How I built a Cryptocurrency Miner Using Raspberry Pi to Mine RavenCoin (RVN)

6 min readNov 13, 2021

Overview

A step-by-step guide to building a CryptoCurrency Miner using Raspberry Pi4 (a 5W single board computer) for Fun, Experimental, and learning purposes.

You can use it to mine the coin of your choice Mineable (Monero, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Ravencoin) or Unmineable coins (SHIBA INU, PancakeSwap, Solana, DogeCoin, etc.)

Step by Step Guide to Mine Shiba Inu SHIB Cryptocurrency using your Windows Computer in a few minutes is here

With that said if you’re going to use your Raspberry Pi to mine any Crypto Coins don’t expect to get rich doing so since the processing power is very limited.

Below is the Snapshot of the Miner Created using Raspberry Pi, It can work headless too, HDMI Monitor is just used for displaying the current status.

High-Level Process

We will be running a Mining Software XMRig to Mine RavenCoin using RandomX Mining algorithm on Raspberry Pi4 using Unmineable service pool and RavenCoin Wallet address to Deposit the coins.

Mined coins will be reflected in real-time on the unMineable, will be deposited to RavenCoin Wallet once the min payment threshold is reached.

Components/Services used to Mine in Real-Time

Raspberry Pi4

Raspberry Pi4 Model B (2GB RAM, 1.5GHz CPU, and 32GB Memory Card for Storage), the Operating System is Raspberry Pi OS Lite (32-bit).

Ravencoin (RVN) Wallet Address — Coin to be Mined

Ravencoin is a peer-to-peer blockchain, handling the efficient creation and transfer of assets from one party to another. We will need an RVN wallet address to Deposit the mined RVN coin.

RandomX — Algorithm for CPU Mining

RandomX is a proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm that is optimized for general-purpose CPUs. RandomX uses random code execution (hence the name) together with several memory-hard techniques to minimize the efficiency advantage of specialized hardware.

RandomX can operate in two main modes with different memory requirements:

Fast mode — requires 2080 MiB of shared memory.
Light mode — requires only 256 MiB of shared memory, but runs significantly slower

Both modes are interchangeable as they give the same results. The fast mode is suitable for “mining”, while the light mode is expected to be used only for proof verification. You can read further about RandomX algo on GitHub

XMRig — CPU Miner using RandomX Algorithm

XMRig is a high-performance, open-source, cross-platform RandomX, KawPow, CryptoNight, and AstroBWT unified CPU/GPU miner and RandomX benchmark.

Official binaries are available for Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD.

unMineable — Mining Pool

unMineable a service/mining pool that allows you to mine using your CPU or GPU in exchange for various coins. It is an innovative real-time exchanging process, based on actual mineable coins:

ETH (Ethereum) for our Ethash pool
ETC (Ethereum Classic) for our Etchash pool
XMR (Monero) for our RandomX pool
RVN (Ravencoin) for our KawPow pool

So you allocate your CPU resources to pool mine the Mineable coins such as RVN, XMR, ETC, ETH and get rewarded in your desired coins such as SHIB, Doge, CAKE, CHZ, etc. An entire list of coins can be found here

The underlying exchanging process runs in the background, converting an actual mineable coin reward to the coin you choose. The conversion is processed on each reward, so you can think of it as an almost real-time exchange, to make it more like if you were actually mining the non-mineable coin.

Steps to Start Mining

Step1: Making Sure Raspberry Pi is up to date

Once Raspberry Pi is started, Execute the following commands from the terminal to ensure that Pi is up to date.

sudo apt update
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get update - allow-releaseinfo-change#Clean up free space in the local repository for retrieved package 
sudo apt-get clean

Step2: Install 64-bit Raspian Container

XMRig only runs on 64-bit so we’ll be using a 64-bit container called raspbian-nspawn-64.

We can get started installing raspbian-nspawn-64 using the following command, Once installed, reboot Pi

sudo apt-get install -y raspbian-nspawn-64
sudo reboot

Note: You can skip this step and instead install Raspberry Pi 64 Bit OS, Step by Step Guide to Install Raspberry Pi 64 Bit OS “Bullseye” is here

Step3: Install XMRig

Execute the following command to switch to the 64-bit shell, you can enter exit to switch back to a 32-bit Pi shell.

ds64-shell

Execute below in the 64-bit shell to get the up to date package information from the configured sources

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get update - allow-releaseinfo-change

Now, To install XMRig, First, we will need to install the dependencies.

sudo apt-get install git build-essential cmake libuv1-dev libssl-dev libhwloc-dev##Once completed, Execute the following commands to build xmriggit clone https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig.git
cd xmrig
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

Once build you should be able to see xmrig in the build folder as in the snapshot below

Step4: Start Mining

Now Pi is ready for Mining! Execute the following command to Mine the RVN Coin using unMineable Pool

Syntax: sudo xmrigbuildpath/xmrig -o poolURL -u COIN:WalletAddress -p workername#referralcodeExample: sudo /home/pi/xmrig/build/xmrig -o rx-asia.unmineable.com:3333 -u RVN:RFZ34F9eCpWwKp2eT6bR3VwwFwaBhoyvkb -p aryanRVNPI#dah5-hbmy

xmrigbuildpath/xmrig — xmrig software path we build in Step3 in the build folder. For me the path is /home/pi/xmrig/build/xmrig

poolURL — After the -o you can see the Pool URL, in this case, all you have to do depending on your location is to use one of the following URLs (select the one closest to your location).

USA: rx-us.unmineable.com:3333
Europe: rx-eu.unmineable.com:3333
Asia: rx-asia.unmineable.com:3333

I have selected the pool URL as rx-asia.unmineable.com:3333

COIN:WalletAddress — Coin that needs to be Mined, followed by the Coin’s Wallet address.

Thus the usage is RVN:RFZ34F9eCpWwKp2eT6bR3VwwFwaBhoyvkb

workername#referralcode — After -p you will notice the worker name and referral code.

Worker name: Name that you provide to identify your worker node, It helps in the case of multiple nodes, my worker name is aryanRVNPI
Referral code: Code to lower the mining fees from 1% to 0.75% You can use the referral code dah5-hbmy

Thus, I executed the following command and started the Mining in Raspberry Pi 4

sudo /home/pi/xmrig/build/xmrig -o rx-asia.unmineable.com:3333 -u RVN:RFZ34F9eCpWwKp2eT6bR3VwwFwaBhoyvkb -p aryanRVNPI#dah5-hbmy

The screenshot is of Mining in Pi, Since my Pi is 2GB Ram thus the Mining is using the Slow Mode of RandomX Algorithm

Screenshot from Unmineable for the RVN coins Stats mined, Here you can notice the worker name aryanRVNPI.

On Unmineable, Remember to use a valid address for each coin, for example you want to get paid in XMR, use the monero wallet address, In our case we used the RVN coin wallet address to get paid in RavenCoin.