Mining with a raspberry pi or an orange pi. Being surprised and sad at the same time.

The orange pi

The orange pi is a single board computer produced by the Chinese company Shenzhen Xunlong Software. They propose a lot of interesting product and prizes are very catchy if we compare them to raspberry’s product.
We aren’t surprised that processors are from Allwinner, another cheap and Chinese brand of electronic. On the performance side, we have tested the orange pi one, a €9 computer. It managed tests and went up to 1 GHz per core whether 4 GHz for the entire machine. That performance makes the orange pi as powerful as a tiny smartphone. So that, it forced us to work on lightweight cryptocurrency which weren’t greedy resource and computational power.
On the quality side, we were agape! For testing purpose, we mined during 24 hours at 100% of its CPU power, and he stood firm! We didn’t smell burnt smell and it has never been overheated!

The target cryptocurrency that we are going to mine

Some blogs, that we won’t say the name, declare that there is a way to get 20 cents a day by mining the Coin Magi cryptocurrency. This money has his own hash algorithm and it is said to be very lightweight. That’s true, we mined Monero at 15 hashes per second whereas we mined Coin Magi at 1000 hashes per second…

But, let me see, if I bought that:
16 orange pi one
16 ethernet cable
1 network router
16 power supplies 5V 2A
I will earn €3.2 per day, therefore €1186 per year! But I think I will buy 48 one at once !

To put the ideas in the clear, even if the orange pi consumes virtually nothing (10 W) unlike ASIC (835 W), it still consumes something. And running them around the clock will slightly influence your electricity bill at the end of the month.
And to break the dreams (yeah, I was the first dreaming), under no circumstances the orange pi one lets you earn €0.2 a day. My orange pi worked during 24 hours and I got 0.019440 XMG… It makes €0,00205397208 at the time of writing. We are far from the €0.20 promised by the blogger and a lot further from the €1000 hoped.

In conclusion, moral of the story

About the hardware, we have not been disappointed. Orange pi is a good brand. But please, always buy a sample of hardware to test if it's worth it to avoid unpleasant surprises. I planned to buy all the material for 16 orange pi which was a total of €300 but a small voice advised me to check the blogger's comments. Fortunately, I had an abandoned orange and who could do the sample. And I was able to avoid losing money by investing in equipment that will not pay enough.

Have fun with mining !