PiTrezor cold wallet creation and review

Earlier today, I created a Raspberry Pi Trezor (cold wallet) for cryptocurrency using that cool Adafruit 1.3" OLED bonnet.

It seems to reasonably work from a fork of the original code. It presents itself to the Trezor Bridge software and to your workstation as a slave USB device. I suppose you could think of the entire thing as a smart USB thumb drive, if you will.

The code image is smaller than you'd normally expect (50MB). I'll get in there and take it apart later from a software standpoint.

Notes:

  • The interface is beautiful on the small screen with attractive fonts and functional animations.
  • I don't love websites which only work with a single browser. In this case, it's Google Chrome of course and it was necessary to install that for Trezor to work at all.
  • The standard screen assumes that the buttons are positioned below it, not so for the Adafruit hat. So you just have to guess that the furthest button equals the right-most button and it all works out.
  • The GPIO pin layout of the OLED bonnet is different from the native Trezor device so of course, the bootloader upgrade routine doesn't work as expected. It will be necessary to recompile and reload the image in order for this to work. I'll have to review all that to see how it affects me to I don't love anything in the cryptospace which can't keep up to the current state of the art.
  • Having the micro USB cable sticking out of the side of the Pi just seems awkward so I'll work up a serial connection to the GPIO pins with a USB plug tail and incorporate all this into a slick-looking case.
  • I don't think I enjoy the website interface for selecting other cryptocurrencies. I think I like the KeepKey version of this better, to be honest.
  • Although Trezor suggests they're compatible with other currencies, they seem to only be able to do Ethereum via a third-party. The hand-off to that third-party provider was about as ugly as it gets and I aborted. You shouldn't have to create multiple accounts to simple store a wallet.
  • Unless I gain more confidence with all this, I won't be putting any money in the wallet but it's an interesting exercise.
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You are correct, the hand off and handling is currently terrible. Trezor just recently announced native eth/token support coming soon.

Trezor does however currently support BTC/LTC/BCH and maybe a couple others.