If there's one thing that Chia has done since its inception (apart from driving up prices of hard drives) is giving birth to a number of DIY projects that aim to increase power efficiency of farming. But then again, if one is going through a personal computing project, why not make it as interesting as possible? And that's what YouTuber LithiumSolar has done, by repurposing a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4 GB of RAM as the brains for a 160 TB Chia farm.
Chia is a cryptocurrency that uses proofs of time and space, which occupies otherwise free hard drive space with proofs (named plots, as if they were plots of land) that maintain the security and blockchain cohesiveness of Chia. While the plotting process (the creation of plots) is both CPU and storage-heavy in its performance requirements, the farming element of the equation (where your plots sit idle on your hard drives until they're summoned to serve as proofs for a new Chia block generation) is extremely light in its computing requirements. This has opened up a series of DIY projects that make the ubiquitous and extremely versatile Raspberry Pi 4 as the center of their Chia farms.
The Raspberry Pi 4 is shown as being capable of handling the farming requirements for this 160 TB Chia farm whilst controlling 17 HDDs, running a full node and a farmer, and responding to the Chia network proof checks in a timely manner so as to enable an actual Chia win (even if those usually dress up as veritable unicorns in their rarity). Even if you are pooling, this project would work much the same way, whilst reducing your farmer's power consumption to one of the lowest possible ones hardware-wise. And it's a way to dip your toes in the DIY Raspberry Pi world - a potentially Alice-in-Wonderland-like world with bottomless fun and possibilities.
