Mining: Raspberry Pi & Handsake (HNS)
Thanks for the great feedback on our SkyInclude.com/mining tutorial.
For our first experiment with mining, we used a MacBook laptop. After talking to many of you - as well as leaving this laptop on 24/7 for almost 2 weeks - we realized we need to have a better solution.The Raspberry Pi 4, 4gb is what we moved to.And we are still using a second hand HNS1 Asic miner. These are the steps we went through:Connecting The Hardware
What We did
We put this little thing in our living room, using our TV as the monitor with a micro USB to HDMI plug to connect it.
We had an old keyboard and mouse and put those in the USB ports.
Power plug for the a/c power (and we connected to an extension cord)
Speaker plug for kid’s to watch Youtube.
And of course, another USB port to connect the mining machine to the Raspberry.
And then a micro SD card for the operating system. Which we need to install:
Install The Operating System on an SD Card
What We did
We installed Raspbian OS, following https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/ guidelines. We see many amazing videos n Youtube about setting up the Raspberry Pi, so won’t re-do those in this tutorial.
In other tutorials we heard about NOOB and other options, but stuck to this one here. Super simple, plug in the Micro SD card to your laptop, and then it formats it for you and installs a new Raspberry OS (Raspian) to it.
Plug in the Micro SD and power it on
What We did
Once you have the Operating system installed, put it in the Raspberry and power it all up.
It will download and install updates as well, which for us took about 2 hours. (Slow internet in China).
Now, for the HNS mining specific stuff:
Install HandyMiner to the Raspberry
What to do
This is a bit “tech” and scary - as it is done in the command line, and not in a GUI (what you see ini what you get) interface - but the team at HandyMiner really make it line by line copy/paste of what you need to do, here:
So to do this - we went to the Terminal in Raspberry (in the living room on the TV) and copy and pasted each line into the terminal command line.
* We are using the Raspberry Pi 4 (they have options for version 3 and version 4)
* We recommend using the Dashboard instead of the standard CLI - why?
Because for whatever reason, it got more GHZ (higher hash rate) than on CLI.
Also, when we first stared using it, it was only 14 hash rate, but after resetting and using the dashboard version, it was averaging 51 hash rate (which for the HNS1 miner, is in line with the 50 +/- 5% range)
* We also turned off the TV screen unless the kids want to watch Youtube / use the computer for something. Or if we want to check the dashboard.
* The noise is cool, the Final Fantasy celebration - but if you’re using a mining pool, it will repeat all the time every few seconds. The team told me in Telegram that this was an awesome announcement when they had solo mining going and got a big HNS payout when their miner “Cracked the code” on an entire block.
It Even Performs Better than when on the Mac Laptop
performance
On this setup, we are getting a bit more HNS each day / each hour than when we had it on the Mac book. The HNS1 miner still iis only getting us 2.25 to 2.75 HNS per day - so it is recommended instead to get a HNS1 Plus.
We hope this guide is helpful.
Again if you didn’t check it out - we have a more details mining HHNS guide where at Skyinclude.com/mining.