Bitcoin with Raspberry Pi

[rupy]

Yeah, but you can't run anything professional with a bitcoind that is restarted every hour.

I think the bitcoin community really needs to move out of the garage; if we're ever going to get this thing going.

[Aido]

I had bitcoind 0.8.1 running on a Raspberry Pi and performance was terrible.....very high CPU usage and too many r/w operations.

Jeff Garzik, one of the core bitcoin developers, is writing a lightweight C library called libccoin and a client called picocoin.

When finished this should be suitable for running on low powered devices like a Raspberry Pi.

Although I am concerned about running any client that will store the entire blockchain on an SDCard as it would significantly reduce the cards lifespan.

[qualalol]

Yeah, but you can't run anything professional with a bitcoind that is restarted every hour.

I think the bitcoin community really needs to move out of the garage; if we're ever going to get this thing going.

You can't go professional running anything on a Raspberry Pi. It's not designed as a professional piece of equipment. Especially something as memory/storage intensive as bitcoin.

Ps. you should probably look at http://binerry.de/post/28263824530/raspberry-pi-watchdog-timer for making sure you can deal with your Pi locking up (never happened to me, but I don't push mine very hard) if you are using it for something important.

Hm, interesting! I just feel a bit uneasy about feeding the routers "own" power back into it.

Feels like it might work fine until there is a spike in the grid and then: poof your hub is toast, and if you're unlucky your house burns down with it...

Do you know what the USB spec. says about this?

Edit: Please see this quote from a user on the raspberry forum:

If you leave the red wire intact, (and are thus "back-feeding" the PI, as its commonly called) you are in fact bypassing the PI's F3 polyfuse.

There is one single case I am aware of where this caused trouble when that user also used a badly designed power supply to feed the hub. The power supply wasn't properly regulated, and unloaded it outputted more than six volt! When he plugged it in it triggered the over-voltage protection diode of the PI (which triggers at about six volt) the resulting short circuit current though the diode, unimpeded by any fuse, overheated the diode so much that it melted a hole in the enclosure of his PI!

Its thus much better to "cut the red wire", and not to back-feed the PI!

http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/4880/powered-hubs-backfeeding-and-safety has some more useful info. But basically unless you've cheaped out on an unregulated USB hub you won't cause damage, and in most cases things will just work without problems. Neither of my PIs has failed yet, the one which I have always-on hasn't crashed once. (48 days uptime ATM, i.e. since the last time I was rearranging cabling and had to unplug it.) If you're really interested I reccomend looking at some USB hub circuits online...

// Edit: and for some more detail look at http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=17560

[rupy]

You can't go professional running anything on a Raspberry Pi. It's not designed as a professional piece of equipment.

I'm building a PaaS on a cluster of RPi's, so I obviously think you are wrong here.

I'm going to modify one of these, I mean why risk it?

[razorfishsl]

Ok, but what about RAM memory running out? How do you "fix" that, reboot every 12 hours?

Don't try and run such software on shitty little cutter CPU's, go HERE:

http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/main.php

Get a U2.... 4 CPU & 2GB FAST memory, I've had one on line since Jan......7/24
More importantly the 10/100 & the 'other' USB ports are split out onto SEPARATE USB channels back to the chip, so... no bottle neck.

But as with ANY small Flash card based system you really need to watch your write caches.

Only had one issue , where I shorted the power and had to pull the SDcard to FSchk it on a 'real' computer. (two if you count the PSU of the shitty china telicom ADSL blowing up..)

Just wish they were a bit cheaper...... but they ARE worth the money.....
Really am happy with my purchase.

[rupy]

There is no free hosting for these afaik, and the linux on RPi is stable because the community is huge.

And as I said, I now run the bitcoind on another server, so I already solved this problem.

I will use battery backup and RUT-500 redundant 3G to handle fiber/power failures for uptime at home.

[ct1aic]

Greetings.

Did you tried minepeon? I have it running in 3 Raspberry Pi's and they are stable for many days, 24/7.

Site: http://minepeon.com/index.php/Main_Page

Best regards.

[tingwahk]

Greetings.

Did you tried minepeon? I have it running in 3 Raspberry Pi's and they are stable for many days, 24/7.

Site: http://minepeon.com/index.php/Main_Page

Best regards.

Here's the thread the developer of MinePeon uses:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137934.0

[Chaoskampf]

Does anyone know the status of picocoin? I can't wait for a stable version. It would help my project immensely.

[peapodamus]

Add more swap, run bitcoind from git.

Doesen't swap wear the SD card?

(snip)

If you are concerned about swap wearing the SD card, just use a USB thumb drive or something to hold a swapfile instead.

[qualalol]

Add more swap, run bitcoind from git.

Doesen't swap wear the SD card?

(snip)

If you are concerned about swap wearing the SD card, just use a USB thumb drive or something to hold a swapfile instead.

I've worn out a few thumb-drives doing that back in the days when I used Knoppix (but those were fairly cheap thumb drives), better bet is a hard drive or ssd (not sure how good an idea the latter is) -- not as fast, but the RPi isn't that fast either.

[runeks]

No I meant with bitcoind, it runs out of memory after 4-5 hours... no matter what you do.

I've had bitcoind running for 19 days straight on my Raspberry Pi. I had to add a swapfile for it to not run out of memory, but version 0.8.2 uses a lot less memory than previous versions (like 500MB vs 1.5GB), so use the newest version you can.

The bitcoin data directory is on a 16 GB USB stick, along with the swap file. I don't know how long it will last until it wears out, but these sticks are cheap as hell anyways, even the ones with good random read performance like the Corsair Flash Voyager.

bitcoind is currently using 71.7% of the 512 MB of memory (less the 16MB allocated for the GPU) on my Pi, so it's not like it has to use the swap file all the time, only occasionally. I have nginx, php5, varnish and mysqld running as well, serving a Wordpress blog (runeks.dk), and it's fairly responsive.

[rupy]

ok, but 16GB is only going to last you a couple of months at this rate, the block chain grows roughly 1 GB per month. I got a 56GB ssd for the blockchain, if they haven't added proper pruning to the satoshi client by when that runs out; I'm selling all my BTC and ejecting.

btw, bitcoind 0.8.2 uses 1.1 GB RAM on my atom server, so still memory hog, that's not a problem when you have 4GB though...

[MWNinja]

It will eat SD cards like there is no tomorrow; the Pi really isn't a very good target for running bitcoind.  The Cubieboard is in this same class of hardware (uses an Allwinner A10 ARM) and has a sata connector to allow for better storage options.  It's much better suited for running bitcoind.

[runeks]

ok, but 16GB is only going to last you a couple of months at this rate, the block chain grows roughly 1 GB per month. I got a 56GB ssd for the blockchain, if they haven't added proper pruning to the satoshi client by when that runs out; I'm selling all my BTC and ejecting.

Yeah, I'll need to upgrade to a 32 GB stick in a while. But it's like $25 so no problem. I can even add those 32 GB to my 16 GB, if I use RAID 0.

It will eat SD cards like there is no tomorrow; the Pi really isn't a very good target for running bitcoind.  The Cubieboard is in this same class of hardware (uses an Allwinner A10 ARM) and has a sata connector to allow for better storage options.  It's much better suited for running bitcoind.

Use something disposable then, and cheap. $25 for a 32 GB USB stick isn't much if it'll last you a year at least. And by then, you can probably get 64 GB for the same price as 32 GB costs now.

According to this data, storage space per dollar doubles every 14 months. So you can probably get by just by buying for $25 worth of storage every year or two.

[Oliverdjob]

Ive seen it run before. Someone a while back posted a picture of them running a Jalapeño with a Pi and it had extremely low power usage to maximize the income of the miner. Its a pretty neat little gadget and would love to get my hands on one soon!

[runeks]

Ive seen it run before. Someone a while back posted a picture of them running a Jalapeño with a Pi and it had extremely low power usage to maximize the income of the miner. Its a pretty neat little gadget and would love to get my hands on one soon!

Beware that the Pi is slow. And just just slow, but slow slow. As I mentioned, it took roughly a week for it to build the transaction database from a complete blockchain that was already on disk. I'd say the CPU is probably 10 times slower than a single core of my Core 2 Quad 2.83 GHz CPU in my PC. Also, it has problems with USB. I can't get a SATA-to-USB device to work with it, even though it works fine with my PC.

[peapodamus]

If an RPI can power a USB HDD, why not just use something like this:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/WD+-+My+Passport+1TB+External+USB+3.0/2.0+Portable+Hard+Drive+-+Black/4911796.p;jsessionid=07E5A29C98026DB4AABC33D835F2FF79.bbolsp-app04-153?id=1218575757942&skuId=4911796


That would solve the problems with crashing(put a swap partition on the drive) and space(which hasn't come up yet, but Bitcoind takes up lots of space for the blockchain)

[runeks]

The Pi can't power an external hard drive. So you'll have to get a powered USB hub. But otherwise, it should work, although it won't necessarily, because the Pi has problems with its USB interface, for some reason (as demonstrated by my SATA-to-USB HDD enclosure not working).

Also, as per my calculations above, it might even be cheaper to just go for the USB stick, and upgrade as necessary.

[asc366]

I'm just finished compiling bitcoind 0.8.3 on my RPi, running pidora (instead of, what most people seem to run, raspbian).
I too feared the SD card wearing out pretty quickly so I expored a little iSCSI LUN from my Synology NAS to the Pi and put the whole bitcoin datadir on that LUN. This can also be done using NFS or Samba of course, YMMV.

You can even put your swap on the exported LUN. I'm not sure which is faster, but it at least doesn't wear my SD card out this way!

I'm now downloading the bootstrap.dat to see if I can use that as a "kickstarter".