minera

Setup your Raspberry Pi as mining device controller

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As I just bought a new miner (Rockbox new R-Box) I was looking into a convenient way to operate and administrate this box. Currently it is running on a Windows 7 machine using cgminer (a tutorial will follow on that one). As I got some Raspberry Pi’s lying around, I was looking into way how to setup one of the Pi’s as controller.

After digging around I bit, I found first Minepeon. But after a bit of research on the project page and the forums, it seems this project is pretty much dead: Latest release is from early 2014, forums not having any recent post except for one thread with the title “Minepeon Project Died?“.

So I found this great project called “Minera“. Minera is a – very important – active project providing a lot of features on how to control your mining device(s). Its features are

  • Web frontend with Dashboard and widgets
  • Currencies rates
  • Detailed tables for pool and device info’s
  • Charts
  • System monitor like temperature, system load
  • Autorestart, autorecover
  • and much more

Sounds like the tool you need? That is exactly what I thought as well.

Minera Dashboard

Minera Dashboard

 

Hardware requirements

  • Raspberry Pi
  • USB Power plug (preferable with a on/off switch
  • HDMI cable in case you like to attach a TV/monitor to the Pi
  • SD card with at least 4gb

 

Software requirements

Browse to the Minera project page and download the prepared image for your Raspberry Pi in the download section. Click on “Auto Install” and the download starts. Once the download completed, extract the zip file with your favourite zip tool (like Winzip, Winrar, Archive Manager). This gives you the the file minera-latest.img.

As the next step, copy the image to the SD card. Depending on the operating system you are using, it may vary a bit. As mentioned before, this SD card needs to be at least 4gb.

  • Linux: If you are on Linux you can use ImageWriter or the command line below. You probably have to run it with the sudo command or as root:
    dd bs=4M if=minera-latest.img of=/dev/your-sd-card
  • Windows: If you are on Windows you can use Win32DiskImager
  • Mac OSX: If you are on a Mac OS X you can use ApplePi-Baker

Writing the image to the SD card may take a while. Once completed, put it into your Raspberry Pi, connect the Power/USB and the HDMI cable to it, attach any mining devices and boot it up.

There is not a lot to see on the monitor, as Minera is mainly controlled via the web interface. But it shows you an important detail: The IP address where Minera is reachable. So go to your computer and type in the following URL

http://<RaspberryPi IP>/minera

The default password is “minera”. There you go; welcome to your mining dashboard.

In the next article we look at how to configure Minera:

  • How to add your mining pool
  • select your favourite mining sftware (cgminer, bfgminer)
  • and explore some other features
Minera Settings

Minera Settings