Hi Steemians,
I always wanted to build up a Stack of Raspberries, to crunch data for Gridcoin projects. I decided to take parts of the bonus I got for Christmas to invest in a Sixpack of those nice toys ;)
Additionally it had to be a new power source and new USB Cables and some M 2.5 Spacers in order to have a nice, shiny and especially stable construction.
Current looks
Currently, I am not really sure what the foundation of the PIs will be. I was thinking on an old piece of wood, slated clean and oiled maybe, to combine the technical with the natural. But I am not yet sure.
Technical Stuff
They are all set up with the most recent version of Raspbian on a 16Gb Class 10 Memory Card. For connectivity reasons, they are also running VNC Server.
As you can see in the pics above, I bought 3 different versions of heatsinks.
All of them are made of Aluminium, but the one on the Pi in the Base of the stack has also a small copper plate.
The heatsinks are glued to the CPU with a 2 component thermally conductive adhesive.
I am quite interested in the comparison between the heatsinks, for additional cooling I will install a noiseless fan, driven over the 5V of the USB Port of one of the PIs.
Gridcoin Projects to crunch data for
Actually, there are not that many Gridcoin projects around, where you can use a Raspberry Pi for.
In short, these are the projects:
- Universe@home
- Enigma@home
- Einstein@home
- Asteroids@home
- Collatz Conjecture
Most of them like Collatz Conjecture or Enigma@home can also be calculated with GPUs and it definitely makes no sense to compete with a Raspberry against a Nvidia 1080ti for instance. Therefore I will stick with Universe@home for the moment, at least up to now this project can not be calculated by a GPU.
By the way, since I have Raspbian installed I am not taking into account any Android on ARM projects.
After a few weeks, when the stack has reached it's full Mag, I will write a short update to this post.
About Gridcoin
If you haven't heard of Gridcoin before, there are many very good introductions here on steemit.
The very short version goes like this: Gridcoin is a Cryptocurrency. This currency can be earned by donating parts of your computational resources for scientific projects. So, instead of calculating "useless" hashes like in normal PoW mining, you can compute data, for instance for projects like LHC@home or SETI@home.
You help to advance humanity and are rewarded for this. For me, this is a perfect win-win situation
For further information please see www.gridcoin.us or www.gridcoin.science or take a look around under the #gridcoin tag.
Yours,
Jan
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