Potato chips. You can’t just eat one, am I right? That’s how mining has become for me. It’s always just a little more mining power. Like reaching in and grabbing a couple of extra chips and before you know it, the entire bag is empty. But in the case of mining, there will always be something left in the bag. You can trade various coins, set up more rigs or upgrade your current hardware.
Up until now, GPUs where the only way to mine Altcoins. ASIC’s are what took over Bitcoin mining and now they’re finally just starting to become available for Scrypt mining. One of the first that are somewhat affordable are the GridSeeds. I have been reading about them but wasn’t sure about the legitimacy of them. But now that I have read threads with more and more people using them, I decided to give ’em a go. (We’ve been watching a lot of BBC lately.)
Orginally, I had the GridSeeds connected to my main desktop along with the GPUs. You have to run a separate version of CGMiner just for them. It worked for the most part, but you do have to install the WinUSB driver. If you decide to use BFGMiner, you’ll need to remove the WinUSB driver if you installed it.
The other day I was having issues with my desktop so I decided to grab an extra Raspberry Pi and use it since it’s better than not having anything mining. This turned out to be the best way to use the GridSeeds. Using the Scrypt image, I was up and running in no time. Just burn the image and boot up. Setup your pools and a way you go. You can download it on this thread, https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=9908.0. Just make sure you get the latest one from at least April 2014 that has GridSeed support.
The image gives you a nice website to manage them as you can see from the screenshots at the link above. Be sure to change the default password, especially if you decide to port the site outside of your network. I think the best thing would be to setup a VPN server and connect it to your network to manage them. Much more secure. You could even use the Pi as the VPN server, like in my, case I use my Windows Server 2008 setup in a VM.