Posts Tagged ‘Raspberry Pi’

Do Not Pay With Bitcoins at Pi Sipply

18, Apr 2015

pi-supply-payment-options

A little over a month ago Pi Supply, an online store selling Raspberry Pis and accessories for them among some other interesting products, announced that they have started accepting payments with Bitcoin. We have decided to check how will things go, so we made an order and paid with Bitcoins for it with the idea to share our experience with you after that. Well it is time to share that experience and it is not positive at all, about a month layer we still have not received our order paid with Bitcoins. We have not received any email from Pi Supply saying that they are out of stock or there will be a delay with shipping our order or about any kind of a problem. A few days ago we even tried contacting them to see what is going on since it was getting almost a month since we have made an order and paid for it with BTC… still no answer from the store.

So in short, we would not recommend to purchase anything at Pi Supply and pay with Bitcoins. Do your payments with PayPal and ask for your money back if you end up in a situation like us when you are not getting what you have ordered a month later. You can also pay with a Credit Card and do a Chargeback if you encounter a problem like this, but unfortunately there is not much you can do if you have paid for an order with Bitcoins like we did and you are not getting your ordered items and not getting a reply with an adequate reason. Unfortunately contacting the Bitcoin payment processor that Pi-Supply uses – BitPay and explaining the situation to them did not bring any positive results.

New More Powerful Raspberry Pi 2 Model B Now Available

4, Feb 2015

new-raspberry-pi-2-model-b

A little while ago we have discussed how you can build a low power dedicated Bitcoin or Litecoin node using Raspberry Pi. This however has raised some concerns due to the limited resources and processing power as well as the use of an SD flash card for storage of the big blockchain. Also the RPi has been used quite a lot with various ASIC miners to make them independent from a computer and allow them to run with only a direct Internet connection with the mining software installed on the Raspberry Pi board. The good news is that there is now a new faster and more powerful Raspberry Pi 2 Model B available for the same affordable price (about $35 USD) that will handle the load associated with running a crypto currency node on it than on the previous RPi. The new Raspberry Pi 2 Model B features a faster 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU that is supposed to provide up to about 6x the performance of the previous model, 1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM or essentially 2x the memory of the old model and offer full backwards compatibility with with Raspberry Pi 1.

The only drawback that still remains is that the new Raspberry Pi 2 Model B still relies on SD flash card as a storage option and in the case for use as a dedicated crypto currency node this could turn out to be a problem on the long run. The blockchain of Bitcoin is already over 30 GB in size and will continue to grow, so you need larger storage and a more reliable one. If you are looking for similar to Raspberry Pi solution with better storage options that would allow you to use a HDD or even better an SSD drive, then you might want to check out the very similar projects Banana Pi and Banana Pro that feature a SATA port for storage connection. These are dual-core solutions with 1 GB of RAM, so faster than the now older first RPi, but probably not as powerful as the new model. Of course there are also many other alternatives to Raspberry Pi, including more powerful ones in terms of performance and with additional extra features. The RPi however is still one of the best solutions in terms of price/performance/features ratio and that is really important when talking about using it for projects such as running a dedicated crypto currency node for example.

– For more details about the new more powerful Raspberry Pi 2 Model B that is already available…

How to Compile Bitcoind and Litecoind on Raspberry Pi

2, Sep 2014

raspberry-pi-controller

If you have a spare Raspberry Pi that you are not using you might want to turn it into a Bitcoin or Litecoin network node in order to support the network. The RPi is not very powerful and the use of an SD flash card might create some problems with reliability on the long term, but you might want to give it a try and see how long it will last. A 32GB SD card is recommended to be used in order to have some spare space available for the already pretty large Bitcoin blockchain, the Litecoin blockchain is much smaller. What is important to note is that it is not a wise idea to have the two clients running on the same Raspberry Pi as it will be a bit too much for the low power device. Also it will be a good idea to transfer the current blockchain files to the RPi, so that the device will not have to start from the beginning downloading the blockchain as this may take way too much time on it. Also some tweaks of the RPi OS could be implemented in order to reduce the unnecessary writes and optimize the memory usage of the device.

When you start and flash an ISO image on a 32GB SD card you will most likely not have the full space of the flash card available, so you need to extend the image to use the full card, you can do so by running the following command: sudo raspi-config


To compile Bitcoind 0.9.2.1 without wallet functionality:

sudo apt-get install libboost1.50-dev libboost-filesystem1.50-dev libboost-system1.50-dev libboost-program-options1.50-dev libboost-thread1.50-dev libboost-chrono1.50-dev libboost-test1.50-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libdb5.3++-dev libminiupnpc-dev

wget https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/archive/v0.9.2.1.zip
unzip v0.9.2.1.zip
cd bitcoin-0.9.2.1

./autogen.sh
./configure –disable-wallet
make

cd src
strip bitcoind


To compile Litecoind 0.8.7.2:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev libboost-all-dev libminiupnpc-dev

wget https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/archive/master-0.8.zip
unzip master-0.8.zip
cd litecoin-master-0.8

cd src
make -f makefile.unix
strip litecoind


top