Tuesday, 25 January 2022

Crypto mining on an Arduino

Yes. You read that correctly. Crypto mining on an Arduino.

I recently discovered something called Duino Coin. It's a proof of concept crypto currency. But unlike other currencies where you need massive mining rigs to produce just a few $$$ before you pay for the electricity and hardware, this one uses very modest micro processors. In fact if you use higher end hardware to mine this coin you get a penalty and the reward drops significantly.

I'm using a method called I2C mining. This is where a handful of miners are connected together via an I2C bus and then another device handles the connection to the network. Very similar in setup to a traditional rig where a load of graphics cards are plugged into a PC. 

You cannot buy hardware for this project and so I designed my own circuit board. It uses common off the shelf parts. 5x Arduino Nano's (ATMEGA328), 1x Wemos D1 (ESP8266) and a power supply (MP1584). The D1 handles the WiFi connection and the communication with the Arduino's. The Arduino's do the actual mining.


This is what I came up with and it works very well. Each miner gets about 250 hashes a second.