Operating a pool from a Raspberry Pi is a cheap way to save operating costs, but as many of you already know the compiling process is tedious, prone to failure and literally blocks your Raspi for hours.
Moreover, the process might not be evident at the beginning and one is tempted to just leave the Raspi path and move to AMD64 architectures.
I wanted to provide a quick way for people to get the compiled binaries cardano-cli and cardano-node.
For that, at the end of this page https://main-hamburger-pool.de/about/ I have added the section “Compiled Binaries” where you can simply download them!
I operate with two Raspis, so for me it’s quite easy to just compile the code in one and then transfer the binaries to the other, hence my idea of “why not to everybody else?”
Hey, so I’ve been doing this for a while and the binaries are on my GitHub repo
But IOG is currently providing custom static builds for ARM architecture as well, because performance isn’t that great with the ghc8.6.5 compiler for ARM. Check this group: https://t.me/joinchat/FeKTCBu-pn5OUZUz4joF2w
I like this! When I read your pool description my first reaction was to laugh out loud. Some SPOs boast about their mighty server hardware as if it mattered and here is somebody running a pool on a few modest Raspis.
For my own pool I considered Raspis too but went with externally hosted VPS mainly because of reliability considerations. The one I use at home for another project tends to crash when it gets hot in summer and while the residential fiber here is fast and usually reliable, there have been outages in the past.
It is true that even low-cost VPSs are more expensive in the long run but the fixed pool cost of 340ADA is more than enough to pay for them and missing even one slot would cost more than I could ever save on hardware.
If you wanna take it to the next level, here is my (unfortunately undocumented) project on how to run cardano pool on microk8s on a cluster of raspberry pis. https://github.com/speedwing/cardano-node-builder
Project contains Prometheus operator, ddclient for people running this at home and topolopy updater.
