Pool node where I will point my miners.

Welcome to the club of hobbyist miners. Supported by sidehack and others.

Cheers,

- Zed

This is just for a hobby right?

I have had a hell of a time attempting to get my ACIS's running on my Raspi.. still haven't got it working.. I am not very good at Linux though.

Try here:
https://github.com/michelem09/minera

seems like a pretty straightforward install (says the bozo without a RPi) and includes the latest bfgminer and cgminer code built-in.

Cheers,

- zed

@Zed

Thank you for setting the realistic explanation of what to expect and for the tips!  I will definitely start with Bitcoin but will also keep an eye on the other SHA-256 coins to see which one may return a better return.  Heh, yeah at first multiple GH sounds good...until I notice that the network is in PH :-O.  The idea of the "lotto" mining sounds pretty fun :-P  GL with the pool, let me know if you'd want some other miners!

@spazzdla

Yep, just a hobby....for now.  This is pretty much for fun until I can build a good gaming PC, which I will use for mining occasionally.  I am kinda nervous about the set-up because I have practically 0 coding experience, but hopefully a friend can help with that.  Since the rPI I am proposing comes with an OS, that should help quite a bit.

I've tried most of the sea-256 coins, and had no luck. Probably me, but my S7LN was not reliable on any pool until I pointed it at a P2Pool node. The Compac on the other hand has similar "issues," but eventually get shares accepted at pools.


check the number of digits in the network hash rate, and I think you will see that you are off by three orders of magnitude. :o  The current network rate is ~2.48 EXAhash (10¹⁸).


Sure. The node is still syncing the blockchain. It's on block 440,750 as I type this, but man is it slow. I'll post when the P2Pool node is "sane."

Lottery mining keeps the lights on. On the miner that is.  ;D


If you are going to mess around with GPU mining and altcoins (Ethereum, Zcash, etc.) be sure to check out the altcoin sub-boards. There is a ton of info there, and is where I got started. Don't bother trying to mine Bitcoin with a GPU unless you like pain. GPUs don't have enough horsepower compared to an ASIC. Gaming and mining don't necessarily go together, but they can if you do not care about return on investment (ROI). phillipma1957 and eliovp are two people who have a boatload of info and know what they are talking about from my experience. There are others, but you will figure that out when you start reading.

I went down the path of a dedicated single GPU mining rig. I've posted the setup in a few places, and there is a link in my sig to "live" data from it.

As long as it is fun, and you aren't too serious, you'll be OK.

Cheers,

- zed

:o Wow

Sounds good!  I'll let you know when I have it built.

Thank you so much for the help!  :)

If I want to run this with a side hack miner what do I do to the zip file?

Do I just copy the zip onto a micro SD and blamzo ready to go?

In the github file description below all the files it says you can just download the image of Minera in the description and you should be able to write it onto a SD card and you should be off. Further instructions are included there to login remotely onto the controller device.

i think that you can have a better power efficiency with raspberry pi 3 cluster instead of those mining stick, since Raspberry pi has just 5~6 watts per modest (AFAIK), where there are at least 24GFLOPS per node, should do around ~10 GH/s per node. hope i didn't make it wrong.

Hmm, that's an interesting idea, too.  How did you set it up?  I just tried to find an easy step-by-step procedure for setting that up to no avail, so any help would be appreciated!

Sorry to burst your bubble, but GFLOPS (Billions of Floating Point Operations per Second) have nothing to do with GHA (Billions of SHA256 Hashes per Second). The SHA256 Hash operation involves numerous logical operations (And, Or, Xor, and Shift) on binary data. It has absolutely nothing to do with a Floating Point Add, Subtract, or Multiply. The lowliest 333 MHS (i.e. .333 GHS) Asicminer USB stick from 2013 is many times faster than the fastest CPU mining on any general purpose processor (e.g X86 or ARM in the Raspberry Pi). You might be able to find CPU mining software that you can compile and run for yourself. For BTC mining with the SHA256 at the center, an ASIC is the only cost-effective way to mine Bitcoins. This has been true for at least 4 years.

The ASIC miners of today are so streamlined and specialized, the ONLY thing they can do is the SHA256 operation. They are 0.0 GFLOPS (couldn't do a Floating Point Operation of any kind).

I appreciate the feedback about GFLOPS vs. GHA and at this point I'm just sticking to my two ASICs for bitcoin, peercoin, and any other coin that is suggested for SHA-256 mining.  At this rate, I'm getting about ~62GH/s with my two 2pacs at 287.5MHz and am slowly trying to increase the frequency without hitting hardware errors.  I realize that I'll only be mining ~1mBTC/month at current rates, but this is more just about mining as a hobby than it is about making a profit.  As time goes on, I'd eventually like to invest in better ASICs, like GekkoScience's proposed 70W pod.  TBH, I'm probably earning more bitcoin by lending on Poloniex.

GekkoScience makes some pretty nice miners though, and their blades and bitfury pods will definitely be a hot sell :) i'm waiting for them just like the people here, can't wait to have a pod that outperforms an S3 in terms of hashrate and performance.

stick mining is just for fun.

Re lending on Polo, i am not sure how can anyone make any money there as current rate is 0.01%, so you earn $4 in two days on $38000 bitcoin at risk, which is almost nothing.

Hi friend, your list helped me a lot, I would like to know if you managed to buy things and make your miner, how was it ?, I want to do the same and I already have the Bpi3 to start.

Thank you so much.

I have a Pi 3 hosting an Avalon 4 and it works nicely. (At least after I got a SD card image that actually boots...) But it's misleading at best to say that you're mining with the Pi. That would be akin to saying that you can "run" at 200MPH when you're in a race car.

As for mining with a Pi 3 by itself, Bitcoin is clearly out of the question. I did try using a Pi 3 to mine earnhoney and it actually got a decent amount of revenue, but it proved too unstable to be worth running.

Thank you for responding, 1. When you mine with the Avalon, how much H/s?
2. When you talk about mining by itself with the rpi3 you do with the bitcoin or with another currency?
Thanks.

Avalon 4 does a little more than 1TH/s. It can be pushed up to 1.3TH/s, but then it wouldn't be particularly quiet.

Since Bitcoin can only be mined with ASICs as of the last few years, only altcoins can be mined with a Pi. I haven't found any altcoin that is worth mining with a Pi. Earnhoney comes close but the (lack of) stability of the mining software prevents it from being worth running.

The only altcoin I have ever mined using a Pi by itself is earnhoney, but it was too unstable to be worth it. The difficulty has gone up dramatically so now it's even less worth it. Pi, by itself, just isn't for mining.