Is android mining worth it? - The Gridcoin test
Four months ago, one of the first articles I read on Steemit was a question raised by @trumpman whether Gridcoin mining on Android is worth it. Like @trumpman, I had also an Android lying around catching dust. It is a Nexus 7 (2013) which is nowadays an average performing tablet. Here are the specs:
To get some more facts on how much I could gain from this tablet and which projects would be providing the highest returns, I decided to run all whitelisted projects with Android support. At the moment there are 11 projects supporting Android but during the test I didn’t manage to receive work-units for Enigma@home so I had to leave it out.
When I initially started to run BOINC on 4 cores, the tablet became really hot so I reduced it to 2 only. I ran every project for 5 days (24h per day) to calculate the maximum achievable RAC (after 5 days a system reaches roughly 40% of max RAC output).
In the table below I have presented the results of the tests. I was surprised that I could earn 0.2 GRC per day with some projects, which is not bad. By comparison my i5 laptop with 4 cores achieves maximum 2.5 GRC per day for the same projects.
The 3 highest earning projects for my tablet are Yoyo@home, theSkynet Pogs and Universe@home. Due to the fact that the difference with the rest of the projects is so big, I can imagine that this will be the case for other tablets and smartphones as well.
Thanks for reading and follow me for more Gridcoin-related articles.
Thanks for this, much appreciated!
As a side effect we are now trending on the Android section of Steemit so hopefully this article gives Gridcoin some extra PR as well.
You are welcome :D Just follow the advice in the banner and who knows, maybe there is more to come!
Getting 2 mag with a mt8127 mining most of the time, in universe@home.
Assuming you run BOINC with 4 cores, this matches nicely with the information in the table above which is based on 2 cores only.
Which its a weird thing honestly. It should be higher, maybe it just hasnt stopped rising.
I think it is fine. Your tablet is generating 2 mag = 0.45 GRC while my tablet is only generating 0.22 GRC for Universe@home.
My Lenovo K5 with an ARM Cortex A53 and 8 cores get a RAC of 101.45 at yoyo@home. It is often only crunching while loading during the night.
Probablity you've already checked this but there are a various reasons that can limit the daily output on Android devices. For example:
Ha! Thanks for the mention. In the end, I didn't bother to set my android devices, but getting 0.2 grc from such an old hardware (and a tablet that is!) doesn't sound bad
To my best experience you need to run yoyo at least for 2 weeks until the RAC becomes stable. Iam runnig yoyo@home on the same device 24/7 since 2 weeks and the RAC is still rising. At the moment i prepare a comparison between 4 different devices and platforms (Arm on linux , Android, x86) and the RAC is still not stable. For project with short turn around time per project the RAC is stable much faster. Some work packeges in yoyo take more than 2 days - so you may throw away a lot of CPU time when canceling the project on day 5.
RAC can increase from 4-6 weeks or even more on more high powered kit, so 2 weeks isnt too bad
As @scalextrix mentioned before, it takes a while. After 2 weeks your system will be at 75% of the maximum RAC output.
Yep, I'm getting stable mag = 2 on skynet pogs with my old 4 core phone running 24x7.
Will try to add yoyo to the list also, thanks for the tip ;)
Curious which app you used for your android. The google play store has boinc. But it does not load the projects. While the reviews were good most complain it has to many bugs and hard to set up.
I'm using the standard BOINC app from the Google play store. It does require some tweaking to optimise but I haven't had issues with it.
You mentioned it doesn't load projects, can you let us know what you have tried and where it failed.