Build Your Own Node on a Raspberry Pi

A Raspberry Pi makes a brilliant Monero node: it sips power, runs silently, costs little, and can stay on 24/7 in a drawer. Building one yourself is the cheapest route to a full node — and you'll understand exactly what it's doing. This lesson walks through the parts, the one thing people get wrong (storage), and the setup.

What You'll Need

• A Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 (4 GB RAM or more). A mini-PC works just as well if you prefer.
• An SSD (USB or NVMe) with room to spare — see the storage note below. This is the most important part.
• A reliable power supply, a case (ideally with a fan or heatsink), and an Ethernet connection for stability.
• A microSD card just for the operating system.

The One Rule: Use an SSD, Not a microSD Card

The Monero blockchain is large and extremely write-heavy during sync. A microSD card is far too slow for this and will wear out and fail. Always put the blockchain on an SSD. You can boot the OS from the SSD too. If you're tight on space, plan to run a pruned node, which cuts the storage need to roughly a third while still fully validating.

Step 1 — Install the OS

Flash Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit) to the microSD (or SSD) using the Raspberry Pi Imager, enable SSH, set a strong password, boot it up, and update:

sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y

Step 2 — Install monerod

Download the official ARM64 Monero CLI from getmonero.org/downloads (verify the hashes as in Running or Choosing a Node), unpack it, and point the data directory at your SSD:

./monerod --data-dir /mnt/ssd/monero --prune-blockchain

It will begin the initial sync. On a Pi this can take a while the first time; after that it just keeps up with new blocks.

Step 3 — Run It as a Service

So the node starts on boot and restarts if it crashes, create a small systemd service for monerod. The official user guides include a ready-made unit file you can adapt — set it to run as a non-root user with the data dir on your SSD.

Step 4 — Make It Reachable on Your Network

To let your other devices use it, bind the wallet RPC so your LAN can reach it:

./monerod --data-dir /mnt/ssd/monero --prune-blockchain \
  --rpc-bind-ip 0.0.0.0 --confirm-external-bind --restricted-rpc

Note the Pi's local IP (e.g. 192.168.1.50) — you'll point your wallets at 192.168.1.50:18081 next lesson. Keep it on your own network; only expose it to the internet if you intend to run a public node.

That's a Full Node

For the price of a Pi and an SSD you now have a private, always-on, fully-validating Monero node — no monthly fees, no third party seeing your wallet's queries. Next: use it from your phone and desktop.