Monero Mining on a Raspberry Pi 3 Profitability

Mining Monero on a Raspberry Pi 3

After having unprofitable results mining on the Raspberry Pi Zero, it's time to see what the more powerful Raspberry Pi 3 can do. The Pi 3 uses a 4 core 1.2 mhz ARM Cortex-A53 CPU with 1 gb SDRAM. For this example I will still be running the raspbin lite OS with the CPUMiner-Multi program but this time I will be going after a different cryptonight coin, Monero.

Getting a miner

First step is to download all the dependencies required.

sudo apt-get install automake autoconf pkg-config libcurl4-openssl-dev libjansson-dev libssl-dev libgmp-dev make g++ git

Next, clone CPUMiner-Multi

sudo git clone https://github.com/tpruvot/cpuminer-multi

Once it has been downloaded, enter the new folder

cd cpuminer-multi

Compiling

Now let's compile the program.

sudo ./autogen.sh

sudo ./configure CFLAGS="-Ofast -mtune=cortex-a53 -mcpu=cortex-a53 -mfloat-abi=hard -mfpu=neon-fp-armv8 -mneon-for-64bits" CXXFLAGS="-Ofast -mtune=cortex-a53 -mcpu=cortex-a53 -mfloat-abi=hard -mfpu=neon-fp-armv8 -mneon-for-64bits" --with-crypto --with-curl

sudo make

Start mining

Once again, I'm mining on the minergate.com pool and as I noted before, due to the sites high payout threshold it could be a while before you receive a payout when using low hashing power. The command to start should be formatted like this:

sudo ./cpuminer -a [algorithm] -t [cpu threads] -o [pool address:port] -u [username] -p [password]

The Pi 3 has 4 treads that can be used to get around 9.25 H/s. This should bring in 0.00026 XMR per week at the current difficulty. With the price of XMR at $244.33 at the time of writing this, I will earn 0.064 USD per week.

But what about the electricity?

With the meter registering .86 amps at 5 volts, I can figure out that the Pi 3 is costing me 0.072 USD per week at my electricity rate of 0.10 per kWh. This means that like the Zero, it's not profitable to mine cryptonight coins on the raspberry pi 3. I hate to admit this because I love my Pi farm, but this is where the situation stands. The only way to see a profit mining cryptonight coins on the raspberry is to mine something and hope it's value increases.