Announcing Flexpool's FlexFarmer Open Beta: The Future of Chia Farming (Windows, Linux, Hive OS, Pi Chia Farmer)

Chia Pools
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No full node, reliable and stable, lower stales, energy efficient, less hardware required. – You only need a machine with Flexpool plots.

FlexFarmer aims to make farming Chia as easy as crypto mining through rewriting and optimizing the entire farming process in Golang replacing the standard harvester+farmer. It connects farmers to our hosted nodes over a blockchain bridge gateway which runs on powerful infrastructure hosted by Flexpool.io.

During testing Flexfarmer was found to work on a RPi 3 needing less than 100 MB of RAM and uses up a small percentage of the CPU (less than 1%). It thus allows farming to work on almost all devices using minimum power. FlexFarmer better identifies plots and errors allowing for a smooth worry-free farming experience. FlexFarmer will increase farmers profits through reducing errors, stales, power use, and increasing reliability.

FlexFarmer currently only works on Flexpool’s Chia pool and charges 0 fee. FlexFarmer supports Windows, Linux, and has a docker image. We also plan to have a macOS build soon as well.

Benefits:

  • No node sync required
  • No local wallet daemon required (you will need to input a wallet address)
  • Almost no pain required to get it up and running compared to the standard Chia farmer
  • Fast lookup times in milliseconds rather than seconds when lots of plots are loaded, thus reducing stales to almost 0
  • Better identification of plots and possible issues
  • Naming of each individual rig for website dashboard stat tracking
  • Reported space support (see your actual space right in your Flexpool dashboard)
  • HTTP API and Prometheus metrics support
  • Better tracking of stats and stales/invalids
  • Low processor usage, RAM usage, power usage, memory/storage space usage.
  • Highly configurable
  • Much more stable
  • Autodetects new plots added
  • Failover to neighbor regions during an outage on primary region

FAQ:

  • What fee is charged by the FlexFarmer? - 0%.
  • What pools are supported? - Flexpool.io only.
  • Why FlexFarmer is not open source? - We have spent weeks of R&D working on this project and have employees that we must pay. Unfortunately we must be profitable to ensure that our staff are paid on time and can continue to develop projects that make Chia better.

FlexFarmer is currently in open beta. It runs on Linux and has a docker image. Instructions on how to run it are inside the download archive; please join our discord for any questions or technical support. Windows builds are coming soon closer to official release.

Download links:

Linux AMD64: https://static.flexpool.io/dl/flexfarmer/flexfarmer-linux-amd64-v1.0.0b1.tar.gz

Linux ARM64 (RPi): https://static.flexpool.io/dl/flexfarmer/flexfarmer-linux-arm64-v1.0.0b1.tar.gz

Docker image: flexpool/flexfarmer (instructions on using it can be found in the regular download archive)

Windows https://static.flexpool.io/dl/flexfarmer/flexfarmer-windows-amd64-v1.0.0b1.zip

I’ve done a rough guide to get windows working:

Here

Run flexfarmer and farm chia on hive os using the following guide created by nekusul: run it at startup as a systemd service on HiveOS, here are the steps: GitHub - F1DNA/FlexFarmerAsAService: Run FlexFarmer as a service - written for Ubuntu Server

Verifying legitimacy of the downloaded software:

All our download archives are signed by our FlexFarmer Code Signing GPG key located at https://static.flexpool.io/dl/flexfarmer/gpg. The software signatures are available at .sig

Note: Interactive guide on our website is coming soon. Please visit our discord for any support or questions/comments. Thank you to our Alpha testers for their feedback and suggestions.

flexfarmer example
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Now we are going “off” the official path. There maybe complications?

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Not to my knowledge, its a healthy baby :smiley:

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Regarding the “much more stable” claim, does this mean that the hosted nodes are achieving 100% unskipped and ordered signage point perfection?

And will this often ignored yet important metric be made public, unlike with OG pools?

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Can’t guarantee this, they are doing better due to being on better hardware but network issues have affected us before. You could ask Alex on our discord for a copy of the logs when issues pop up on the network and for a more technical discussion.

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Core Pool of the NFT plots!

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So you’re releasing a closed-source client? Welcome to the dark side of Chia pooling.

Just kidding. We’re actually able to do a lot more client-side verification than the Official Pooling Protocol if say someone did find an exploit.

No one in their right mind would discredit what you guys have done. There’s been a lot of work behind the scenes and it’s only right to applaud the work that you guys have done.

I remember seeing mention of your team working on a GoChia node. Is that still in the works to be made public?

If not, I wouldn’t be mad. Keep doing your thing @Chris22.

It’s better than seeing you complain about the price of XCH or that nobody wants to support the Official Protocol because they straight up didn’t offer their users any benefit.

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Only if you don’t consider replotting a complication.

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Thanks for the support.

Yes but so far no one has agreed to offer funding so I’m not sure if we will open source it or finish it, most of the work was done as part of the pool. I believe we have the first and only full featured Chia wallet.

The problem is that we really do want to open source things and help the community…but someone needs to pay to keep the lights on. If farmers want to get together to donate to a fund to pay our bills we can open source our work, or if Chia themselves want to we can. But if no one’s funding then we’re forced to compete with other pools which means advantageous software remains closed source.

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Exactly brother. We’re in the same situation. It’s not realistic to think that you can just ‘set and forget’ with the Official Pooling Protocol.

It’s actually pretty sad the Official Chia Team has not put the pre-farm to work and started paying people for doing valuable work on their Network…

…which at this point is going to make the investors rich and the people who put the hard work in poor…

Oh wait! That’s just like every other corporation where the people that don’t do **** all get most of the reward for being slimy.

If the Official Chia Team commits more than 50% of the prefarm toward developers I take back what I said.

Investors don’t build squat.

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Since no need any Chia app, no full node, no sync, only a farmer and plots, where goes the 0.25 XCH?

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To the wallet address you set.

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Disclaimer: I’ve been testing flexfarmer as part of their closed alpha program. I don’t get anything in return for it, and I’m not receiving rewards for posting anything on their behalf. These thoughts are my own.

I’ve been pretty impressed with the software they’ve created and the people behind it are pretty genuine guys. I’ve been making suggestions and giving feedback and they respond positively, and integrate ideas into their code, and or address my concerns.

Mostly, I’ve been testing it as a small Pi farmer. The fact that you don’t need to run a full node or download the blockchain for farming is a boon for small devices like the Raspberry Pi. Most of all, the resources it uses is minimal but the connectivity between the farmer and the pool is pretty damn impressive.

Screenshot from 2021-08-04 12-19-14
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I mean it just sips resources on my 2GB Pi 4.

There are still times when you need to download the blockchain for managing your plotnfts and wallet. Or if you plan to run full node no matter what then this probably isn’t for you. But I do think this is a big step forward for Chia farming in general. No more worrying about sync problems! I mean that’s kinda huge.

I hope that someday more pools will develop this kind of lightweight software that will run on old laptops, underpowered VMs, and low-powered IoT devices like the Pi.

Of course, the biggest downside is that you’ll have to switch from your current favourite pool to flexpool. But the experience so far hasn’t been a bad one. My one and only gripe, is that the payout threshold is 0.1 instead of 0.01 (like spacepool). But that just means I’m getting a payout every 10 days instead of once a day.

But seriously, if any of you want to try it out it is worth a shot. I’m sure they would appreciate your feedback as part of their beta program. They’re always looking for ways to improve flexfarmer for users like us.

For those of you who are just curious, make a new ploftnft, create a few plots, join flexpool, and try out their new software. You’ll have a pretty good idea of what they’re about and then you can make a more informed decision about whether or not flexfarmer is for you.

Any concerns or why you don’t plan on trying it, let Chris know. I’m sure he would appreciate the feedback from this community.

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I’ve done a rough guide to get windows working:

Here

Windows download link has been added to the first post.

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There is some real work (different than the rest), keep going! :slight_smile:

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Thanks! And someone created a guide to get it working on Hive OS which is pretty awesome. Mine ETH and Farm Chia on one rig!

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Umm, swimmingly is the word for it? I’ll add more to it (if all goes well in a few days).
The configured farmer folder is zipped and saved, “You may hope that I’ll be lazy to change things”.

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Sans titre

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Ever think of creating a Docker for this? I run most of my plots off an unraid server and a docker would be the bee knees…

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Funnily enough I am running an unraid docker of this… :laughing:

It’s not an official docker, more like one I janked together with their docker image.

Here’s a short guide:

  1. Make a chia-plots share and add some plots to it.

  2. Download flexfarmer to a regular PC and set up your config file and make sure it works.

  • Add your plots directory
  • Farmer secret key
  • Launcher ID for the plotnft you’re going to use
  • Worker name like Unraid
  • region
  • payout address

  1. Make a directory in your AppData folder called ‘flexfarmer’ and copy your config.yml into it. (Edit the file so that the plot directory goes to somewhere sensible like ‘/plots’)

  2. Go to community applications > settings > Enable additional search results from dockerHub

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    Screenshot from 2021-08-12 23-28-09
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  3. Search for ‘flexfarmer’

    image
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  4. Edit the installation

  1. Hit apply, let it install, go to your docker tab and hit start and check the logs to see if there are any errors and that it runs.

    image
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  2. Give it a few minutes and log into your flexpool dashboard and see if it appears.

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Et voila. Flexfarmer in an Unraid Docker.

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