About a month ago I made a post outlining all of the things that would be needed to mine Burst coin completely off of solar. I've finally got everything in and had the time to get it setup. Here is how:
1x 100 Watt solar panel:
1x Charge controller with USB ports:
1x Raspberry pi with at least a 4 gb micro sd card to install Raspbian:
You'll also need a battery. I'm just using an old car battery for this, so just about any 12 volt battery will work since the power usage is so low.
Simply install Raspbian to your micro sd card using the guide on the Raspberry Pi website. Then, plug your raspberry pi into the usb ports on your charge controller. There are 6 screws on the charge controller. The 2 on the far left are for the + and - wires of your solar panel, the 2 in the middle are for the + and - of your battery, and the ones on the end are for your load. We won't be using those for this setup. Although you could use them to power your Raspberry pi if you wired a car cigarette lighter up to it and bought a 12 v to 5 v usb plug(like you would use to charge your phone in your car). After you've gotten it all wired up and booted into Raspbian, you're going to install the Burst miner(creepminer) by following this guide:
https://github.com/Creepsky/creepMiner/wiki/Compilation-&-Installation-on-the-Raspberry-Pi-3
You're also going to want to plot your hard drives to mine burst coin. The best way to do this is with a powerful desktop computer. I simply use the windows Burst wallet to do this. Here is a guide for that:
https://www.burstnation.com/wbb/index.php?thread/385-how-to-start-mining-burstcoin-in-a-pool/&postID=5455#post5455
After you've gotten creepminer compiled and installed(It's going to take a very long time on the Raspberry pi), you'll need to plug your external hard drives into the Pi. You're probably going to need a powered USB hub to hook them up as the Pi doesn't have much power behind it to power the drives. However, I was able to plug one in and run it just fine to test this. You would simply just cut off the wall plug of the power cable for your usb hub and wire the + and - into the load section of your charge controller as it's 12 volts. Then, just plug the usb cable from the hub into any open usb port on the pi. Your pi should pop up and tell you that a new drive is detected and ask if you would like to open it to view the files. Tell it yes as you will need to know what the location of your drive is. Then, go to the folder of your creepminer on the raspberry pi and find a file called "mining.conf" in the /bin folder:
Right-Click on it and open it in your text editor. You only need to change a few things in here. You need to find the "Plots" section of the config and tell it where your plots are located(should be loaded up from earlier when I had you to tell the pi to open your drive to view files). Then, "mining info" and "Submission" will be your pools http address. Wallet info will be the http address of an online wallet so it can get block information:
Then, you'll simply load up your terminal, and start by running the creepminer application with ./creepMiner in the /bin directory of where you downloaded creepminer. You should see something similar to this:
Be patient! If you don't have a whole lot of hard drive space, it could be a few hours before you see it sending nonces. But, as long as the light green text pops up and says it's submitted nonces, you're mining burst coin and you should automatically receive them in your wallet(usually within 24 hours). Congratulations! You're now mining burst and using no electricity. I personally already had everything needed to set this up, so it didn't cost me anything. So it's a fun little project and i'm basically making free Bitcoins.
I love it. I'm working on something similar, but a good deal larger for a solar GPU rig to mine on nicehash (and Ether for as long as that's viable). What kind of Solar setup would I need to comfortably power a 1600w PSU?
Where are you located? How many hours a day of sun do you get? That's probably not really viable unfortunately as you're probably going to need over 5,000 watts of solar panels and a really big battery bank. I wouldn't really recommend investing all of that into it as you'll probably never recover the money. That's what I like about burst. I did all of this with just a 100 watt panel that cost me about $95. Got lucky and hit 2 blocks last week that paid me about $50. So i've almost paid for the panel already. Which, I had it to begin with, so it's just a nice bonus.
I'm in Southern California. On a south facing exposure we get a MINIMUM of 6 hours of full sun. Whole house solar out here runs roughly $36k for the Tesla 30 year systems (installed), so it could be pretty economical.
I've also looked into other grid minimizing options like wind turbine (especially given the flow created by the output heat) and water turbines in the greywater reclamation system.
How many cards can you run off of that 1600watt psu? How long would it take you to recover the almot $10,000 it would take you to set it up? Also, wind turbines would help tremendously, they're a bit cheaper than solar I think. They're not really an option in my area as we don't get much wind unless it's raining. You could also just go grid-tied and mine for free during the day. That would cut your bill in almost half. Just a thought.
6 GPU on one 1600w (Radeon R9 390). According to nicehash, each has a return of 0.00163142 BTC/Day or +0.00981854 BTC/Day for all 6 together. https://www.nicehash.com/?p=calc
If I were to spend $12k on the rig and Solar, the ROI would be a little over a year (380 days). Alternatively, I could pay the high cost of grid electricity ($0.43 kwh) and recoup $2500 in 6 months then upgrade to Solar when it becomes economically feasible.
I would need to research more to see what it would pay direct mining vs pool
Wow.. youre electricity costs are $0.43? That's insane.. Yea, I would definitely look into getting into solar at that point. Mine is only $0.12. You can get solar panels for less than $1/watt. If the ROI is less than a year, I say you should go for it if your prices are that expensive.. After 1 year and you get your roi, you will be mining for free. Not to mention that if the price of ETH keeps going up, you'll get your roi a lot quicker.
Yeah, for "peak" power (which mining puts you into really fast) electricity is just obscene here)
good work sir
Thanks! Many people have been wanting me to finish this guide. Can't believe you're the only one that's seen it so far.. Idk what i'm doing wrong. Guess i'm posting the wrong tags or something. It's weird. Thanks for the comment though!
don't worry man it will come.
Call it "Free Bitcoin Solar Pi"
Or Solar BURST :)
perfect I want to try it for fun