Would you believe you can participate in cryptocurrency production using a simple Raspberry Pi computer? No need for powerful ASIC miners! Peercoin is an interesting altcoin that has minting capability built-in, and minting is the ability to create new coins from the ones you already have. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to set up a dedicated Raspberry Pi computer to mint the Peercoins in your wallet.

Assumptions

This guide assumes the following:

  • You’ve downloaded Raspbian Lite ISO image.
  • You’ve burned the image on the SDCard and you have some experience working with the Raspberry Pi computer
  • You’ve installed Peercoin on your computer and you want to transfer your wallet.dat file to your Raspberry Pi computer.
  • You already have some Peercoins in your wallet.

This guide has been confirmed working on:

Instructions

(Optional) Changing the Host on your Pi

The following section was taken from this link.

  1. Open up this file.

    sudo nano /etc/hosts

  2. Leave all of the entries alone except for the very last entry labeled 127.0.1.1 with the hostname raspberrypi. This is the only line you want to edit. Replace “raspberrypi” with whatever hostname you desire. I named my computer peercoin-pi.

  3. Back at the terminal, type the following command to open the hostname file:

    sudo nano /etc/hostname

  4. Replace the default “raspberrypi” with the same hostname you put in the previous step (e.g. peercoin-pi).

  5. Commit our changes.

    sudo /etc/init.d/hostname.sh

  6. Reboot the computer.

    sudo reboot

Improve security

  1. Install firewall.

    sudo apt-get install git ufw

  2. Enable firewall and allow only ssh access

    sudo ufw allow 22
sudo ufw allow 9901
sudo ufw --force enable
sudo ufw status

  3. To add more security, read this link.

Swap

The following section was inspired by this article. Please be warned that running the following code can shorten the life-span of your SDCard.

  1. Configure using the following.

    sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=64M count=16
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile

  2. (Optional) Stop our swap memory and remove it.

    sudo swapoff /swapfile
sudo rm -f /swapfile

  3. (Optional) Make the swap memory permanent on every boot.

    sudo vi /etc/fstab

  4. (Optional) Append the contents:

    /swapfile none swap defaults 0 0

Peercoin

Build Executable

Please note these instructions where taken from this section. The following instructions are to be run on your raspberry pi.

  1. Update the libraries.

    sudo apt-get update

  2. Install build requirements:

    sudo apt-get install build-essential libtool autotools-dev automake pkg-config libssl-dev libevent-dev bsdmainutils python3

  3. Install more requirements

    sudo apt-get install libboost-system-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-chrono-dev libboost-program-options-dev libboost-test-dev libboost-thread-dev

  4. (Optional) If above command doesn’t work, you can install all boost development packages with:

    sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev

  5. According to this link, we are compiling on arm processor so we need to run:

    sudo apt-get install g++-arm-linux-gnueabihf curl

  6. Install git because it’s not installed.

    sudo apt-get install git

  7. Clone Peercoin to our home directory.

    cd /home/pi
git clone https://github.com/ppcoin/ppcoin.git
``

  8. To build our dependencies for arm, according to this link, then run the following:

    cd depends
make HOST=arm-linux-gnueabihf NO_QT=1
cd ..
./configure --prefix=$PWD/depends/arm-linux-gnueabihf --enable-glibc-back-compat --enable-reduce-exports LDFLAGS=-static-libstdc++
make

  9. To build our executable for arm, according to this link, then run the following:

    ./autogen.sh
./configure
make
make install # optional

Setup and Run Executable

  1. Upload the wallet.dat file on your computer to your raspberry pi.

    rsync -avz ~/Desktop/wallet.dat pi@192.168.1.10:/home/pi/.peercoin/wallets/wallet.dat

  2. Run the following code to confirm the Peercoin daemon starts running in the background.

    cd /home/pi/ppcoin/src
./peercoind -listen=0 -daemon -server

  3. If the daemon loads up then you have successfully built the executable.

(Optional) Run peercoind in background

This section had assistance from this link.

  1. Install screen.

    sudo apt-get install screen

  2. Open up our screen session.

    screen bash

  3. Start our session.

     cd /home/pi/ppcoin/src
./peercoind -listen=0 -daemon -server

  4. Detach the screen session so it runs in the background. Enter CTRL plus A then D.

  5. Confirm our background process is running.

    screen -list

  6. (Optional) If you would like to resume your background session then run the following, else skip this step.

    screen -r

  7. Confirm our daemon is running in background by running the following command. (Don’t forget to run CTRL plus X when you finish)

    top | grep peercoin

  8. (Optional) If you get any error, please investigate the debug.log file by running the following.

    ~/.peercoin/debug.log

Start peercoind on system startup

We are going to create a service in systemd to have our peercoind startup on boot time.

DEVELOPERS NOTE: For some reason the following code does not want to work. If someone can comment on how to fix this, that would be great!

  1. While being logged in as pi run the following:

    cd ~/
touch peercoind_startup.sh
vi peercoind_startup.sh

  2. Populate the contents of our new file with the following

    #!/bin/sh
cd /home/pi/ppcoin/src
./peercoind -listen=0 -daemon -server

  3. Permit to run our script.

    chmod u+x peercoind_startup.sh

  4. Create our systemd service to handle loading our startup script.

    sudo vi /etc/systemd/system/peercoind.service

  5. Copy and paste the following contents.

    [Unit]
Description=Peercoin Daemon
After=multi-user.target

[Service]
Type=idle
ExecStart=/home/pi/peercoind_startup.sh
Restart=on-failure
KillSignal=SIGTERM

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

  6. We can now start the Gunicorn service we created and enable it so that it starts at boot:

    sudo systemctl start peercoind
sudo systemctl enable peercoind

  7. Confirm our service is running.

    sudo systemctl status peercoind.service

  8. If the service is working correctly you should see something like this at the bottom:

    raspberrypi systemd[1]: Started Peercoin Daemon.

  9. Congratulations, you have set up a Peercoin headless minter service.

  10. If you see any problems, run the following service to see what is wrong. More information can be found in this article.

    sudo journalctl -u peercoind

  11. To reload the latest modifications to systemctl file.

    sudo systemctl daemon-reload

Donate

If you found this article useful, please consider donating:

  • Peercoin PXTyiBqraYCn95cvEP2jcoCfYEBscNHxBW

Credits

Cover photo by Vishnu Mohanan on Unsplash.