How to Use Raspberry Pi to Farm Chia Coin

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Make your own low power Chia Coin farming system.

Raspberry Pi Chia Coin
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

After you’ve gone through the process of building Chia Coin plots on a PC (see how to farm Chia Coin), there’s no need to waste the electricity and tie up expensive computer hardware keeping those plots connected to the Internet. Instead, it’s best to take an external drive or drive(s) with the plots on them and hook them up to a Raspberry Pi where they can stay online, without gulping down too much juice.

In this tutorial, we will create a custom Raspberry Pi Chia farming device powered by the latest Ubuntu 64-bit release for the Raspberry Pi. The unit is designed to be hidden away, farming Chia Coin silently while we go about our lives. As such we chose to house the Raspberry Pi 4 inside of a passively cooled case. Our choice this time was the Akasa Gem Pro which has great cooling for the SoC, PMIC and PCIe chip and a rather tasteful, if unusual design. 

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Les Pounder
Les Pounder
Associate Editor

Les Pounder is an associate editor at Tom's Hardware. He is a creative technologist and for seven years has created projects to educate and inspire minds both young and old. He has worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to write and deliver their teacher training program "Picademy".

16 Comments Comment from the forums
  • oxygenchaos
    Is it possible to connect multiple HDD to the Pi4 with sizes up to 18TB ?
    Reply
  • satai
    Just create a systemd unit to run the process automatically instead this workaround.

    (a different distro but a good intro to services: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/systemd )
    Reply
  • lilyammy
    tomshardware should be renamed to www.tomseveryarticleisaboutrasberrypiandvirtualcurrency.com
    Reply
  • GoofyOne
    Awesome. Do you think a raspberry pi 400 will work ok ... not sure of it's cooling powers?
    If I end up doing it, I think I'll just be happy if I get my money back from what I spent on getting the extra hardware.


    {GoofyOne ... retired IT guy, all excited like a giddy little kid he may have found a new hobby :p}
    Reply
  • s.petmecky
    oxygenchaos said:
    Is it possible to connect multiple HDD to the Pi4 with sizes up to 18TB ?
    Short answer: Yes, undoubtedly.
    Long answer: This is Linux, you can connect Thousands of drives to it if you like. (though that will be less than efficient)
    If you're looking for maximum space, you could go with a NAS and fill it up with max capacity drives. Then link the RPi to it via a Network Share.
    You'll want to use something similar to this in your FSTAB on the RPi.
    //192.168.1.2/Share/ /plots/n/stuff/ cifs username=pi,password=<secret>,x-systemd.automount 0 0(edit the IP of your share, share name and folder, and your pi's secret password has to be allowed on the share)
    Reply
  • toaste
    Tom’s Hardware sure is publishing a disproportionate number of Chia articles.

    Tom’s Hardware and/or the authors need to add a disclosure for the amount of money or hardware equipment invested in Chia.
    Reply
  • Rogue Leader
    toaste said:
    Tom’s Hardware sure is publishing a disproportionate number of Chia articles.

    Tom’s Hardware and/or the authors need to add a disclosure for the amount of money or hardware equipment invested in Chia.

    Tom's would need to add such disclosure if this were true, however no such hardware or investment exists. Make no mistake if you continue to make slanderous accusations about Tom's Hardware you will be commenting elsewhere. Have a nice day.
    Reply
  • recursivecodes
    I'm confused. Is it required to set this up first on a PC? How does the PC come into play if you're farming on the Pi itself?
    Reply
  • drsierrac
    Hey y'all...newbie to cryptocurrency and Raspberry Pi here with no coding or anything background... I really appreciated the step-by-step directions in this article, but now I've hit a big roadblock that I can't seem to get around. I get to the 9th step where I'm trying to 'sh install.sh', and it keeps giving me this error message.

    ERROR: Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement clvm-rs==0.1.7 (from chia-blockchain) (from versions: 0.1.0, 0.1.1, 0.1.2, 0.1.4, 0.1.6, 0.1.7)
    ERROR: No matching distribution found for clvm-rs==0.1.7

    Please help!! (and yes, I've upgraded to Raspbian 64, so that's not it...)
    Reply
  • GoofyOne
    Hmmm Raspbian may be the wrong OS, ... you may have to install Ubuntu OS to get the Chia farming setup going. I actually don't do Chia farming (at least not atm), but I tried setting up the Chia farm software on my Raspberry Pi 400 using Ubuntu 21.04, and it installed fine going by the directions given.

    It's probably only a fairly minor difference, but unless you are a expert on Linux, could be difficult to track it down.


    {GoofyOne's 2c worth}
    Reply