USB Block Erupter ASIC Bitcoin mining devices hooked up to a Raspberry Pi.

It’s perfectly fine to hook up USB Block Erupters to PCs, laptops and so forth but I wanted to run mine 24/7 without having to leave my Windows machine on all the time. The alternative that worked well for my needs was a Raspberry Pi and MinePeon.

The rPi

According to raspberrypi.org faqs, “the Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming.”

MinePeon

MinePeon is described on minepeon.com as “a small Linux Distribution for the Raspberry PI based on Arch Linux ARM. The goal for MinePeon is to make a small, lightweight, robust mining platform that supports all major ASIC and FPGA peripheral USB mining devices.”

The Equipment

Here’s a list of components I used as shown in the image at the beginning of the post.

Other Parts

The following are spare parts I already had around the house. They came in handy to put the whole thing together.

• Micro USB Sync and Charge cables to power the Pi from the powered hub USB ports. You can fine these cheap at Wal-Mart.
• A used PC fan to create a bit of air flow on the Erupters. They get hot.
• An Arctic Breeze fan to create air flow on the power bricks underneath the setup. This is a USB fan. I have it plugged into a small USB power cube. Got that at the grocery store counter one day for under 3 bucks.
• Power bars.
• An assortment of tie wraps from the hardware store. I’m a big fan of tie wraps. They are sturdy enough to hold down the hubs, rPi and the fan as shown and are also great for tidying up cables. See image below.
• Wood boards from an old picnic table to hold the devices down and to create a space to hide and tidy up the cables underneath.

Source: rdmsnippets.com