BITCOIN MINING ASICS REPURPOSED TO keep NTP SERVER ON TRACK

They state time is money, however if that’s true, money must likewise be time. It’s all figurative, of course, however in the situation of this NTP server heater powered by Bitcoin mining dongles, money really does ended up being time.

This is an example of the lengths to which Network Time Protocol aficionados will go in browse of somewhat much better performance from their NTP servers. [Folkert van Heusden], having heard that thermal stability keeps NTP servers happy, utilized a picnic cooler as an environmental chamber for his  Pi- as well as GPS-based NTP rig. warm is added to the chamber thanks to seven block Erupter ASIC miner dongles, which are turned on by a Python script when a microcontroller sends an MQTT message that the temperature has dropped below the setpoint.

Each dongle creates about 2.5 Watts of warm when it’s working, making them quite efficient heaters. Alas, warm is all they create at the moment — [Folkert] just has them working on the exact same hash over as well as over. He does state that he has plans to let the miners do useful work at some point, not so much for revenue however to at least assist out the network a bit.

This seems like a bit of a long method around to solve this problem, however since the mining dongles are basically obsolete now — we talked about them method back in 2013 — it has a nice hacky feeling to it that we appreciate.