How to Use Raspberry Pi to Farm Chia Coin

[Admin]

The Raspberry Pi 4 is the ideal low power device for farming Chia Coin. After you’ve made your plots on a powerful PC, you can keep them online at a fraction of the power usage.

How to Use Raspberry Pi to Farm Chia Coin : Read more

 

[oxygenchaos]

Is it possible to connect multiple HDD to the Pi4 with sizes up to 18TB ?

 

[satai]

Just create a systemd unit to run the process automatically instead this workaround.

(a different distro but a good intro to services: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/systemd )

 

[lilyammy]

tomshardware should be renamed to www.tomseveryarticleisaboutrasberrypiandvirtualcurrency.com

 

[GoofyOne]

Awesome. Do you think a raspberry pi 400 will work ok ... not sure of it's cooling powers?
If I end up doing it, I think I'll just be happy if I get my money back from what I spent on getting the extra hardware.


{GoofyOne ... retired IT guy, all excited like a giddy little kid he may have found a new hobby 😛}

 

[s.petmecky]

Is it possible to connect multiple HDD to the Pi4 with sizes up to 18TB ?

Short answer: Yes, undoubtedly.
Long answer: This is Linux, you can connect Thousands of drives to it if you like. (though that will be less than efficient)
If you're looking for maximum space, you could go with a NAS and fill it up with max capacity drives. Then link the RPi to it via a Network Share.
You'll want to use something similar to this in your FSTAB on the RPi.
//192.168.1.2/Share/ /plots/n/stuff/ cifs username=pi,password=<secret>,x-systemd.automount 0 0
(edit the IP of your share, share name and folder, and your pi's secret password has to be allowed on the share)

 

[toaste]

Tom’s Hardware sure is publishing a disproportionate number of Chia articles.

Tom’s Hardware and/or the authors need to add a disclosure for the amount of money or hardware equipment invested in Chia.

 

[Rogue Leader]

Tom’s Hardware sure is publishing a disproportionate number of Chia articles.

Tom’s Hardware and/or the authors need to add a disclosure for the amount of money or hardware equipment invested in Chia.

Tom's would need to add such disclosure if this were true, however no such hardware or investment exists. Make no mistake if you continue to make slanderous accusations about Tom's Hardware you will be commenting elsewhere. Have a nice day.

 

[recursivecodes]

I'm confused. Is it required to set this up first on a PC? How does the PC come into play if you're farming on the Pi itself?

 

[drsierrac]

Hey y'all...newbie to cryptocurrency and Raspberry Pi here with no coding or anything background... I really appreciated the step-by-step directions in this article, but now I've hit a big roadblock that I can't seem to get around. I get to the 9th step where I'm trying to 'sh install.sh', and it keeps giving me this error message.

ERROR: Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement clvm-rs==0.1.7 (from chia-blockchain) (from versions: 0.1.0, 0.1.1, 0.1.2, 0.1.4, 0.1.6, 0.1.7)
ERROR: No matching distribution found for clvm-rs==0.1.7

Please help!! (and yes, I've upgraded to Raspbian 64, so that's not it...)

 

[GoofyOne]

Hmmm Raspbian may be the wrong OS, ... you may have to install Ubuntu OS to get the Chia farming setup going. I actually don't do Chia farming (at least not atm), but I tried setting up the Chia farm software on my Raspberry Pi 400 using Ubuntu 21.04, and it installed fine going by the directions given.

It's probably only a fairly minor difference, but unless you are a expert on Linux, could be difficult to track it down.


{GoofyOne's 2c worth}

 

[SykesX]

Thx for the howto! How would I update to a new version via the git clone method?

 

[GoofyOne]

When I saw this I just knew you would all be interested, so here it is, the perfect storage device for your Chia farm ... Chia Storage Array Just hook that up to your Raspberry Pi 😀



{GoofyOne's 2c worth ... which may or may not be actually worth 2c}

 

[froggx]

Short answer: Yes, undoubtedly.
Long answer: This is Linux, you can connect Thousands of drives to it if you like. (though that will be less than efficient)
If you're looking for maximum space, you could go with a NAS and fill it up with max capacity drives. Then link the RPi to it via a Network Share.
You'll want to use something similar to this in your FSTAB on the RPi.
//192.168.1.2/Share/ /plots/n/stuff/ cifs username=pi,password=<secret>,x-systemd.automount 0 0
(edit the IP of your share, share name and folder, and your pi's secret password has to be allowed on the share)

This defeats the purpose of the Raspberry Pi. NAS enclosures that hold enough disks for this to make sense often outperform the Pi and run on top of Linux and could probably run the farmer itself. Same thing happens if you turn a PC into a DIY NAS. I would just to grab a bunch of powered USB hubs and daisy chain disks onto them. I'm guessing the only reason USB 3.0 was used in this article was because it can supply enough power to keep the disk happy. According to the faq, "You could even load them on a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 with outdated USB 2.0 drives attached and they will harvest and farm just fine. "

I'm confused. Is it required to set this up first on a PC? How does the PC come into play if you're farming on the Pi itself?

The PC is (ideally) used for Step 1: Plotting, the act of creating plots. The Pi is for like Step 3 or Step 5ish or something: Farming, the act of checking if your plot solves the thing and you win. The Pi can be used for plotting, but that should only be done if your PC died or you're a masochist. Based on what the devs have seen, the Pi works at ~0.025GB/min, which works out to a little under 3 days per plot. At some point between plotting and farming, or maybe during the farming, Chia also does "harvesting," which I neither understood nor wanted to learn about.

 

[froggx]

Windows has shipped with the OpenSSH client for a good minute now. It's a lot easier to open powershell or the command prompt and type:

"ssh user@IPaddr"

than it is to mess around with going online and playing with PuTTY.

 

[ppp696qqq]

I'm confused. Is it required to set this up first on a PC? How does the PC come into play if you're farming on the Pi itself?

You need to "plot" on the PC, meaning creating the spaces on your HDD where you will "farm" for currency. The farming step requires a faster SSD for plotting, as well as your PC's faster CPU. When you farm on your Pi, you're just hooking up your HDDs to the slower and less power-intensive Pi, as the farming process is less resource-intensive than plotting.

 

[ppp696qqq]

Hmmm Raspbian may be the wrong OS, ... you may have to install Ubuntu OS to get the Chia farming setup going. I actually don't do Chia farming (at least not atm), but I tried setting up the Chia farm software on my Raspberry Pi 400 using Ubuntu 21.04, and it installed fine going by the directions given.

It's probably only a fairly minor difference, but unless you are a expert on Linux, could be difficult to track it down.


{GoofyOne's 2c worth}

I installed using raspbian, and everything's gone fine except auto-mounting. After running the reccomended steps here, the Pi won't boot. I'm going to try with a clean install of Ubuntu and see how that goes.