Duino Coin Mining on a Raspberry Pi

What is Duino Coin?

Duino Coin (DUCO) is a centralised based cryptocoin that has been designed to be easily mined on small IOT type devices like Raspberry Pi and Arduino (hence Duino Coin). It’s still in the early stages of its life (compared to other giants like Bitcoin and Etherium) but by allowing users to mine for the coin on small, low cost devices, it paves the way for a different generation of miners to get involved in crypto.

Why mine on a Raspberry Pi?

Good question. Simple answer. Because you can.

I’m a keen Raspberry Pi hobbyist and have been for many years. I currently have 3 Raspberry Pi devices in my house doing various things, and some sat here collecting dust so why not use them for something that will earn me some £££ in the background?

How do you mine on a Raspberry Pi?

First of all, go and register yourself an account on the Duino Coin Wallet page. Remember your username, you’ll need it for mining!

get your Raspberry Pi installed with the latest Raspbian OS (I’d recommend the lite version as you won’t need a desktop for this) and make sure you can SSH into it. If you need a guide to do that, checkout this one over on the Raspberry Pi website.

Once you’ve SSHd into your Pi, run the following commands in the terminal;

Once the Pi has updated, upgraded, installed and cloned the above, we need to start a screen session to run the miner in so we can exit out of the SSH session without stopping the miner. I won’t go into too much detail on how to use screen, but if you want to know more about it check out this article.

To start the screen session, type screen bash . This will create you a brand new screen session using bash as the shell. Now to start mining;

If this is the first run, you’ll be asked some simple questions to help configure your miner. If you ever need to edit these settings later, you can do so by typing nano PCMiner_2.4_resources/Miner_config.cfg and editing them accordingly.

To detach from this screen session (so that you can close the SSH session) simply press ctrl + a and then d . To go back into your session, type screen -r .

That’s it! You’re now mining crypto on a Raspberry Pi!

Extra

If you want your Pi to start mining as soon as it’s powered on type crontab -e (if it’s your first time editing your crontab, you’ll be prompted for your preferred editor. I assume you’ve chosen nano). At the very bottom on this file, add

@reboot screen -dm bash -c "cd ~/duino-coin; python3 PC_Miner.py"

Then press ctrl + o, ctrl + x and your cron job will be saved. To give it a try, simply reboot your Pi (sudo reboot) and type screen -r to see your mining progress.

Conclusion

The guys over at Duino Coin have made it super simple to mine on small, inexpensive devices, and are constantly improving everything (so don’t be surprised if you see a few errors pop up in your console). If you get too worried and need to ask some questions, check out the Duino Coin website for the best way to do it.