How many milliseconds? Remember that your power supply is at near zero volts twice (on the AC) for at least 1 millisecond every 50th or 60th of a second. If you are talking of 20 milli seconds or less then you should have no issues since all but the worse/unser-powered powersupply will last for 100 or more milliseconds.
If you are running your power supply on the limit of its power capabilities then depending on its design 100mSec might be its limit.
Personally I have never had an issue in the past before I used a UPS with 1/4 second (250mSec) dropouts and typically 1/2 sec to 1 sec was handled by the power supply. Yes occasionally a possum would cause a AC dropout when it contacted to overhead wires (or caused them to touch each other. Screen would flash, lights drop out and back again but the computer kept going and the router too.
An online UPS is supposed to be
AC in ==> Power supply to charge battery
Battery ==> inverter to supply power to device
An offline UPS is supposed to be
While AC in has over a minimum voltage
AC in ==> Power supply to supply Battery
AC in ==> Power device
When AC power drops in voltage below the set minimum it switches to
Battery ==> inverter to power device
Now it only detects low/no voltage after approx 50 milliseconds and has an inverter startup time rated in 100mSec or more.
This is still within specs for decent computer supplies.
You can also get 1F capacitors used for car systems, only useful is you were using common 12/5V lines for all the Pis
EDIT: here is a test. Switch off then back on the (AC mains) power switch and gauge how long before the Pi is stopped, resets, whatever. The quickest you can switch off then on again would likely be more than 100 milliseconds
There is big difference voltage drop and total power cut. PC power supplies and other switching power supplies are very tolerant to input voltage and if there is at least something, they can compensate and keep output close to desired value. Simple transformer will drop output voltage with same rate input voltage drops.
If the power sudenly drops to zero, ATX standard for PC power supplies says on 100% load it has to be able to survive at least 16 ms hole in input without dropping output. This is minimum, good brands can be significanly better and running it on 20% load makes that time 5x longer.
There is no standard for small devices, but because of smaller power needs, thay usually last much longer.
I was workring for ISP that does lot of wireless sometimes in small villages and there were many different UPS used. Even with the cheapest offline UPS I never saw a problem from UPS acting too slowly. Simple offline UPS is probably best for most home users, because online/interactive UPS are not only more expensive to buy, but more expensive to run. They burn significant amount of power just for being āonlineā.
If somebody has many devices lake Raspberry running od DC, instead of running 230/110V UPS and many power bricks it is more efficient to buy one big power suply and do backup on low voltage DC.
A PC power supply is more than sufficient to run may PIs.
One issue though is most power supplies are switching power supplies (including the wall plug ones too) and simply adding a capacitor (say 1 or more farads) will cause some switching supplies to refuse to start up due to rush incurrent for the capacitor. Some switching supply designs will also not regulate properly with super capacitors on the output.
Yet some switching supplies have little issues with large capacitors.
Some of the small SBC computers use a power chip that has the ability to run the device from a flat pack lithium battery if the power goes off. It regulates the charging with the other features needed for proper lithium handling. Does he Pi have that option (to add a battery)?
With that the option I would go with is PC power supply to supply all the RPis and have each RPi using that circuit with a battery, instead of any UPS. It has the advantage of online UPS with a cheap price. @Josh
I do not know the power requirements for RPi but surely a decent sized battery would keep a RPi running for hours.
The issue then lies with the router (just use a router that runs off 5 volts and use the circuit as well) and the internet connection which may need something else from perhaps a small cheap UPS to something similar to the power circuit for the RPis
Yea, can buy these real cheap. A 50 real watts UPS should power most routers/Internet. Maybe get a 200-400 Watt one since the battery inside them would be larger than a 100 watt and thus power them for longer.
For this I would not waste money on expensive battery unit for the RPIs and use the saved money for more RPis.
I think my pi setup above is ideal for a starter mining rig. Solid metal case with pi and a large ssd. Might go as far as slapping the safe logo on the case.
With test nets am able to start pushing friends who have invested to start farming.
Setup for friend, same setup as above but a 2TB m. 2 ssd sata drive. Should keep them farming fir a while.
Iāll put together a script to join node on device startup and the can just āplug n playā when the time comes for the real launch.
Need to understand how to transfer node keys to a more substantial farming rig and the effect on the authority of the node. I think Iāll be okay copying keys and chunks accross to a new farming rig and then shutting the old one down once I reach the 2TB limit.
Fun times. Already building farming rigs.
This case is similar to what I got excited about when a forum member said they could manufacturer a small farming rig. Tech has caught up and is already offering an ideal attractive starter box.
Already looking for a sticker printer.
ā¦should start working on a āsafenetwork insideā sticker or some sort of safenetwork node sticker.
Iām planning to set up a few separate nodes: cloud, Odroid, Pi etc and suggest a more decentralised approach like this is worth considering, this rather than one or two bigger nodes with masses of disk space.
It may seem simpler to just run one or two big nodes, but I think itās less desirable for the network which will therefore be tuned towards more smaller, simpler nodes where possible by making larger ones less profitable.
Also, putting all your eggs in one basket is a higher risk strategy. Your node only has to go offline for a short time and itās earnings will halved. For longer and they will drop to zero. This can happen for many reasons, software, power interruptions, hardware failure, internet connectivity. Things we shrug at and have become accustomed to will be an issue when a node has spent months reaching high earning potential. Not to mention hacking!
It remains to be seen what size of storage per node will be most profitable. Thereās an argument that having free space should keep a node profitable, but it remains to be seen because the network wonāt want small full nodes to go unrewarded.
My hunch is small will be beautiful when it comes to Safe Network farming. David has always favoured this, for good reason IMO, yet I think thereās a tendency to assume the opposite.
Later there may well be a place for larger ultra reliable nodes (remember āarchive nodesā) but thereās no sign of what that means just now, and I donāt think many here will be able to ensure ultra reliability.
yes the case carrier board and m2 adapter allows the raspberry 4 to have a standard Nmve hard disk and there is a possibility to have the pi boot from the nmve hard disk.
as far as I am aware a 4tb nmve should work the same.
I agree to an extent. That depends on what you spend on the device though.
You need to recoup that too if it is only to run a node.
You could easily spend 2 years electricity on buying the hardware, if not more.
Running a SBC headless with just a decent microSD will lower cost but vastly increase difficulty for most.
So where is the happy medium?
Of course for many of us the cost of setting it up is overshadowed by our desire to participate.
Iām using the Guzila mini PC right now. Running Linux Budgie on it. it seems to work fine for the test-nets, in fact its quiet, fast enough, reliable, low power usage, not as good as Arm, but good enough.
Very little errors with running test-nets, I have a gigabit internet connection, running on LAN. Iām happy with it. But at this point what Iāll be farming on in the future is anyoneās guess.
So iv been having a read through and wondering if a full on workstation is just mega overkill.
Iām currently running a 36 core 64gig of ram 40tb chia server and had the idea of once this comes out switching over to it.
Iv not tried out the test node yet but just wondering about the actual effectiveness and potential earning from such a system.
Could someone smarter than me clue me in a little please?
If you want to do it cheaper then a SBC like a RPi would work well. Connect a drive or 2 and leave running 24/7
As far as we know the RPi will be more than enough to run a node. This way you can run more than one node with each drawing 3-15 watts average depending on the drive used.
Also you could set aside some space of the 40TB to use for a node or so on that powerful PC of yours.
For safe the compute power of the CPU is not as important as it is for other blockchains etc.
