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Bitcoin made its debut 2009 and took off as the new online currency of the future. However, it has become harder and harder to mine as people with giant GPU clusters the size of a normal bedroom are being outdown by a single person with a device called an ASIC (Application-specific integrated circuit). The size of ASICs range from being the size of a USB wifi card to being the size of a couple computer power supplies, such as the AntMiner A7.

 

Ether, officially Ethereum is relatively new to the market as it was released June 30, 2015. Therefore, companies have not taken the time to create an ASIC that could mine ethereum at an extremely high rate like the bitcoin ASIC miners. GPU processing for Bitcoins is now almost financially impossible as the amount of power required to run the cards is in many cases much higher than the profit that is produced by them. Therefore, the new Ethereum currency is much easier to mine and much more profitable for people who do not want to spend a ton of money to get into crypto-currency mining.

Mining Ether does require some decent hardware if one wants to get paid anything within the next year. Unless one has a cluster capable of hashing at 800MH/s or more, it is probably worth it to mine in pools. The way pool mining works is that people combine computing power into one system essentially and then are paid for their computational power after a small fee is deducted for the pooling website and servers to stay online. For those just getting into mining like myself I highly recommend mining in pools.

You do not need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on mining equipment but for best results you should have the following:

1. A computer with a decent processor. Not necessarily required but it helps in the overall operation.

2. A stable and relatively strong internet connection, preferably ethernet connected instead of wifi. Again, this is not super important

3. A stable power supply from your provider, if you lose power while you are working on a block the block has to be restarted.

4. Most Importantly-A GRAPHICS CARD WITH 2GB GDDR5 OR MORE. If you have a graphics card like a Nvidia GTX 550TI that only has 1GB of RAM you will not be able to mine with ethermine.

   1. Your graphics card will also need to have support for CUDA, if Nvidia, or OpenCl if AMD. These are the two SDKs that will allow you to use your graphics cards for hashing power.

   2. Your graphics card will probably be 10x faster than your brand new CPU, therefore you really don’t need a $1000 processor, you would be better off spending it on graphics cards.

5. You are going to need a pooling website- I use weipool.org, they are reliable and only take 1% off your profit to run their services. I am sure there are many other great pooling websites out there I have just been really happy with weipool.org because they also provide your expected round payout and so fourth.

When you are ready to start mining and you have CUDA or OpenCL SDK/Support installed and ethermine, all you need to do is execute the script in the form of a bash or bat file depending on if you are running Windows are Linux. Below is the script that I use to mine. If you think that this article helped you out or if you just want to test out your system the links below should work:

GPU Mining

ethminer –farm-recheck 200 -G -F mine.weipool.org:5555/0x425da1e88129ff1690b85b9447814fb4f3a393d9/30

 

CPU Mining:

ethminer –farm-recheck 200 -F mine.weipool.org:5555/0x425da1e88129ff1690b85b9447814fb4f3a393d9/30

 

If you have multiple servers and you want to deploy the same script across all of them I recommend writing the script and then uploading it to a cloud storage service and making it public so you can just download it using wget on your server. For instance, before I had the correct GPU I CPU mined with Google’s Cloud services. I deployed 10 servers and I really did not want to write ten scripts so all I did was upload one hwrrobotics.com/miner.

Note: If you use my miner script it will install etherminer for you if you are running Ubuntu saving you the install commands.

The install commands are very simple for Ubuntu and are shown below:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ethereum/ethereum-qt
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ethereum/ethereum
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cpp-ethereum -y

Once my script was uploaded I executed the following:

1. wget hwrrobotics.com/miner

2. sudo bash run miner

If you are running a Windows machine and you just want a run script then you are more than welcome to use: hwrrobotics.com/minerrun and modify it in any way, shape or form.

 

Within the script you will find a big address, such as: 0x425da1e88129ff1690b85b9447814fb4f3a393d9 with a /30 appended to the back of it. The /30 is the speed at which you can mine in MH/s

 

Once you have adjusted the script to fit your needs and you run it weipool.org will add you to their list of miners by your ethereum account address. This is also the same account address where they will deposit your funds. If you have not done so already you are going to want to create an ethereum wallet so you can get paid for your work. If you go to https://www.ethereum.org/, you can download the wallet executeable and create your account.

 

Finally, once you have everything setup you can go ahead and run your script. Within a few minutes your address should appear on the weipool homepage as well as your current mining speed.

 

Congratulations! Now you will be able to literally do nothing and still get paid! No, you will not get paid a whole lot if you don’t have a ton of equipment, but there is a good chance that you will make a little more than a dollar a day if you can hash at around 18MH/s. I hope this article has been helpful and if you would like to donate to me or just mine with my account for a round that would be greatly appreciated. Thank You and I wish you the best mining experience possible.

 

 

Helpful Resources:
[Taring Your System](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BackupYourSystem/TAR)–[Tagging Docker Images](https://docs.docker.com/mac/step_six/)–[Docker Docs](https://docs.docker.com/)

#Have you ever wanted to create a Docker Image from a running operating system?#

##By following some very simple Docker commands you will be able to make your Linux system modular and deployable to almost any host that supports Docker.##

**Before attempting any commands shown below make sure that you have a backup of your data!**

To create a tar of the current operating system you are going to want to change into your root or home directory

cd /home/user
cd /root/
If there is a folder that you do no want to backup make sure you include its path in the command below. For example, if you wanted to exclude /home/john/files you would enter

tar -cvpzf serverbackup.tar.gz –exclude=/home/john/files –one-file-system /

tar -cvpzf serverbackup.tar.gz –exclude=/serverbackup.tar.gz –one-file-system /

Depending the speed of your server and the size of the system you are backing up the time to complete the task will vary. If you are making a copy of your server and it is only running a decent sized webserver you can expect it to be close to 8 gigabytes. Once this is finished you want to the make sure that Docker is installed on the server or computer that you want to transfer the tar to. If it is all setup and ready to go, then you can continue with the tutorial. If not, you may want to check out the following tutorial:
[Installing Docker On Ubuntu](https://docs.docker.com/engine/installation/linux/ubuntulinux/)’

Once you have the tar image on your new system you can import it by changing to the directory containing the tar file and running the following command:

cd /home//
docker import serverbackup.tar

When you type this docker will list all of the current images you have installed into your docker system. You are going to want to find the one with the most recent date and it should be named we are going to want to change the name of it so we are going to make a docker tag:

docker tag containerid /:latest

Once this is completed you will be able to run your image. A sample Docker run command for webserver image could be:

docker run -i -t -p 80:80 -p 443:443 -p 6789:22 / /bin/bash

This command will run the Docker container within the terminal and allow the user to kill the server by just typing exit in the terminal when they are in the root directory. If the port forwarding is setup up correctly you should be able to access your website via http and https as well as ssh through ports 80 for http, 443 for https, and 6789 for ssh.

### Troubleshooting:

If you get an error that looks like this after restarting apache2 :

* Restarting web server apache2 [fail]
* The apache2 configtest failed.
Output of config test was:
mktemp: failed to create directory via template ‘/var/lock/apache2.XXXXXXXXXX’: No such file or directory
chmod: missing operand after ‘755’
Try ‘chmod –help’ for more information.

Try this:

sudo mkdir /run/lock

If you try to ssh into your server and that doesn’t work, try this:

sudo service ssh restart
sudo service mysql restart

If you try to access the ip or web address and there is no connection, try this:

sudo service apache2 restart
sudo service mysql restart

####If the service that you want to use is not working just try restarting it.

Driving "Roberto the Robot" on low and or almost dead batteries does not make for a very fun experience. In order to correct this problem, I decided to install an alternator on the top deck plate. Therefore, when the 6.5hp engine was running the batteries would charge and the robot would operate as usual. The alternator I used is a 120 amp Deutz Letrika alternator from Surplus Center.

https://www.surpluscenter.com/Engines/Engine-Accessories/Alternators/12-VDC-120-AMP-DEUTZ-LETRIKA-11204137-ALTERNATOR-28-1883.axd 

Below are pictures of the setup. If you have any questions please leave a comment below or email them to me at [email protected].