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I have a Pi sitting around on my desk that I have never used. Could I use this to mine some Monero? I don’t pay for my electricity, so there is no cost for me.

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  • It's not profitable to run a monero node on a raspberry pi for mining, but it can be used to sync the blockchain and stay up 24/7 so your laptop isn't screaming. Then you can use it to send and receive transactions using a desktop wallet without needing to connect to a (potentially unsafe) remote node. Open source instructions here github.com/seibelj/iCryptoNode and pre-built here
    – seibelj
    Jan 26, 2019 at 18:08

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I think you would have to do a lot to get a miner running on a pi. The CPU doesn't have much cache, isn’t that strong, and would need the AES-NI instruction set (which not all Pi s have). And it would get a very low H/s anyway. There's a GPU on the pi but I haven't seen much info about using it for mining. However since the power is free it could be fun just to fiddle with it and see what you can get out of it

The Monero project has instructions for Building to Pi

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I have my Pi3 mining away on my new pool:

Gulf Coast Mining (XMR)
https://mon.gulfcoastmining.com

I've created two "PI" specific ports on the pool to align difficulty: 

PPLNS: 2222
SOLO:  2224

(SOLO of course being a long shot lottery but why not!!)

It's hashing at about 10H/s which even at that rate far exceeds any cost of electricity (yearly estimate is $6). It will get warm though if left on 24x7. I have it encased in an aluminum chassis that acts as a heatsink. I would definitely not do it without addressing the heat. It also gets hot enough in my case that small children should be sure to be beyond reach.

I compiled directly on the Pi3, set it up in a screen session and it has yet to have any issues.

https://github.com/tpruvot/cpuminer-multi

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  • can you add here some output from yours miner so we can have complete picture regarding Pi3 performances?
    – Amit Vujic
    Dec 21, 2017 at 10:05
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    If it’s getting that hot it’s using more than $6 a year in energy
    – Zigglzworth
    Dec 21, 2017 at 19:33
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    The temperature of the unit and the wattage in use have no such connection. At its max, it runs abt 3.5W. It's mean is below that. 3.5W to hours / kwh ~ 285.7hrs or 30.66kwh units per year. At $0.15 k/wh x 30.66 = ~$4.60 a year. My electricity is closer to $0.09 but $0.15 is a fair national cost here in the US
    – user4066
    Dec 21, 2017 at 20:41
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    When the Pi gets hot it activates a throttling system for the CPU. I thought this would consume more power.. perhaps not. In any case the throttle would likely slow down the miner
    – Zigglzworth
    Dec 23, 2017 at 6:52
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    Agreed on the throttle and the heatsink chassis does a great job of pulling that heat up off the chips. It currently maxes at 63.9C mining 24x7 on both CPU & GPU. Throttling kicks in at ~82C.
    – user4066
    Dec 23, 2017 at 11:05
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I can confirm that @Mark is right though I get a lower hash rate(some compile tweaking maybe and overclock the board): 

[2017-12-21 04:53:06] Using JSON-RPC 2.0
[2017-12-21 04:53:06] CPU Supports AES-NI: NO
[2017-12-21 04:53:06] Starting Stratum on stratum+tcp://xmr-us-east1.nanopool.org:14444
[2017-12-21 04:53:06] 4 miner threads started, using 'cryptonight' algorithm.
[2017-12-21 04:53:12] Stratum difficulty set to 120001
[2017-12-21 04:53:56] CPU #2: 1.53 H/s
[2017-12-21 04:53:56] CPU #3: 1.52 H/s
[2017-12-21 04:53:57] CPU #0: 1.51 H/s
[2017-12-21 04:53:58] CPU #1: 1.48 H/s

You do have to configure though as in https://github.com/pooler/cpuminer/issues/72

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    Just to comment on tweaking & OC ... not something I've done, just a pure compilation. Perhaps it's the choice of miner.
    – user4066
    Dec 21, 2017 at 11:49
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I'm working on project focused to provide best-possible RPi3 mining.

Pool used: https://supportxmr.com/

In order to exploit RPi3 hardware at maximum level I'm using Arch Linux. together with my fork of xmrig/xmrig miner - can be found on GitHub

Hashing perfromances are so far between 15-20H/s

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    15-20 H/s with how much power consumption please?
    – user5733
    Feb 28, 2018 at 23:33
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Not worth the trouble. You won’t earn enough to get a payout on any pool I’m aware of. And even if you were to find a pool with basically a zero payout threshold, you’d be earning at most $2.47 a YEAR at current price and difficulty. And that’s with free power and after tweaking to get it up to 10 h/s.

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Yes, you can! It's quite fun to finally see your miner up and running. As you smile at last at your accomplishment, you notice something. Your smile falters.

CPU #0: 1.51 H/s

CPU #1: 1.48 H/s

CPU #2: 1.53 H/s

CPU #3: 1.52 H/s

Damn it, how are you going to pay the electricity bill this month?

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