scrypt mining back online

I’d taken my dinky scrypt miner offline in all the excitement of the transition to snowbirding.  I’d been running the (laughably outdated) gridseed blade 80-chip miner from a laptop, which was sub-optimal.

So when I was doing some housecleaning this week and found the miner I decided to run it from the Raspberry Pi that’s already on 24/7 doing DVR duties.  It doesn’t strain the Pi;  all the heavy lifting is already being done on the miner itself.  The pi is only passing info back and forth to the mining pool.

A person running such a miner off shore power would lose money because the amount of coin mined would be less valuable than the cost of the electricity consumed.   In this case my power is excess solar power so there is no cost in the normal sense.

I lost (or tossed) the original power cords but was able to scrounge enough from the Junk Drawer to get one side of the two-blade setup running.

tech notes

Bitcoin (SHA256) mining is power-intensive and impractical for solar use.  Scrypt mining is memory-intensive;  it uses relatively little power but the hardware tends to be more expensive.   This miner uses about 40w/blade, or 80w total.

At the native 600MHz cpu speed this miner hashes ~2MH/s per blade.  Since I’m camping in mild weather I might try to ramp up that cpu speed to 750MHz to hit the rated 2.6MH/s/blade rate.

The Pi is running the siklon fork of cpuminer, and mines on the prohashing pool.