bitcoin-ticker

bitcoin-ticker is a E-ink ticker that shows usefull information about bitcoin. Due to the limited refresh lifetime, new information is currently shown every 5 minutes and whenever a new block arrives.

Hardware

waveshare 2.7 e-Paper HAT (e.g. from berrybase)
rasberry pi zero WH (e.g. from berrybase)
Power supply Micro USB 5V
micro SD card with 16 GB or more

Usage

Ticker view

The Tickers the following information:

Block height, Mean block intervall in minutes, Time
Minimal Block fee for the first 7 blocks in mempool
Dollar price of a bitcoin
Satoshi per Dollar (also know as moskow time)
Sotoshi per Euro
Euro price of a bitcoin

Whenever a new block has arrived on the blockchain, the following information is shown for 120 seconds:

Euro price of a bitcoin, mean block intervall in minutes, Time
Minimal Block fee for the first 7 blocks in mempool
Blocks in mempook, Number of transaction in mempool
Blocks until next difficulty retargeting, est. difficulty multiplier, est. retarget time
Block height

Due to the limited lifetime of 1000000 refreshes and an expected lifetime of 5 years, the refresh period has been set to 216 seconds.

Buttons

There are four buttons which the following behaviour (Please be patient after pressing, the e-ink is quite slow):

Switch through different ticker views
Switch BTC/fiat graph through 1, 7 and 30 days
Show new block screen (is also shown everytime a new block is created)
Force an update

Flash SDcard

Downlad version 0.1 from btc-ticker-0_1.img.gz
Verify SHA256 checksum. It should be: 9C7465131DE4AB10C5969228CDEFDB747D34F53D378E48E18CA4FDC5342D106F
add wpa_supplicant.conf to the boot partition when mounted on PC

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
country=[COUNTRY_CODE]
network={
  ssid="[WIFI_SSID]"
  psk="[WIFI_PASSWORD]"
}

replace COUNTRY_CODE with the ISO2 code (e.g. DE)
Set WIFI_SSID and WIFI_PASSWORD

Build SDcard from scratch

The SDcard build process is inspired by the great raspiblitz.

Download lastest raspios image
Write the Image to a SD card Tutorial
Add a ssh file to the boot partition when mounted on PC
Add a wpa_supplicant.conf file, as shown in the section before. More information are also available here
Login via SSH to ssh pi@[IP-OF-YOUR-RASPI] using password raspberry

The image can now be build with:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/btc-ticker/btc-ticker/main/build_sdcard.sh && sudo bash build_sdcard.sh

After everything run through, it is possible to login with the password btcticker In order to prepare everyting for release, run /home/admin/XXprepareRelease.sh

Changing the ssh password

In order to secure your btc-ticker in your local network, you should change the SSH password after setting up everything.

Login via SSH to ssh admin@[IP-OF-YOUR-RASPI] using the password btcticker
Change the password (this will be improved in the next release)

echo "pi:NEWPASSWORD" | sudo chpasswd
echo "root:NEWPASSWORD" | sudo chpasswd
echo "admin:NEWPASSWORD" | sudo chpasswd

Replace NEWPASSWORD with the new password.

raipat / btc-ticker