Idle CPU time, what do you use it for?

[chaoticlapras]

Ordinarily, if we leave our pis on overnight or not, we leave them idle, not running anything.

What could we run then? We could use our CPU to help with science, mine bitcoins, seed torrents, and lots more?

When your pis not doing anything else, what do you leave it doing? I connect it to BOINC and run einstein@home and a couple of other projects on there, helping science and stuff. In the past I've used it to seed some torrents that not many or noone seed, just keeping them alive if I've found them useful. A few people run bitcoin miners, to do that effectively you need to buy special equipment really, though. I've also used it to compile things or crack passcode hashes, that sort of thing.

Don't worry, I'm only testing my own website's data to keep users secure.

[riklaunim]

Raspberry rarely has "idle CPU" Bicoin mining long ago went to ASIC chips and no CPU or even GPU can compete in any way. Other scientific tasks won't do much on Raspberry either, but you can try if they work - but check if they won't start lagging other tasks the board does.

[experix]

"rarely has idle CPU" ? I'm guessing that "idle CPU" is supposed to mean the system is booted up but has nothing to do at the moment, so CPU is powered down as much as possible. Then the question is about finding something for RPi to do at that time.

[chaoticlapras]

Indeed, indeed.

Say, overnight, when the user is sleeping.

[W. H. Heydt]

The main Pi I'm concerned with needs to be up at night so that I can act as the alarm clock in the morning. So far as I am concerned, it's not idle, it's running cron.

[chaoticlapras]

Haha, I use an RPi as an alarm clock too. It plays metal machine music by Lou Reed at 4am. I sleep to MMM music on extremely low volume too.

Yes, I'm insane.

[toxibunny]

Mine runs 24/7 as a spinning rainbow LED lamp at the mo. I'd no doubt do more with it if I could get a stable wifi connection sorted out though...