Alright, this might be a long post, and a pseudo follow up to my previous post.
TL;DR is use the pre-built aarch binary from Litecoin dot org for your Litecoin Core application because the package in the debian repo is 2 years old. Be sure to port forward port 9333 for TCP and UDP to your Pi, and expect the blockchain to take at least 4 days to download (as of this writing it is STILL downloading nearly 60% of the blockchain. Also make sure you have at least a 256GB microsd card to store it on. Also, for this to be of any use to the network, do not enable pruning mode.
So I bought a Raspberry Pi 4B about 5 years ago. It’s running the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS (bookworm). My unit has a quad core 1.5Ghz proc, 4GB of RAM and currently has a 256GB sandisk extreme MicroSD card for storage. I bought the complete unit with the case, and exhaust fan. I also have another small fan blowing air across it to help move any residual heat out the top, and that drops the temps down at least 10 degrees.
I experimented with a bunch of the different tutorials out there for setting up a node and originally went with the Litecoin Core that was in the debian package repo, however it is v0.21.2.1…so a little out of date. I tried compiling from source, and that was a massive fail. Then I remembered to check the litecoin dot org site and found they had a AARCH binary that will run on my Pi 4, so I downloaded, extracted, created a launcher for it in my taskbar (had to manually add the icon to the launcher as well) but it works very well.
Over all, considering the Pi 4s very limited resources, especially the RAM (my model is the 4GB unit), so far (I think) it’s holding up very well. The one consistent pain point has been downloading the blockchain, arguably the most important point in all this, haha! In 3 attempts, I’ve yet to successfully download the full blockchain without receiving some kind of errors. The last one was that the blockchain was corrupt and needed to be re-downloaded. Despite having a 128GB card in my unit then, it only left me with less than 10GB of free space…so it’s a tight fit. I decided to get a 256GB card, reload it with Bookworm, and try again with the pre-built binary for Litecoin Core.
I had previously set a port forward on my firewall to forward TCP/UDP 9333 to my Pi, and doing so allowed me to get multiple inbound connections (currently over 30!) while my outbound is topped out at 10. So be sure to do that if you want to have a public node. I plan to use this for my custom node in litewallet.
My next step is going to be figuring out how to use this in conjunction with my 3 Futurebit Moonlander 2 USB miners, to do some solo mining. I previously used this Pi to control these moonlanders and mine on Litecoin pool, however even with a powered USB 3.0 hub, the devices would randomly drop off in BFGMiner, so I moved them over to my actual desktop and they do much better there.
So this post is more of a status update to my previous post, and hopefully some folks here found it interesting. Thanks for attending my TED talk. I hope it was informative and stimulating.