This time we have something really special. In this post, you don’t just get the story of a farmer, you’ll get the story of a family joining chia and an emerging software developer. Todays post is about Ronald aka BubbleTrouble, the developer of the openChia app (Get it on Android and iOS) and also another app called Chia Address Balance (Get it on Android and iOS)
This post is part of an article series about your farming setups.
If you have an interesting setup and want to have some internet fame please ping @speedmann#6896 on discord or let me know in one of the official channels that you are interested. (Editor’s note: You can also contact the site or by email [email protected] and Speedmann will get it) We also now have a form which you can fill in.
Who are you? Some background about yourself please
My name is Ronald, but most people know me by my alias name BubbleTrouble. I am 22 years old and currently live in Austria. I started programming at 16 and have been doing so since. Currently I am self-employed and started studying IT in October. Recently I created the mobile apps (runs on IOS and Android) called Chia Address Balance as well the app for the OpenChia pool where one can read ad free The Chia Plot news.
Why farm chia?
By coincidence I stumbled across an article on chia and I had a few disks lying around and thought why not give it a try. Initially it was only me doing chia farming, but I was able to convince my family to jump onboard as investors.
What hardware are you using?
For the full node we are using an intel PC. For creating plots we use a Threadripper with 256gb of RAM. Most of our disks are hooked up to raspberry pies running as harvesters, but some are still connected to the full node and the Threadripper for replotting to NFT.
To house the disks, I built a custom shelf which uses two long opposing aluminium L-profiles for each row. The L-Profiles are connected to the shelf with custom 3D printed parts allowing me to adjust the width to fit different disk sizes. Each row can hold about 20 disks. In total the shelf can house about 160 external disks.
The current farm is providing 1.72PiB to the netspace.
Do you have a special networking/distributed farming setup?
Nothing special, just one farmer PC and raspberry pies as harvesters.
Given the chance to start over in march again, what would you do different?
I should have started in March 2020.
Are you pooling or solo farming?
We are doing both. Initially we thought we would remain solo but with my involvement in OpenChia we are now replotting to add our farm to the pool.
How much did you invest in your setup?
Enough.
How time consuming is running your farm? Do you have monitoring?
Building and designing the shelf was time consuming.
The day-to-day management has also had its difficulties, with USB ports crashing that then require PC reboots. We use Chiadog and the OpenChia app to monitor our farm.
How profitable is your farming setup?
Impossible to say and we are hoping for a long-term return.
What are your plans for the future? Will you keep farming?
Fill up the shelf and continue creating applications for chia to improve the whole ecosystem. I don’t think we will stop farming any time soon.
