Do it yourself!

The BitBoxBase projects encourages you to build your own Bitcoin full node! It is still under heavy development and not ready for primetime, so this section will become more detailed over time.

Hardware assembly

Although we use custom hardware to improve our commercial product and enable additional features, you can build your own full node using standard components:

• Pine64 components
  • RockPRO64 4GB single board computer
  • eMMC 16 GB and USB adapter
  • Power adapter EU or US
• Case option A (internal storage)
  • Custom case (e.g. made of acrylic like Digital Garage’s hack0)
  • PCIe SSD adapter, either a minimal adapter or Pine64’s standard adapter
  • 1 TB SSD (we had good experience with Cruzial P1)
  • Mid Profile Heatsink
  • CPU Fan
• Case option B (external storage)
  • Pine64 Aluminium Casing
  • external USB3 drive (SSD or HDD)

Base image

You can grab the latest Base image from our releases page. See the “Releases” section how to download, verify and write the release to eMMC storage.

But you can also build and customize the disk image yourself. The automated build process will compile the custom Armbian operating system, install and configure all applications and prepare the image for Mender OTA updates (optional).

Prerequisites

Make sure you have the following prerequisites installed on your computer. At the moment, we test the whole process on Ubuntu only.

• Docker CE, version >= 18.06.3 install manually according to the official documentation

• Git and qemu-user-static

  sudo apt-get install git qemu-user-static
  

Compile Armbian and custom applications

The BitBoxBase runs a minimal Armbian operating system with additional custom applications. The main output is an Armbian image that contains the compiled custom applications and can be used to boot the BitBoxBase.

We assume that running Docker requires sudo, therefore sudo make is needed. If your Docker installation allows execution for regular users, sudo is not necessary.

• Building the BitBoxBase system image

  sudo make
  

• Optional: updating the BitBoxBase system image later with an adjusted build configuration

  sudo make update
  

See Building the Armbian base image and related pages for more details.

Create Mender.io update artefacts

The Armbian disk image contains only one partition and cannot be updated remotely. To integrate the BitBoxBase with the professional Mender.io update management solution, this image is postprocessed. The result is a disk image with multiple partition that contain the mender configuration and allow over-the-air updates.

• Creating Mender.io disk image and update artefacts based on the Armbian system image

  sudo make mender-artefacts
  

Note: this method works only using eMMC storage. Although the RockPro64 board can also use microSD cards, it won’t boot from an image that has been postprocessed by Mender.

Assembly

(TODO)Stadicus

Operations

(TODO)Stadicus