Yes yes, I have finally given in to crypto. I won’t try to defend myself.

So this shall just be some technical notes for setting up Chia farming on a Raspberry Pi or ROCK Pi device.

Notes on plotting

  • Use the MadMax plotter [1]
  • Don’t plot on a Pi. It doesn’t have nearly enough memory and CPU, and we haven’t even touched the topic of disk throughput.
  • Don’t plot on WSL.
    • Maybe it’ll work for you, but it failed badly for me.
    • WSL runs on HyperV under the hood (at least in my case it did)
    • Plotting is an intense exercise, it will push CPU/memory/disk to the limits
    • When plotting on WSL, the entire ubuntu VM can crash, causing you to lose the entire plot
  • Use PowerShell (if you’re on Windows) 
    # contract address is 62 characters (0-9a-z)
# get this from Chia GUI -> Pool -> ? beside pool name
# or via CLI, `chia plotnft show`
$CONTRACT_ADDRESS = "xch..."

# farmer public key is 96 characters (hex)
# get this from Chia GUI -> Keys -> eye
# or via CLI, `chia keys show`
$FARMER_PUB_KEY = ""

$THREADS = 4  # match cpu cores
$THREADx = 1  # 2 if hyperthreading

$PLOTS = 27   # match disk size

# replace this with path to mad-max-plotter binary
..\local\chia-plotter-win-v0.1.6\chia_plot.exe `
  --size 32 `
  --count $PLOTS `
  --threads $THREADS `
  --rmulti2 $THREADx `
  --tmpdir tmpdir/ `
  --tmpdir2 tmpdir2/ `
  --finaldir destination/ `
  --farmerkey $FARMER_PUB_KEY `
  --contract $CONTRACT_ADDRESS `
  2>&1 | % ToString | Tee-Object -FilePath output.txt -Append

Notes on farmer setup

Prerequisites:

  • Run the Chia GUI on a more powerful machine (plotting computer?)
  • Wait for a fully sync’d node + wallet
  • Join a pool and wait until confirmation

Farmer setup:

  • Recommended:
    • Ensure you have some swap space (4-8GB), and plenty of disk space (30+GB)
    • Create a chia user with its own home directory, no password, and definitely no sudo privileges
  • Follow standard ubuntu installation instructions [2]
  • DO NOT RUN chia start <> YET
  • Run chia init, and chia keys add to setup the new client
  • From the full node machine, copy the blockchain db to the Farmer
    • ~/.chia/mainnet/db, ~15GB at the time of writing
    • ~/.chia/mainnet/wallet/db, ~5GB at the time of writing
    • SFTP is nice here, if you have WSL already
    • See below on the gotcha
  • Copy the above db directories into corresponding folders in the farmer
  • On the farmer, modify ~/.chia/mainnet/config/config.yaml. In jsonpath syntax:
    • $.farmer.logging.log_level: set to INFO if you want a log of when partials are submitted to pools
    • $.pool.pool_list[0]: copy the pool list config from the config file on the full node machine
    • $.harvester.plot_directories: add the list of directories containing plots
  • Now, you can run chia start farmer
    • After a few minutes, the following should show that the farmer node is running and healthy
    • chia show -s: Full Node Synced
    • chia wallet show: Wallet Synced
    • chia plotnft show: Wallet is farming to the pool, and the pool URL is as expected
  • Setup systemd so that chia starts automatically when the Pi restarts
    • In /etc/systemd/system/chia-farmer.service: 
      [Unit]
Description=Chia Farmer
Wants=network-online.target
After=network.target network-online.target
StartLimitIntervalSec=0
[Service]
Type=forking
Restart=always
RestartSec=1
User=chia
Environment=PATH=/home/chia/chia-blockchain/venv/bin:${PATH}
ExecStart=/usr/bin/env chia start farmer -r
ExecStop=/usr/bin/env chia stop all -d
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
    • sudo systemctl daemon-reload
    • sudo systemctl enable chia-farmer

Gotcha - What if I don’t copy the blockchain db?

If you choose to not do this, the Pi will struggle a LOT trying to sync the blocks.

Symptoms:

  • Full node sync will take a couple of days
  • Wallet sync will be stuck at block height 0
  • Pi will constantly run out of memory and hang

Running chia start farmer-no-wallet will alleviate some OOM and hanging issues. However the farmer won’t be submitting partials, as partials submission appears to require the full plotnft information, which in turn depends on a working wallet.

A few people have reported different aspects of this problem, this post is the collation of the suggested resolutions to get things to work. [3] [4] [5]

References

  1. chia-plotter by MadMax: https://github.com/madMAx43v3r/chia-plotter
  2. chia-blockchain Ubuntu installation: https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/wiki/INSTALL#ubuntudebian
  3. Pool farming problem report 1: https://chiaforum.com/t/pool-farming-without-wallet-sync-not-working/10770
  4. Pool farming problem report 2: https://chiaforum.com/t/points-not-updating/10149/11
  5. Pool farming problem report 3: https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/issues/7210