Installing electrum and lightning on a different machine is as good as running all on the same? I realize its a little redundant but i have a couple mac minis with dual core processors that should be able to run this instead of taxing the full node.
I wouldn't put Electrum / Lightning on a different machine than the machine holding the Bitcoin Core install with the blockchain. The second machine's uptime would otherwise always depend on the primary machine (with Bitcoin Core) being online. Separating
'Mining' and
'Full Node' may make sense, though.
I guess what im asking is does more ram+processor help bitcoind, lightning or electrum more?
The Apollo SBC has enough power for everything, but if you have extra hardware lying around, putting the whole 'full node' stuff on there, may allow you to have slightly better uptime / reliability in terms of always having access to it, while the miner may have a downtime. By nature, an ASIC can have problems with power supply or cooling (e.g. in summer) from time to time.
I have considered just throwing away the sbc part of the full node i just came seem to find a reason for needing it that is obvious to me. it has opened a lot of doors for me tinkering with gpio and pci-e a lot more than i have in the past simply because i never had a reason to do so prior.
Well, without the SBC, the Apollo won't mine on its own. You will always need to keep another computer running to feed the ASIC hashboard inside the Apollo the blocks to mine. If you already got the full unit, why would you want to do this?
If you enjoy tinkering with GPIO (for other projects), maybe get a Raspberry Pi Zero or such; cheaper and better documented than the Orange Pi 4.
