Introduction
I have been processing units on and off for SETI@Home since 1999 and have been on the lookout over the years to find a low cost low power method to do this. When BOINC became available on the
Raspberry Pi I tried to use one but soon found that with a single core it would take a couple days to process a single unit. Once the quad core version became available, with four times the throughput it
made it practical to use but I wanted to be able process units a bit faster so looking round the small board market I found the Odroid C1+.
The C1+ processes one unit in just under 24 hours/processor. I therfore bought four Odroid C1+ and stacked them into a 'SETI tower'.
To get the C1+'s set up with Boinc I installed each with the Android OS and the Play Store. This was a bit of a task as I was using an old TV as a monitor and was limited to 720p resolution.
I had to set each one up using a PC monitor then drop the resolution to suit the TV but once installed they performed reasonably reliably. I also kept some Pi's in the mix.
Four years on and each Odroid has accumulated roughly half a million credits but over the last few months they have been struggling to remain stable so I made the decision to change the OS to Ubuntu 18.04.3.
This has gone fairly well but nothing is ever straight forward with Odroids. Everything has to be installed in a strick sequence or they crash/freeze. Once the sequence is found then it's not a problem but
don't unplug the mouse while its running or it freezes a couple of minutes after you turn your back! I'll see how this setup performs in the coming years..
SETI Hibernation
On March 2nd 2020 SETI@Home announced that it is going into hibernation from the 31st March 2020, that's over 20 years since I joined and not quite 5 million - I hope I get there by the end of the month!
On the 31st I will retire the five Raspberry Pi 3's and transfer the five Odroids to Einstien@home. I may also take the opportunity to retire the three raspberry Pi 2's currently working Einstien@home, I'll
make that decision in a few weeks.
A couple of weeks later I reached the 5 million credits so I started to run down the SETI work units on the Raspberry Pi's and the Odroid C1+'s in readiness to shut them down or switch projects. As I've
said before Odroids are not that easy to get along with and simply switching projects was no exception! So change of plan - I'll be retiring the Odroids C1+'s and consgning them to history..or more
likely as paperweights :-) The Raspberry Pi's will be swapped to Einstein@home along with a Odroid C2.
24th March 2020 and the change over is complete, the four Odroid C1+'s are now retired leaving just the Odroid C2 and seven Pi's all crunching units for Einstien@home. Well einstien@home also
has it's difficulties, when setting up my original three Raspberry Pi's I found that 'Validate Errors' occur if all four processor cores are used - the general concesus is this is due to heat so I
reduced the cores used to three/Pi and this resolved the problem. When adding in the four Pi3's each using three cores they started to produce 'Validate Errors!' Hoping to reduce these errors I have reduced
the processor usage time to 90% thus reducing the heat a touch and also giving the OS a bit more time to itself.
The recovered Odroids, PSU and Mice, the C1+'s are now bygonebytes!
3rd June 2020, about a week ago my Odroid C2 stopped communicating with einstein@home and no matter how much cajoling I could not make work so out it came! replaced by a spare RPi 3B+. All my Odroids are
now bygonebytes.
My current BOINC stats are:
When it came to bulding NAS for my network I looked at the Odroid C1+ but found that Hardkernal had brought out a 64 bit version, the C2, and that there were Open Media Vault builds available for
both the Odroid and the Pi 3. I therefore built two NAS devices, one for Data and the other for a Backup. As the C2 has Gigabit Ethernet this was used for the data, streaming etc., and
the Raspberry Pi 3 with Fast Ethernet for the backup. Open Media Vault makes it easy to backup the data every 12 hours using Rsync.
Odroid C1+.
Odroid C2
Odroid C1+/C2 stack.
Raspberry Pi Stack