Low Cost Node Hardware - Revelar

[IMPACT]

Low-cost low power-usage electronics are garnering a lot of attention in the blockchain space. These devices are capable of providing the necessary hardware needed to interact with the blockchain while still having a power usage that is low. This low power usage makes it cheap to run the device off a solar or other off-grid installation.

Raspberry Pis have arguably been king-of-the-hill in terms of low cost single-board computers capable of running a full operating system however recent supply chain shortages have pushed their prices up from the $30-60 range with most retailing in excess of $100-120USD.

One of our Fund 7 proposals that received funding entailed the creation of an Easy Node Deployment solution/guide. As we have gone through the process fulfilling our obligations to this proposal, we have discovered that there are many ways to augment low-cost hardware devices and bypass some of the hardware restrictions whilst only incurring a very small performance cost.

This means that devices with requirements less than the recommended requirements, can become viable considerations albeit with a few clever tweaks.

We therefore want to explore other low cost hardware devices that could be used to interact with the blockchain or run an always-on node. We also want these devices to be low power usage so that the energy burden to turn a low-power deployment into a self sustainable deployment is very small.

Many of the current Cardano deployments are being run using centralized hardware owned by cloud providers. Whilst there are valid use cases for using these vendors, it is also important to build a community of decentralized hardware. We believe that by researching ways to create low-cost low-power hardware based deployments of Cardano nodes, it would provide valuable learning opportunities as well as give more people access to on-chain tools and software services.

In line with the challenge, we will be keeping our findings open-source with a MIT License in the form of a guide, just like our Fund 7 proposal.

Risks there are a plenty but the two primary risks we see are:

• Further supply chain issues - The supply chain shortages could start affecting some other devices as well. We plan to mitigate the effect of global supply chain shortages (as much as is in our power to do) by looking at other devices available that could be used to build and run a node

• Nested incompatibility troubleshooting - One risk is that devices appear to be compatible on the surface but then as one progresses through the process of building a node, it becomes apparent.

[FEASIBILITY]

Having worked through a large portion of our Fund 7 proposal which involves the setup of a hardware node on a Raspberry Pi, we envision almost all of the funding to be allocated to the hours cost. The time estimates for work below assume roughly 20 hours per week devoted to this project.

Min/Max Timeline

1-4 Weeks - Hardware Sourcing (Could be longer)

4-6 Weeks (135 Hours) - Tinkering/Hacking work to get the process figured out per device. We are also expecting the number of hours devoted to documentation to be rather high

Budget for this project is fairly straightforward, purchasing several Rock Pi setups and utilizing different M.2 NVME with SWAPs for testing the efficiency of a Low RAM or High RAM Pi. Our hope is to offset growing RAM requirements with M.2 NVME and virtualized RAM.

• $750 Hardware costs
• $ 6750/135 hours = $50/hr for Engineering Fee

We envision this process to consume a number of “hacker” hours from our hardware engineer, as such we price it at $50/hr for 135 hours.

Benjamin Beer – CTO

Ben’s formal education is in Computer and Electronic Engineering with a focus on both hardware and software based programming and system design. His Masters degree specialty focus is on the creation of decision support systems. He was on the NWU Solar Car racing team in South Africa as an engineer to create a web-based Race Strategy Optimization System that provides near real-time feedback in a race scenario by collating and processing large amounts of telemetric data. As part of his post-graduate thesis he focused on the incorporation of blockchains, specifically smart contracts, into the supply chain. This research involved significant work on Ethereum with Solidity, before being introduced to Cardano. Plutus Pioneer Cohort #3, Atala Prism Cohort #2

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-beer

Twitter: @bigbenbeer

Discord: KarooSeun | DUO#2202

[AUDITABILITY]

Revelar has a dedicated domain to all of our Catalyst proposals, we run these as live as we can to show real time progress, history, and modifications until we do our final reports and closeouts for each proposal. We welcome anyone to visit and audit our progress anytime - https://catalyst.revelar.co

For open source code and projects this Gitbook is automatically synced with appropriate GitHub repos for redundancy.

• Payment confirmations for hardware purchase posted to our audit site
• A Gitbook that is edited in real time (weekly if not daily) showing the progress on the project

Success is defined as:

• Successful deployment of a functional cardano-node to a device
• 3 Months - 500 Views
• 6 Months - 1000 Views
• 9-12 Months - More than 5000 Views

This proposal is a continuation of our Fund 7 proposal entitled Easy Cardano Node Deployment. In that proposal we focused our efforts on a Raspberry Pi. In this proposal we want to continue albeit with non Raspberry Pi devices to increase options for node hardware.

Revelar has a catalogue of past proposals & their progress at: https://catalyst.revelar.co