Revisiting Flexfarmer five months later – efficient Chia farming on Raspberry Pi and more

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This is another piece on a part of the Chia and cryptocurrency landscapes. See previous posts at https://rsts11.com/crypto

Back in August 2021, I wrote here about Increasing Chia farmer efficiency with Flexpool’s new FlexFarmer. I was alpha testing on Windows, Linux, and a Rock64 Pi-like computer before that, and I found that it was quite efficient, handling my 90TB farm easily on any platform without breaking a sweat, and carving around 100 watts off the power I needed to keep a dedicated farmer going.

Five months and several versions later, I wanted to come back with my experience and observations since then. I’ll also answer a couple of frequently answered questions here, for those of you who have common questions.

Disclosure: I still work for Flexpool as of this writing, but this post is based on my experience, not a press release or the pool admin’s expectations. Some of the testing I did was “on the clock” alongside support tasks, but I was not paid or asked to write this post.

Quick Flexfarmer recap

The basics are the same. With a tiny distributed binary and config file (under 10MB download) and the specifics of your PlotNFT in Chia (farmer secret key, launcher ID, payout address), at least one plot, you can start farming Chia without a fully synced node (which could save you over a week on a Pi-class machine, and at least a day or more on a more full-size PC).

Want to build a compact, inexpensive machine for farming? Read my three suggestions from a January 2022 post.

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Three ways to build low profile Chia (and forks) nodes

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This is another piece on a part of the Chia and cryptocurrency landscapes. See previous posts at https://rsts11.com/crypto

Need to set up a lightweight VPN to get into your low profile node remotely? Check out Stephen Foskett’s writeup on Zerotier. I’m using it on my Pi nodes to reduce NAT layers.

Many if not most Chia farmers run a full node on their farming / plotting machine. Some larger farms will use the remote harvester model, with a single full node and several machines farming plots on local storage. 

If you’re using Flexfarmer from Flexpool, or just want a supplemental node (maybe to speed up your own resyncing, or to supplement decentralization on the Chia network), you might want a dedicated node that doesn’t farm or plot. And for that use case, you don’t really need dual EPYC or AMD Threadripper machines. 

In fact, a well-planned Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB or 8GB system, with an external USB drive, will do quite well for this use. If you want to do a few forks as well, or another blockchain full node, a moderately-recent Intel NUC would do quite well for not much more. 

So here we’ll look at three builds to get you going. Note that any of these can run a full node plus Flexfarmer if you want, or just a full node. 

If you don’t already have Chia software and a full node installed, go ahead and install and sync the node on a full scale PC. it may save you five days of waiting. My original build for this use case was to test the blockchain syncing time from scratch.

Syncing from a semi-optimal Pi 4B from scratch took about 8 days, for what it’s worth. One member of the Chia public Keybase forum reported about 28 hours to sync on an Intel Core i5 12600k. 

Caveat: Raspberry Pi boards are a bit more challenging to find and even harder to find anywhere near the frequently-touted $35 price point, or even under $150. And for Chia nodes, you want a minimum of the 4GB Pi 4B (8GB wouldn’t hurt). So while it’s possible to run on older hardware, it’s not recommended.

 

You might also be able to run on a Pi400 (the Raspberry Pi 4B in a keyboard case, which is much easier to find for $100 or so, complete). I plan to test this soon.

 

Raspberry Pi with external USB SSD. 

This was my initial build, and today it’s running at the Andromedary Instinct providing an accessible full node for about 10-15 watts maximum. 

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My 2021 Amazon order highlights

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As usual, I’ve reused and recycled way too many Amazon Prime packages this year. I’m going to #thread my top 10 purchases in 2021.

These are items I have actually purchased with my own money during 2021. Photos are of the actual items in my possession (I may go back and add obvious stock photos later for the items I didn’t catch in action). .

No seller or manufacturer has asked for a review, provided any incentives, or otherwise interfered with these orders or this post. If you buy through my links here, I may receive a commission.

In no particular order….

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Turnkey Chia farming with Evergreen Miner, and making your own compact farmer

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Disclosures at the end, as usual

The Evergreen site and product line have evolved since this post was made in late 2021. I’m planning to update the coverage soon, but don’t be surprised if product names and prices have changed since then.

If you’ve bought your Evergreen Miner, you may have questions answered at my unofficial FAQ.

In the mean time, I have (as of January 2023) joined the Evergreen Systems Co. affiliate program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to the partner site. If you’d like to buy some of their gear, use the link https://evergreenminer.com/?ref=g2vkXM2BkDi2m, or use the referral code RSTS11 for a $10 discount, and I may receive a commission.

A few years ago, a turnkey desktop container/VM platform from Antsle came along, and I thought “this is cool, but I bet I could make one myself.” You can read about that here on rsts11.

Earlier this month I saw a low power Pi-based project similar to the Antsle Nano (which I did build on my own) come out for Chia farming. The project, Evergreen Miner (evergreenminer.com), is the brainchild of a young geek named Dylan Rose who’s worked with Amazon and other companies and has begun an interesting forward-looking Chia project to really bring Chia farming to the masses.

I’ve written about building your own Chia system, and lots of people (tens of thousands at least) have done so. But some people aren’t up for the space, expense, time, tuning, software building, and so forth to make a node and farm.

However, a lot of people could benefit from the technology and platform and even more into the future as the ecosystem matures. So the idea of a turnkey platform that’s relatively easy to build and maintain and expand, even without plotting on your own, sounds pretty good.

Think all of the functionality and potential of Chia, with the ease of setup and management of a typical mobile app, and of course the power draw of an LED light bulb or two. No hardware or Linux or filesystem or SAS knowledge required.

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Titanic, Hindenburg, and My Management Mindset

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As some of my readers know, I’ve taken the last year off from the corporate world. I’ve done some things on my own, sold some things on eBay, and worked as a contractor for a mining pool. Now that I’m back into interviews, one thing I get asked more than ever before is about my management style.

I prefer to think of it as a management mindset, as the style would adjust to each minion’s needs and “work language” for lack of a better term. And despite relatively little formal management training, I’ve come to a coherent and occasionally appreciated position.

You can only be as good a manager as your manager is to you.

A large part of team management is proxying in both directions between the people who report to you, and the person or people you report to. Your reach and control is probably limited — you can’t usually spend more than the budget allows on salary, or eliminate 7am calls for your west coast team because a manager three levels up wants 10am meetings from his east coast office.

But on a more granular level, if your own manager isn’t supportive of what you need for your employees, there’s only so much you can do to make that happen. This is often because your manager’s manager is limited, and on up many levels.

This can be an uncomfortable maxim to present to a prospective or current manager, as some will take it as a personal affront. But good managers (leaders) will understand that it’s reality, and they can’t do more for you than their manager permits (generally speaking). They probably know it even if they haven’t specifically thought about it.

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