It was a rocky road…

… 9 days ago our RAK Miner v2.0 stopped syncing… Now we are back in business!!

For all fellow miners our there, we feel you… so we tell our story in hopes that any information here below eventually results helpful to you.

Our stock miner came with a SanDisk High Endurance 32Gb SD card, and the failure happened when running the 2022.01.04.0 firmware, so having read all the discussions in Reddit and Discord we decided to upgrade to a bigger SanDisk High Endurance 128Gb SD card and install the latest 2022.01.12.0 and then 2022.01.12.1 but the miner never got to catch up with the blockchain height… It was only when they released 2022.01.24.0 that the miner started syncing at a good, acceptable speed..

However, since the latest available database snapshot was taken at block height 1.193.774 and current height was around 1.900.000 it took our miner almost 4 days to fully synchronise. Today it managed to process some data transfers and generate a couple of challenges, however no beacons or witnessing so far, let us wait a couple of days to report on that.

Some interesting learnings about the whole process, though, when using a brand new SD Card (Image 1) to flash the new firmware (Image 2), you may be surprised to see that the resulting card size in Windows Explorer is only 32Mb!!! (Image 3).

Fear not!… on a close inspection with any Partition Manager, you can notice that the FAT 32Mb size is just the first of three partitions, this one most likely containing the booting packages for the Raspberry Pi inside the miner, then a 1Gb partition more likely containing the mining software and finally an unallocated space with the rest of the available card memory.

Once the miner had taken its time to synchronise, you can see that the third partition is now in use, thus we trust there will be enough space to store many more weeks of blockchain activity until we are faced with a new downtime event.

We can only hope 🙂