Run a Metaverse Node on a Raspberry Pi

The latest Metaverse release 0.9.1 now also comes with a arm64 version that is compatible with the aarch64 devices like the Raspberry Pi 4. The low energy consumption of a raspberry pi makes it a great alternative to have it running on your desktop computer or notebook. The Raspberry setup allows you to have it always running and therefore avoid some of the sync problems that can occur if you stop the computer without properly shutting down your Metaverse node.

What do you need?

You need a Raspberry Pi 4 and it should have at least 2GB of memory. For the storage we suggest that your Micro SD card has 64GB. To be able to run the aarch64 mvsd binary file you need to make your Pi boot a 64bit kernel. The easiest way I found was to use the Ubuntu Server image or Manjaro. Manjaro has the advantage that it comes with a nice desktop while Ubuntu Server just has the terminal. Of course you can install any desktop you want but if you want to connect using WIFI and you have never done it from a terminal then you should go for Manjaro.

Prepare your Operating System

If you already have a 64bit kernel running on your Pi you can skip this step. To find out you can use the command

uname -a

If should contain the term aarch64

If you don’t have an operating system installed of the term aarch64 is not included in the response of the previous command then you need to install a new one. We suggest Manjaro.

Download the image from their website to your computer. Copy the downloaded image to your Micro SD card.

Linux

Plug in your SD card lookup the device name. You can use the command

lsblk

In my case it was the device name sdb. Please make sure that you are sure to use the correct name. Otherwise you might overwrite some important data on your hard-drive or other connected devices.

xzcat Manjaro-ARM-xfce-rpi4–20.02.img.xz | sudo dd bs=4m of=/dev/YOUR_DEVICE_NAME

Now just insert your SD card into your raspberry and power it. If you have a HDMI cable attached to a screen you should see it booting Manjaro.

OSX

Plug in your SD card lookup the device name. You can use the following command.

diskutil list

In my case it was the device name disk2. Please make sure that you are sure to use the correct name. Otherwise you might overwrite some important data on your hard-drive or other connected devices.

xzcat Manjaro-ARM-xfce-rpi4–20.02.img.xz | sudo dd bs=4m of=/dev/YOUR_DEVICE_NAME

Now just insert your SD card into your raspberry and power it. If you have a hdmi cable attached to a screen you should see it booting Manjaro.

Windows

Unzip the Manjaro image (Manjaro-ARM-xfce-rpi4–20.02.img.xz).

Download Win32DiskImager to install the Manjaro image on your SD card.

In Win32DiskManager, open the image file (Manjaro-ARM-xfce-rpi4–20.02.img), select your SD card as the device and click on Write.

Now just insert your SD card into your raspberry and power it. If you have a hdmi cable attached to a screen you should see it booting Manjaro.

Connect to a Network

If you use a wired network you just need to plug in the cable. The setup of a wifi connection is just as simple. Just click the network icon from the bottom bar and select the SSID of the WiFi network you want to join.

Setup your Metaverse Node

Visit mvs.org and download the raspberry version of the desktop wallet. Open the downloaded file and extract it. Now open your file manager and locate the directory where you extracted the files to. Do a right click and open a terminal.

If you want to use the browser frontend you can install it using the following command:

sh mvs-install.sh

To start the node you can use

./mvsd

Wait some time for the database to initialize. This step will take around 3 minutes. It should connect to the seed nodes and sync blocks.

To open the frontend just open the browser and visit http://127.0.0.1:8820. You need to have mvsd running when trying to open the frontend.

To use the command line interface you can use

./mvs-cli

For more information just visit the official documentation.

Congrats, you now have a fully functional and eco-friendly Metaverse node!

Use your Raspberry as a low energy PoS mining server or experiment with the functions of your Raspberry device.

Raspberry Pi showing the Metaverse Blockchain height