DIY Build For DeFli Miner Made Easy

You want a DIY Build for DeFli, but not sure how to start?

For this article, I am going to assume that you know nothing about Linux and have no parts at home to make yourself a DIY build for DeFli. I will be editing this post as I receive feedback to help you be successful. Raspberry Pis have been out of stock for quite sometime and if you find them used, they are over $100. For this build, I will be using an alternate to the Raspberry Pi called the Le Potato made by Libre. Please note, the Le Potato does not have Wifi built in, so you need to plan on running connected via a ethernet cable.

What Do I need?

  1. Libre Le Potato – Around $35 as of the time of this blog article
  2. RTL-SDR – This is the Radio receiver that will monitoring air traffic
  3. SanDisk Micro SD Card – This will be the memory for your miner
  4. Micro USB Cable for power – If you have one already, you should be fine. If you need a charging brick to plug USB in, then make sure to get one too. I figure most people have one laying around somewhere.
  5. Antenna Adapter if connecting to an Old Helium install
  6. If you do not already have an antenna, This is a very basic antenna for indoors

I recommend getting a case for your board to live in, but it is not necessary, just good practice.

Writing the Image that will run your DIY build for DeFli

You will need to download Balena Etcher or use another program to write the image file to your Micro SD card.

Second, you need a copy of the IMG file that you will be writing to the SD card. You can download the IMG file that I created, here. Download and save this to your computer.

  1. Connect your MicroSD card to your computer and verify that it shows up in your list of available drives.
  2. Open Balena Etcher
  3. Select “Source from File” and select the file that you downloaded for your DIY Build for DeFli
  4. Select your Target (this is the destination where you are writing the image). Please, double check to make sure you are writing to the SD card and nothing else. What ever you select as target will be formatted and overwritten with a Linux file, so this is extremely important.
  5. Once you start the process, it may take 10-20 minutes, maybe longer depending on the speed of your computer. If your computer balks at the end and says it needs to eject a disk because it is unreadable, that actually may be a good sign – MacOS and Windows don’t really like bootbale Linux images when they read them and spit them up LOL

Time to Assemble your DIY Build for DeFli

Plug the RTL-SDR into the usb port of the Le Potato board and install your antenna. Your Micro SD card will slide into the opposite end of the Le Potato with the writing of the card facing out, so if you don’t see the label of the card, you have it oriented in the wrong direction.

Last, plug your power cord into the Micro SD slot and wait for a couple of minutes, at this point, you are almost done.

This is the fun part of your DIY Build for DeFli

What you will need:

  1. Check your router and find out the IP address of your Le Potato – it should show up as a recently connected device. The IP address will likely be something like 192.168.1.xxx or 10.0.0.xxx. Write that down.
  2. Next, we need to login to the command line of the board and enter a couple commands.

Below is how to initiate an SSH instance so you can tell your DIY Build for DeFli what you want it to do.

SSH ubuntu@192.168.1.xxx

The image is setup with a Username “ubuntu” and password “potato” (Note: Linux is case sensitive, so both must be lowercase letters in order to match.)

After a few seconds, you should be presented with a Command Line Interface (CLI) for giving commands to your DI Build for DeFli. If this is your first time running things from the command line, don’t worry, it gets easier. I will include a list of commands below to help you cut and paste what you need. But first, we need to tell your DIY Build for DeFli where it is located.

Claiming your Territory

In order to be to send your location to DeFli, you are going to paste command into your Command Line Interface to announce your location. Make sure to keep the exact GPS coordinates you send saved, because you will need to paste them in your wallet as well.

Go to LatLong.net and put int he address where you are installing your DIT Build for DeFli.

Taking the example above, we are going to edit the below command for our LAT and Long in order to announce our Miner to the network. Remember, you need to use your Latitude and Longitude, the example below is just a visual aid.

sudo readsb-set-location 34.200495 -106.482928

Once you have entered your location, press Enter.

NOw we need to tell our DIY Build for Defli where to send data

Still at the Command Line, you need to edit the below code to start sending data to the DeFli servers:

nc <your Pi IP address> 30002 | nc 77.68.73.29 30001

Remember to edit for your IP address. Then, hit enter.

Now for the cool part!! Let’s go see what Air Traffic you are seeing!

In your web browser, go to – http://your IP/tar1090/ If all is going well, you should see a map and some air traffic.

Here are some other links you can check out:

  1. Graphs – http://YourIP/graphs1090/

Copy/Paste Guide Reference Guide for Command Line on your DIY Build for DeFli

  1. Auto Gain adjustment
sudo autogain1090; sleep 120

2. To Look at your signal metrics, use the following from the command line

grep -sh . /run/{dump1090-fa,readsb}/stats.json | jq '.total.local | ((.accepted | add), .strong_signals, .signal, .noise)' | xargs -n4 echo | awk '{printf "\nPercentage of strong messages: %.3f\nSignal: %.1f\nNoise: %.1f\n", $(2) * 100 / $(1), $(3), $(4)}'

3. Check your current gain setting

grep -sh -e gain /etc/default/{dump1090-fa,readsb}