Making money, easy as pi

Last week I set up a bitcoin mining rig based on the raspberry pi, for a number of months I have been using a small USB block eruptor plugged into the laptop I am using for my 3d printer. This has been working well but I fancied a slightly cooler solution. A while ago I came across an adafruit tutorial for setting up a bitcoin mining rig with a raspberry pi and after putting it off for a couple months I made the decision to have a go.

The tutorial doesn't cover the whole process as it assumes you have the pi setup with SSH access and installed the library for the LCD screen. They do provide links to articles to get this bit running. The process of setting it up is straightforward and worked well; it is great seeing something appear on the screen, in my case this is the first time I have done anything with a raspberry pi other than powering it up.

After running it for a week I have found the system to be a little intermittent, sometimes it doesn't start up or locks up but when it's running it's fairly reliable. I have a second blockeruptor on order as well as a butterfly labs 5Gh/s miner, these should all be able to run from this one system.

The thing I like the most about this project is the Adafruit LCD display which shows the status of the miner. This uses a python script which fetches data and outputs it to the screen, this is simple enough that I have been able to fork the code and make my own updates so that it removes stats I don't need and displays a few others. Overall I am impressed with the setup but I am even more impressed with the way it has made me take a real look at python programming on the raspberry pi.