A strong and healthy network of nodes help spread the blockchain around the globe, and help keep the network healthy.

You actually need very little to be able to run a full node.

A few Gig of bandwidth a month to spare and a Raspberry Pi will do it.

For those that don't know what Raspberry Pi is, it is a small linux computer which is about the size of a pack of playing cards and only costs around $40, plus the cost of an SD card.

You can read about them here

http://www.raspberrypi.org/

EDIT

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Update

This is now all available via github

https://github.com/tmuir12/FTC_Raspberry_Pi_Full_Node

I shifted it to github where there are full instructions too.

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One of the many things that are great about the Pis is their power consumption, they only draw 5W of power, so only cost a cent or two a day to run.

If you would like to help increase feathercoins Full node count I've craeted an install script that will set up a raspberry Pi as a full node in about 30 minutes.

Although you could use the raspberry pi with what my script will install to hold coins I would recommend against, thi setup is just to create a full node.

To set one up just follow the text below or you can download it from Google docs.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/17xuANNN_DWoMOI8salEG_xY5OLDyxuMgvD4rxcn1_cA/edit?usp=sharing

Create a Feathercoin Full Node Without Compiling

This instruction is to create a Feathercoin full node on a raspberry Pi.

You will need the following things before we start

Raspberry Pi Model B, or B+
Minimum 8Gb class 10SD card, but I recommend a 16Gb
Monitor, keyboard and mouse to plug into the Pi for Initial setup (Not needed after setup is complete
You need to read up on your router and find out how to make it statically assign an IP address to the Raspberry Pi and how to set up port forwarding on it for both inbound and outbound traffic on port 9336
You need to be able to SSH from your main computer to the PI to check it. If you have never down this before you will need to download and install Putty from here http://www.putty.org/
To use Putty just start it and enter the IP address your router has assigned the Pi and make sure port 22 is entered into the port field
To work out what IP address your router has assigned the Pi you can either open up lxterminal when the pi first booted up and type in ifconfig and it will give you the Piâ€™s IP address or you can get this by logging into your router

I will not go into the detail on how to do a standard install of Raspbian off Noobs as the Raspberry Pi website gives great instruction on how to do this.

if you do not know where to download Noobs from you get it here.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/

This link is to the howto to install Noobs onto the SD card

http://www.raspberrypi.org/help/noobs-setup/

The few extra things you should do over a standard install is

Change the password from the default password for extra security.
I also recommend doing minor overclocking to 800Mhz.
Donâ€™t forget to enable SSH during setup
I recommend changing the memory split from 64 to only 32Meg for the video as you are not going to watch video on this so give more memory to the CPU
Donâ€™t forget to select your timezone
Consider changing the hostname if you already have more than one Pi on your network

Set up Rasbian as per the instructions from the Raspberry Pi website and SSH into the Pi

Now we need to download the install script (Remember you can paste into the terminal window by right clicking in the window after selecting copy from this page)

enter

wget https://www.dropbox.com/s/4eqecop7f35qvw9/feathercoind_node_precompiled.sh

We now need to make the script executable by typing

chmod 755 feathercoind_node_precompiled.sh

Now we need to start the install script by typing.

./feathercoind_node_precompiled.sh

This will

Update the Pi to the latest version
Install needed applications to run feathercoind,
Set up a firewall, that will allow ssh in and feathercoind to talk to other clients
Download feathercoind
Create a conf file with input from you to select a password for RDC
Download a fairly recent blockchain and chainstate to speed up the process of getting it running
create an /etc/init.d entry to start feathercoind as using â€˜piâ€™ at boot

You are now on the home stretch.

You now need to log into your router and statically assign the IP address to the Pi and enable port forwarding to this IP address both inbound and outbound on port 9336.

You will need to read your router's manual to find out how to do this.

Once you have set up your router its time to test it.

Type sudo reboot

Once the Pi has booted back up SSH back into it

Give it 2 or 3 minutes for the Feathercoin daemon to start up and then to check it go

cd .feathercoin

./feathercoind getinfo

and you should be presented something like this

{

"version" : 80701,

"protocolversion" : 60007,

"walletversion" : 60000,

"balance" : 0.00000000,

"blocks" : 444272,

"timeoffset" : 0,

"connections" : 100,

"proxy" : "",

"difficulty" : 9.85707588,

"testnet" : false,

"keypoololdest" : 1414901309,

"keypoolsize" : 101,

"paytxfee" : 0.00000000,

"mininput" : 0.00001000,

"errors" : ""

}

If you get an error when trying the above command wait another couple of minutes and try again as it does take a fe minutes for feathercoind daemon to fully start up.

Whilst it is catching up it will use about 90% of the CPU but once it has caught up it will only use 2% or 3%

Once you have been online for a day or so you should be able to find your node here

https://bitinfocharts.com/feathercoin/nodes/

If you get it running post on this thread to let us now.

You can also look at installing apache mysql and PHP and install a web front end to let you see what is happening by your web browser if you want, but don't forget to open up port 80 on the Pis firewall if you do.