Figured you guys might enjoy my little winter project. I have an always-on server + my gaming PC in my office set up with xmrig. I have electric baseboard heaters in my apartment (PNW, USA) so as long as I’m not heating my office past my normal setpoint the electricity is essentially free.

How I set this up:

  • ESP32 flashed with ESPHome + MCP9808 temperature sensor takes a reading of the ambient temperature every minute and sends it to homeassistant
  • Homeassistant feeds that temperature (as well as a controllable setpoint) to a python script
  • Python runs a PID controller based on the room temp and setpoint
  • I use the XMRIG http API to pause/resume and dynamically control the number of threads used for mining

Here’s the result: image

Keeping my room +/- 0.5 degrees from the setpoint while mining

If you guys are interested I can post more details. I’ve had my baseboards off for over a month now with outside temps below freezing.

  • SakiEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    Twenty years ago…

    11/2/2003 News: VirtualDub 1.5.8/stable released

    Random Helpful Tip: The heat dissipation of a 3GHz Pentium 4 CPU is not wasted if your room is freezing cold, as mine is right now. I’m tempted to overclock it in order to warm the room up some more.

    https://www.virtualdub.org/oldnews

  • shortwavesurferEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Very cool (or warm in this case). I have xmrig running too but i need more machines to maintain the temperature in my ~144sqft bedroom. I currently only have ~200w of heat coming out and need more like ~500 so i still need to run the heater but am able to run it less often.