Now i’ve clearly missed the boat on bitcoin mining and it seems that unless you have a datacentre crammed full of racks with hardware you can’t make any decent return on it. An ex colleague of mine did ‘well’l on it at one point but not sure if he’s still running it these days. That said it’s something i’ve always been interested in and with a pi sitting idle I thought I would give it a go.

Hardware

Raspberry Pi Model B + Case + PSU
Transcend 4GB Class 10 SD Card
7 Port Powered USB Hub (I had a spare anker usb 3.0 one)
SD card reader/writer
Arctic usb powered fan (the asics run hot!) £5.99 at the time of this article

Software

Win32 Disk Imager
Minepeon

How To

Download and install Win32 disk imager

Download the Minepeon pi image file from their site i’ve also hosted it here MinePeon-0.2.4.6-RaspberryPi.img.zip sha256sum 3b85225252795e53e22f23b07bf54a3423db73112e78f022023b55ec825fe82c as per https://downloads.mineforeman.com/minepeon/sha256sum.txt

Extract the image file

Insert SD card into your reader

Run Win32 disk imager

Select your sd card device on the right i.e [H\] WARNING make sure you choose the correct drive letter or you may end up erasing the wrong drive!

Click the folder icon and browse to the image file you extracted earlier.

Check the destination drive letter is right!

Check the destination drive letter is right!

Click ‘Write’

Once the image has been written stick it in your pi

Connect pi to a monitor and ethernet port on your router

Switch on the pi, the boot screen will load and it will try and obtain an ip via dhcp, it boots really quickly so i missed the ip it got so I did an nmap to find it.

Put the ip into your browser and you will probably get a security warning (just accept it).

Login with

Username: minepeon
Password: peon

You should be greeted with the main dashboard.

The settings menu allows you to change your password, restart miner ever x hours, define SHA cores on dual mode and specify update url.

The help menu unfortunately only displays “Work in progress”

Update allows you to update Hashra, when I clicked on it it stated “A newer version is available, do you want to Update?” but I have decided not to do this for now.

Back on the dashboard I ntoced that it said “Running in SCRYPT mode” obviously if your only wanting to mine Litecoin for example you can leave it set to this. Below are some mining stats/hash rate etc.

The final selectable options are Scrypt SHA256 and Dual which you’ll need to set depending on what you want to mine, after choosing you will need to ‘Save and restart’.

While researching bitcoin mining hardware and was considering purchasing the Antminer U3 as I liked it’s apparent ease of setup and higher hash rate then a usb asic I stumbled upon the Gridseed 5 Chip Dual ASIC Miner GC3355. The Gridssed had similar form factor but the added bonus that it is a dual miner and can do either SHA-256 (Bitcoin) OR Scrypt (i.e litecoin) and even both simultaneously.

Specifications

Software

As it was always the intention to use my spare Pi B as the controller I spent some time looking for suitable compatible software. One thing I wanted specifically was a web based control panel so I could setup monitoring on a seperate screen and for the ease of learning what all the differnet numbers mean.
I cam across this useful blog post on cryptomining-blog I narrowed my choice down to Scripta and Hashra. On the post they gave the highest props to Scripta however a downside is that it supports SHA-256 (Botcoin) mining only. While this is new to me I didn’t want to limit myself to just Bitcoin so the obvious choice was Hashra as it supports scrypt only (bfgminer), SHA-256 (cgminer) only or dual-mining mode (cpuminer + cgminer).

After managing to win one on ebay I obviously decided to drop my previous BTC/Minepoen project.

How To

Download and install Win32 disk imager

Hashra, they have different images on their site to use depending on your hardware choice. As I will be using the Gridseed 5 Mini I downloaded the following image HASHRA MINI CONTROLA FIRMWARE DOWNLOAD I have also hosted it on theoutpost as an alternative location. sha256sum 7FC32B10DD6CC9B1046954159E9808DB356112A7D686C9597178873F546D1A0E

Extract the image file

Insert SD card into your reader

Run Win32 disk imager

Select your sd card device on the right i.e [H\] WARNING make sure you choose the correct drive letter or you may end up erasing the wrong drive!

Click the folder icon and browse to the image file you extracted earlier.

Check the destination drive letter is right!

Check the destination drive letter is right!

Click ‘Write’

Once the image has been written stick it in your pi

Connect pi to a monitor and ethernet port on your router

Switch on the pi, the boot screen will load and it will try and obtain an ip via dhcp, once it’s finished booting just before the login prompt it should display it’s ip address.

Put the ip into your browser i.e http://192.168.1.211/ and you should get the login page

Login with

Username: hashra

Password: hashra

You should then see the main dashboard.

The settings menu allows you to change your password, restart miner ever x hours, define SHA cores on dual mode and specify update url.

The help menu unfortunately only displays “Work in progress”

Update allows you to update Hashra, when I clicked on it it stated “A newer version is available, do you want to Update?” but I have decided not to do this for now.

Back on the dashboard I ntoced that it said “Running in SCRYPT mode” obviously if your only wanting to mine Litecoin for example you can leave it set to this. Below are some mining stats/hash rate etc.

On the right are boxes for you to set your mining pools and adjust the clock rate of your miners.

The final selectable options are Scrypt SHA256 and Dual which you’ll need to set depending on what you want to mine, after choosing you will need to ‘Save and restart’.
After this I logged into the pi via ssh using

User: pi

Password: 3K4Hb8FMeZjQZJEX6scYzZa

I was happy to find that it was running Raspbian GNU/Linux 7 \n \l with apt-get etc installed as well as sudo.