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ASUS Tinker Board Getting Started Guide

Tinker Board Getting Started Guide

My wife got me a Tinker Board several years ago as a gift and I always meant to cover it on the site but got busy and forgot about it. Due to the ongoing Raspberry Pi shortage and high prices I’ve been reexamining boards from other manufacturers and found that the Tinker Board is widely available for something like ~$76. There are several more powerful versions available as well such as the Tinker Board 2S model.

Today I will correct the injustice done to the Tinker Board and cover how to get a Tinker Board all set up with the latest image and updates. Let’s get started!

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Different Shapes / Sizes / Features of Compute Module 4 Boards

Waveshare PoE CM4 IO Board - Standalone

One of my favorite things about the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 is that you basically get to choose your own IO board that the Compute Module 4 plugs into.

For illustration purposes imagine that the IO board is the “motherboard” and the Compute Module 4 is the CPU that you plug into the CPU socket. That’s essentially the relationship between the two!

They come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them even have PCIe and I’ve covered before how to take advantage of true NVMe on the CM4. Today I wanted to show you some of the different IO boards for the Compute Module 4 I have and what features / traits led me to want to try them. Let’s get started!

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Getting Root / SSH Access to a Nebra Outdoor Helium Miner

Nebra Outdoor Hotspot Opened

I won’t lie. When I opened the Nebra Outdoor hotspot I was annoyed. Like many, many Helium hotspot owners I paid hundreds of dollars and waited many, many months past expected delivery for a Helium point.

What did I get for my money and patience? I got a several generation outdated Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 from 2015 that they no doubt paid literally a single digit number of dollars for, some connector boards and wireless chips. And of course it came too late to make any money in this last bull market.

To be fair to Nebra that is a beautiful Pi setup. If only they had used a Compute Module 4 or even a 3+ but still, that is clean except for maybe the wireless-N dongle (wouldn’t have needed it if you used a better Pi). However, it really isn’t going to make me any money at this point and is more interesting as an outdoor enclosed Pi setup to me now.

That means I needed to access it by rooting the device and getting SSH access and in this article I’ll show you exactly how I did it. Let’s begin now!

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Benchmark Storage Performance on Linux

Linux Storage Benchmark

When attempting to determine storage performance on Linux there are common tests such as doing a DD write command and measuring the speed of that. These methods leave a lot to be desired and are especially bad at measuring random read/write performance (the most important for operating system / application performance).

I solved this problem for the Raspberry Pi by creating Pi Benchmarks. This is an open source benchmark that *does* measure random read/write performance as well as several other important factors (IOPS, etc.). We’ve collected many years worth of performance data across thousands of different drives including SSDs / HDDs / others. It’s enough information to be used to make important decisions about performance using hard data.

I’d like to announce that this exact same benchmark is now available for all devices! If you’d previously taken the benchmark on a PC or device other than a Raspberry Pi those results are now retroactively live on the site.

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Best Altcoin Mining Pools / Exchanges

DxPool

For quite some time now Kadena (KDA) has been topping the charts for mining profitability. There are many other altcoins though that are power efficient to mine such as Starcoin (STC) and Siacoin (SC) and many others.

The only problem with these coins is that they can be difficult to find good pools and exchanges that will accept them. Fortunately if you know the right places to go you can essentially take care of *all* of your altcoin needs with just a couple of pools and a single exchange.

Today I’ll cover where I do all of my altcoin mining and where I exchange those tokens with minimal fees. Let’s get started!

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Why GPU / Ethereum Mining Is Toast – Stop Buying GPUs

whattomine.com

One way I keep up with the developments in cryptocurrency is I do watch some of the YouTubers since the YouTubers are generally following the juiciest developments to farm views. With the continued news that Ethereum is going to launch Eth 2.0 and is more or less on time (now called the “Ethereum consensus layer”, how catchy) how much denial there is around this fact.

Except we are way past that point now. It’s literally these YouTuber’s job to know that GPU mining is toast and today I’m going to expose how big of frauds they are, how they really built their mining farms, what they are actually doing vs. what they’re telling you and why, as well as explain what exactly is going on with Ethereum and why if you’re planning on being able to mine with those GPUs (at least above the cost of your electricity / profitably) the math is not looking good.

Let’s break down what neither the miners or the Ethereum developers want to talk about / remember and break it down!

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Bulk Management of Multiple Goldshell ASIC Miners w/ Yotta BC

Yotta BC - Official Goldshell ASIC Bulk Management Tool

One reality of cryptocurrency mining is that you are almost certainly going to need multiple units to reach whatever goals you have. The way most people do this is pay for / ROI on their existing units and then they will add more units and repeat the cycle again.

At first this is easy when you only have a few units but it gets more complex as you add more units. You will need better infrastructure and management tools as you scale up.
I’ve been going through this process for a ASIC farm build-out and wanted to share some of the tools I’ve found and used to make scaling up much more effective.

Today I’m going to cover an official tool from Goldshell called YottaBC that lets you do a lot of cool things like tell all of your miners to change pools at once, view the status of all miners in one fell swoop, fix miners that have lost their IP address and lots of other critical functions. Let’s take a look!

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Goldshell BOX ASIC Miner Firmware Recovery Guide

Goldshell Hub - Introduced in firmware 2.2.0

Recently Goldshell released the 2.2.0 update which includes the new “Goldshell Hub” (featured above) which is basically a cloud control center for your miners. I was able to upgrade 23 miners successfully but I had one Mini DOGE and one ST-BOX fail during the upgrade.

After a substantial Google journey and finding some very helpful posts on reddit I was able to recover both of them without waiting for Goldshell’s response on the situation. I will cover what I used to do so and where to find them in the guide but it is at your own risk and if you aren’t outside of your warranty support period you should almost certainly contact Goldshell instead.

With that caveat/warning given, I have 25 of these miners and only 1-2 were bought directly from Goldshell in the first place so I was not worried about losing my warranty or support period from them but you should be careful here and only proceed if you understand this. Let’s begin!

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Fix Home Assistant / HAOS Raspberry Pi USB/SSD Boot Freeze

Home Assistant / HAOS

There are few things I dislike more in this world than getting questions on my setup guides that I don’t know the answer to, but thanks to an investigation by Bill Schatzow we can strike one of those issues off the list!

We’ve had a few comments of people who have encountered this issue over the years. Given that at best only 1% of people who visit the site leave a comment I think it’s safe to say that this issue has plagued thousands of people over the past 10-12 months.

Let’s take a look!

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Bobcat 300 Diagnoser Tool / Utility Guide (Helium Mining)

Bobcat 300 Diagnoser Utility

The Bobcat 300 Helium Miner finally has an interface you can use to be able to tell what it’s doing! Better yet, it lets you do a few things like conduct an internet speed test. You can even get a detailed breakdown of which block your miner is on!

In this guide I’ll break down how to access the web interface (easy) and run through some of the features that are available at launch (1.0). The utility started installing on Bobcat 300’s via OTA updates on August 3rd 2021. Let’s begin!

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