Bitcoin with Raspberry Pi - page 2. | Bitcointalksearch.org

rini17

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GO http://bitcointa.lk !!! My new nick: jurov

Quote from: crazy_rabbit on January 07, 2014, 04:19:51 AM

I'm thinking about running a full node on Raspberry Pi with a web interface that looks like blockchain or Coinbase so that you could have a 'home server' that was secure and that supported the network. With so many thin clients running we're really losing a lot of Nodes.

It plainly won't work on Pi. Even if it would sync eventually, it would be so slow that it'd provide no added value to your nor to the network. Just stop dreaming and build yourself $150 celeron miniitx system + some > 100GB HDD from drawer. It would also easily support additional p2p goodies you'll want to try some other day.

For example I'm using this one as all-in-one bitcoind, electrum server, litecoind, freenet, home router, print server, anything: http://www.mini-itx.com/store/~GA-C847N

crazy_rabbit

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RUM AND CARROTS: A PIRATE LIFE FOR ME

I'm thinking about running a full node on Raspberry Pi with a web interface that looks like blockchain or Coinbase so that you could have a 'home server' that was secure and that supported the network. With so many thin clients running we're really losing a lot of Nodes.

rini17

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Activity: 340

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GO http://bitcointa.lk !!! My new nick: jurov

Can confirm Electrum works fine, although slowly - creating a transaction may take tens of seconds depending on number of inputs. What's interesting, under PyPy interpreter it runs even slower (commandline only, PyQt won't work with PyPy).

Swap is not necessary, but I'm using zram (swapping to compressed memory). Aside from saving sd card also prevents accidental write of sensitive data there. To enable it, you have to keep original raspbian kernel, not install from rpi-update.

super3

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Quote from: buyer99 on September 24, 2013, 01:09:11 PM

I still don't understand..... Why not just store the datadir and swap on a thumb drive or on an external usb drive (w powered hub)? Isn't the solution really that simple?

Sure you could, but that would require a few days to sync and a dozen steps to get working. Would probably run pretty poorly too.

buyer99

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I still don't understand..... Why not just store the datadir and swap on a thumb drive or on an external usb drive (w powered hub)? Isn't the solution really that simple?

super3

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I've seen a few people with electrum running on their Pi's. Bitcoind is just not going to cut it for a Pi.

anonymous_acc

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http://learn.adafruit.com/piminer-raspberry-pi-bitcoin-miner?view=all

asc366

newbie

Activity: 36

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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".

runeks

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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.

peapodamus

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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

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Quote from: Oliverdjob on June 27, 2013, 07:59:45 PM

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.

Oliverdjob

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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

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Quote from: rupy on June 27, 2013, 06:05:05 PM

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.

Quote from: MWNinja on June 27, 2013, 06:37:58 PM

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.

MWNinja

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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.

rupy

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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...

runeks

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Quote from: rupy on May 09, 2013, 01:33:11 PM

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.

qualalol

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Quote from: peapodamus on June 26, 2013, 06:28:53 PM

Quote from: rupy on May 03, 2013, 03:29:31 AM

Quote from: gmaxwell on May 03, 2013, 03:11:42 AM

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.

peapodamus

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Quote from: rupy on May 03, 2013, 03:29:31 AM

Quote from: gmaxwell on May 03, 2013, 03:11:42 AM

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.

Chaoskampf

full member

Activity: 182

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order in numbers

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

tingwahk

newbie

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Merit: 0

Quote from: ct1aic on May 23, 2013, 02:02:07 PM

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://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/linux-mining-distro-for-the-raspberry-pi-minepeon-137934

Topic: Bitcoin with Raspberry Pi - page 2. (Read 17780 times)