YTNObserver #3 Yenten (YTN) Raspberry Pi home miner
Raspberry Pi Yenten (YTN) Miner is an ecological, quiet and cheap tool for mining YTN Yenten coins at home. It’s built on top of the very popular single board computer called Raspberry Pi. As a result it uses little energy, is quiet and can be installed in any room and does not interfere with reader’s daily chores (those who do heavy mining know how annoying is the sound of the computer fans whirling at 100% speed and making a lot of noise in the room).
It’s a perfect match for Yenten coin (YTN) which is the most promising of the so called CPU friendly coins (altcoins). Contrary to more popular altcoins a regular person can easily mine YTN coins on her home computer and having a Raspi Yenten Miner will make it even easier.
In today’s article I’ll show how to assemble and setup a homemade, effortless, family and ecology friendly YTN mining machine that does not affect everyday standard of living. The priority of the assembly is placed on low noise, no maintenance, no cable wiring and minimal effort required to run the device and also low energy costs.
Buying necessary items
There are a lot of places including eBay and other online stores where all parts required to assemble Raspi YTN Miner are available. Parts and equipment cost should make between 100$ — 200$ depending on the version of the board and quality of the supporting equipment.
Minimal list of required items consists of:
- Raspberry Pi main board — we recommend at least version 3. Version 4 has better performance so can mine more YTN coins. Version 2 and lower is
- Case/Chasis
- Heat Sink
- SD Card 16GB
- Power adapter with power cable
- WiFi router to which the device will communicate
Optional elements include:
- cooling fan (better mining performance but noticeably louder so we do not recommend for home mining)
- USB mouse and keyboard and external HDMI monitor (for setup only)
Although for the first time miner we recommend buying new equipment, more experienced readers may try to buy a used kit which may provide some cost savings.
Assembling Raspi YTN Miner
When parts arrive it is time for the assembly.
Main board setup starts with heat sink installation. It is important to place heat sink on the CPU as it will help the board to limit the temperature of the CPU. It affects heavily the mining efficiency as when CPU gets hot the Raspberry Pi main boards starts so called CPU throttling which results in degraded mining performance.
When heat sink is ready the reader shall proceed with case setup. As a result the Raspberry Pi main board should be placed in the case.
Final assembly step includes plugging all supplementary accessories such as USB keyboard, mouse and HDMI monitor. And do not switch the device on yet.
Unfortunately, the YTN miner is not ready yet. It requires Operating System installation and setup.
Loading operating system
Raspi YTN miner requires operating system (OS) on which the mining process may be performed. Preparation of the operating system required modern desktop or laptop computer with SD card port. The SD Card port is important as the operating system will be written to the SD Card and then inserted into the Raspi YTN miner machine.
The user shall start os preparation by downloading the Raspberry Pi Imager application (see reference section for links).
This application is available for download for major computer systems (MacOS, Linux, Windows). When installed and started the user should select default operating system which is Raspberry Pi OS (32-bit).
Also SD card shall be inserted into the laptop/desktop computer and chosen in the application (the card shall be visible on the SD Card dropdown field).
When requested the application will write operating system to the SD card (important — make sure that the card was empty as it will be fully erased prior to recording the operating system). Please be patient as this process may take several minutes to complete.
Remove the ready made SD card from laptop/desktop and insert it into the Raspi YTN Miner main board (there is a dedicated slot for that). This is the moment when the device may be turned on (make sure that all accessories are connected as accessories are detected during startup).
Mining preparation
Then switch on the system. It will boot and soon the reader will see the graphical interface for the Raspi YTN miner machine.
Now it’s time to setup connectivity which is required for mining. The reader should click on the wifi icon and connect to his home wifi network (provide password if required).
Once connected to the internet it’s time to setup necessary components for building the miner application on the device. For this task the reader should start the Terminal app via the graphical interface.
When started up following installation commands should be executed:
# update packages informationsudo apt-get update# install neccesary componentssudo apt-get install git automake autoconf build-essential libcurl4-openssl-dev libjansson-dev libssl-dev libgmp-dev
It may take a couple of minutes to install all requested elements.
When build components are installed now it’s time to download the mining application. The application is available at Github repository and can be downloaded with a single command:
# download miner source codemkdir miner && cd miner && git clone https://github.com/alkeicam/cpuminer-opt.git && cd cpuminer-opt
As download finishes the reader will have a source code of the miner application on the Raspi YTN miner device.
The last step of the mining preparation is turning the source code into an executable application. Compilation environment must be set up properly to comply with Raspberry Pi specific cpu architecture and instructions.
# prepare compilation
./autogen.sh# setup platform specific flags
sudo CFLAGS="-O3 -march=armv7-a -mtune=cortex-a55" ./configure --with-curl --with-crypto# build the application
sudo ./build.sh
After a while there will a cpuminer file in the current directory.
Congratulations! You have successfully compiled YTN mining application for Raspberry Pi.
Mining YTN Yenten coins
Now comes the payday. All the efforts required for preparing the Raspi YTN miner box are made and now we gonna earn some reward — mine YTN Yenten coins.
It’s assumed that the reader has already a Yenten wallet installed (see references for links how to do it). So generate one receiving address in the wallet — this address will be used for receiving mined Yenten coins.
Then start the mining process using on of the publicly available Yenten mining pools.
./cpuminer -a yespowerr16 -o stratum+tcp://yenten-pool.info:63368 -u __YOUR_RECEIVING_ADDRESS__ >> miner.logIf you wish to learn more about mining pools do let us know in the comments
Now the mining is started and after a while the mining information shall be visible both in the mining pool graphical interface and in logs
Starting miner with params yespowerr16 yenten-pool.info:63368 __YOUR_RECEIVING_ADDRESS__ ...
Starting miner with params yespowerr16 yenten-pool.info:63368 __YOUR_RECEIVING_ADDRESS__ ... DONE********** cpuminer-opt 3.9.2 ***********
A CPU miner with multi algo support and optimized for CPUs
with AES_NI and AVX2 and SHA extensions.
BTC donation address: 12tdvfF7KmAsihBXQXynT6E6th2c2pByTTCPU: ARM or AARCH64 no SSE2!
[2021-02-10 11:43:04] Starting Stratum on stratum+tcp://yenten-pool.info:63368
[2021-02-10 11:43:04] 4 miner threads started, using 'yespowerr16' algorithm.
[2021-02-10 11:43:05]ESC[33m Stratum difficulty set to 0.2
Stay tuned — get ready for #4 issue of the YTN Observer magazine
If you liked this article help building Yenten community by liking this article, subscribing to this magazine and sharing this article with your friends.
You can also stay up to date with Yenten by following our ObserverYenten Twitter account
In the upcoming issue we will learn how to store your Yenten coins in a secure soft cold wallet for years (just in case YTN coin will increase in value in the following years).
References and further reading
- ObserverYenten Twitter account — Yenten news from the community
- Yenten Community Discord active chat channel
- Raspberry Pi documentation
- Yenten (YTN) coin mining pools
- Raspberry Pi Imager application
