So I have setup 4 raspberry Pi's running BOINC on each one, its seems to be working. I assume thats the best way to set it up, installed fresh Stretch OS, Installed BOINC, added my SETI account details, left them running. All 4 Pi's show up in my set stats as individual computers.

1. I see some tasks that the status is "Abandoned" what does this actually mean? will they start to work again or is that it?

2. Also seeing some that are "Completed, waiting for validation" how long does that roughly take?

3. Knowing the Pis is not a fast machine, using 4 of them does that actually give me some decent speed, never installed BOINC onto a normal computer so I have no comparison. Do many people use Pi's for this purpose?

4. Lastly any wiki I can read about the setting in the raspberry pi BOINC software, it has lots of stuff to play with but have no idea what to does, some of it is self explanatory.

5. Any sort of reference on how well my 4 pis are doing my average task credit is 138 is that a good indicator of performance? I plan to leave them on 24/7

6. If anything is found by my computers would I bee informed in some way?

Thanks

So I have setup 4 raspberry Pi's running BOINC on each one, its seems to be working. I assume thats the best way to set it up, installed fresh Stretch OS, Installed BOINC, added my SETI account details, left them running. All 4 Pi's show up in my set stats as individual computers.

1. I see some tasks that the status is "Abandoned" what does this actually mean? will they start to work again or is that it?

2. Also seeing some that are "Completed, waiting for validation" how long does that roughly take?

3. Knowing the Pis is not a fast machine, using 4 of them does that actually give me some decent speed, never installed BOINC onto a normal computer so I have no comparison. Do many people use Pi's for this purpose?

4. Lastly any wiki I can read about the setting in the raspberry pi BOINC software, it has lots of stuff to play with but have no idea what to does, some of it is self explanatory.

5. Any sort of reference on how well my 4 pis are doing my average task credit is 138 is that a good indicator of performance? I plan to leave them on 24/7

6. If anything is found by my computers would I bee informed in some way?

Thanks

Since you don't indicate which project(s) you are running, (besides SETI) some of the questions can't be answered.
1) Abandoned, been a long time since I've seen that, might be not returned by deadline
2) completed waiting is project specific - another user has to do the same work and it has to match or it is sent to yet another user up to the error number of tries, so could be minutes to months, especially at SETI
3) some people do crunch with PI's. They are not very fast, but they don't use a lot of power either.
4) try the wiki for BOINC and if your project(s) have wiki's for their settings, if not try their message boards, like this one.
5) credit numbers are project specific and take at least a month to settle in. My pi https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=8173315
6) project specific. SETI will eventually inform you.

Thank you for the reply, thats most helpful.
Im only running SETI, not explored anything else.

The last time I dabbled in SETI was many years ago (early days of SETI I think) and it was just the screen saver and BOINC was not a thing... I think :)

Cheers

So I have setup 4 raspberry Pi's running BOINC on each one, its seems to be working. I assume thats the best way to set it up, installed fresh Stretch OS, Installed BOINC, added my SETI account details, left them running. All 4 Pi's show up in my set stats as individual computers.

1. I see some tasks that the status is "Abandoned" what does this actually mean? will they start to work again or is that it?

2. Also seeing some that are "Completed, waiting for validation" how long does that roughly take?

3. Knowing the Pis is not a fast machine, using 4 of them does that actually give me some decent speed, never installed BOINC onto a normal computer so I have no comparison. Do many people use Pi's for this purpose?

4. Lastly any wiki I can read about the setting in the raspberry pi BOINC software, it has lots of stuff to play with but have no idea what to does, some of it is self explanatory.

5. Any sort of reference on how well my 4 pis are doing my average task credit is 138 is that a good indicator of performance? I plan to leave them on 24/7

6. If anything is found by my computers would I bee informed in some way?

Thanks

Since you don't indicate which project(s) you are running, (besides SETI) some of the questions can't be answered.
1) Abandoned, been a long time since I've seen that, might be not returned by deadline
2) completed waiting is project specific - another user has to do the same work and it has to match or it is sent to yet another user up to the error number of tries, so could be minutes to months, especially at SETI
3) some people do crunch with PI's. They are not very fast, but they don't use a lot of power either.
4) try the wiki for BOINC and if your project(s) have wiki's for their settings, if not try their message boards, like this one.
5) credit numbers are project specific and take at least a month to settle in. My pi https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=8173315
6) project specific. SETI will eventually inform you.

So I have setup 4 raspberry Pi's running BOINC on each one, its seems to be working. I assume thats the best way to set it up, installed fresh Stretch OS, Installed BOINC, added my SETI account details, left them running. All 4 Pi's show up in my set stats as individual computers.

1. I see some tasks that the status is "Abandoned" what does this actually mean? will they start to work again or is that it?

This basically means that the task is no longer assigned to you. Something happened that caused the task to be abandoned. I have had that happen when I re-install BOINC and it wipes the existing WU out.

2. Also seeing some that are "Completed, waiting for validation" how long does that roughly take?

All WUs are sent to 2 computers and then the results are compared to makes sure they match. This usually means that it is just waiting for the 2nd result to return.

3. Knowing the Pis is not a fast machine, using 4 of them does that actually give me some decent speed, never installed BOINC onto a normal computer so I have no comparison. Do many people use Pi's for this purpose?

I am actually running 5 3B+ now. If you want to see my numbers they are here: 0 1 2 3 4

I have mine set up on their own network with 000 acting as a bridge to connect to the internet. The only other thing I would suggest is getting heat sinks for the Pis since they will get very warm and start to throttle due to heat. With heat sinks and a small fan to move air across, I am getting between 300-400 RAC per Pi.

As a note, for fun, I added BOINC and SETI to a Raspberry Pi Zero W.... I would not recommend. It takes something like 300,000 seconds per task!

4. Lastly any wiki I can read about the setting in the raspberry pi BOINC software, it has lots of stuff to play with but have no idea what to does, some of it is self explanatory.

For the other things that BOINC can do, I would start with https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Boinccmd_tool

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So I have setup 4 raspberry Pi's running BOINC on each one, its seems to be working. I assume thats the best way to set it up, installed fresh Stretch OS, Installed BOINC, added my SETI account details, left them running. All 4 Pi's show up in my set stats as individual computers.

1. I see some tasks that the status is "Abandoned" what does this actually mean? will they start to work again or is that it?

This basically means that the task is no longer assigned to you. Something happened that caused the task to be abandoned. I have had that happen when I re-install BOINC and it wipes the existing WU out.

2. Also seeing some that are "Completed, waiting for validation" how long does that roughly take?

All WUs are sent to 2 computers and then the results are compared to makes sure they match. This usually means that it is just waiting for the 2nd result to return.

3. Knowing the Pis is not a fast machine, using 4 of them does that actually give me some decent speed, never installed BOINC onto a normal computer so I have no comparison. Do many people use Pi's for this purpose?

I am actually running 5 3B+ now. If you want to see my numbers they are here: 0 1 2 3 4

I have mine set up on their own network with 000 acting as a bridge to connect to the internet. The only other thing I would suggest is getting heat sinks for the Pis since they will get very warm and start to throttle due to heat. With heat sinks and a small fan to move air across, I am getting between 300-400 RAC per Pi.

As a note, for fun, I added BOINC and SETI to a Raspberry Pi Zero W.... I would not recommend. It takes something like 300,000 seconds per task!

4. Lastly any wiki I can read about the setting in the raspberry pi BOINC software, it has lots of stuff to play with but have no idea what to does, some of it is self explanatory.

For the other things that BOINC can do, I would start with https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Boinccmd_tool

Thank you for the reply, great to hear someone else running Pi's

Yes I have the cooling covered, my rig was actually running for the passed year as a CPU crypto minor but this made me about $4-5 dollars, so I have discontinued that as re purpose the rig for SETI, each CPU has heat sink then its own small cooling fan, then another full size fan cooling the complete rig... just in case :)

thanks for the discussion and pictures. I have a few pi s rattling around, and to think it might be faster than the mac mini I'm crunching with makes me want to try. They are older though so probably not as good.