seeing as it is already out there :) There are some geo's that have extremely high number of sunlight days & are also blessed with natural wind (like Hawaii, etc) - how much power does Raspberry PI use? i added a top post just for more fun, I mean if it is gonna hang out it has to hang all out :) On Wed, 6 Sep 2017 09:06:41 -0400 Alvin Starr via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
Now to the completely unrelated part. I have been thinking about a project and I would like to bounce it off you. A client came to me asking about helping him setup an Etherium mining server pool.
This got me thinking.
In its simplest sense the process is power in ..... ETH out. The biggest cost is power then cooling to get rid of all the head from the GPU's.
What if you glue a GPU with very little extra hardware to the back of a solar panel. Stick it out in the sun and let it calculate 8-10 hours a day. Put a big heat sink on the GPU and it should be able to stay cool enough just from air cooling
Take a few thousand of these and set them out in a sunny place and you would have a coin generator. Once the hardware is paid for then the operational cost would be close to 0 but for some glass cleaner and rags.
They would need to be networked together but it does not have to be high speed. It could be a low power mesh to an edge that connects via something as simple as cell phone data.
Solar panels cost about $1/watt and there is no ongoing cost but power here costs about $0.08-0.16/KWH. On the face of it there is a 3 year payback for the power but if you add in 30% extra power to run cooling and the building costs for housing the mining pool.
Am I crazy?