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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Apparently mining Monero on Raspberry Pis seems to be all the rave now? So let’s try:I had 5 Raspi 3B and one 4B 8GB lying around…Mining In A PoolAlthough you can download the official wallet and just start mining, the hash rate of your computer will most certainly be too small to ever solve a block and get a reward. So we will use a mining pool, where the work and rewards are distributed across all miners in the pool.There are a lot of mining pools with different parameters around. I use xmrfast because they also pay out rewards as small as 0.005 XMR and I expect to not make much $XMR anyway. Also, it’s not a big pool so I contribute to the decentral nature of Monero.Setup Ansible ScriptsSo let’s set up some miners. As always I use Ansible to get rid of the repetitive tasks. You can use the scripts below as starting point. All you need is some 64bit Pis with SSH access and python3 installed.That’s enough for the playbook, we will do the rest in the role:So basically we download the source code, compile and install it and make a service out of it. The code is tailored to Raspi 4Bs with the explicit user “pi” and the “make -j4”. You should maybe adapt that to your needs.The service file looks like this:There, we reference the config file. Mine uses CPU only as we are on Pis and TLS to connect to the server. Don’t forget to fill in you Monero wallet address in user.That’s my host file: Does it work?YES! I also loaded a node-exporter on every Pi and logged to my Prometheus:So how well does it work?Here is the absolute hash rate of the Pis taken from the 15min average of xmrig. I included my Dell XPS 15 with a i9-9880HK and GTX 1650 as a comparison:Now the Dell absolutely destroys both Pis. Although it’s interesting to see that the Pi 4B is nearly four times as fast as the Pi 3B. Also, the anti-CPU tactics of Monero seem to be working: The CPU is much more performant than the GPU.But in Mining, absolute performance matters less than efficiency. So I measured the energy consumption of the 3 devices and divided the hash rate by it:Again, the Dell CPU is far ahead, but less so, as it’s using 50W of power. The Pi 3B
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