The open source nature of many hardware cryptocurrency wallets allows anyone to create a DIY wallet like Trezor from scratch, but it requires certain skills.
Florin Cocos, an electronic design manager from Romania, built his own Trezor with the wallet's open source in 2018 without having access to a “real” Trezor device.
On his YouTube channel, voltmeter, Coconuts proven the process of creating the DIY Trezor Model One, using electronic components purchased from distributors such as Farnell. The engineer specifically used a Farnell microcontroller and a printed circuit board (PCB) ordered from a production house in China, extracted from a Gerber file available on Trezor's GitHub.
“Parts can be purchased through any reputable distributor such as Farnell, DigiKey, RS, Newark, TME. It really depends on your location; Get them from your local dealer. You can get the OLED screen on AliExpress or eBay”, Cocos wrote about his voltlog Blog.
Five years after posting his DIY Trezor video, Cocos is still excited about his DIY crypto device. “I have used the device and would always trust my DIY device over an off-the-shelf device,” the engineer told Cointelegraph in an interview on September 19.
It took Voltlog about 10 hours to set up the DIY Trezor
However, the availability of Trezor on the market was not the main reason for Cocos to build the DIY wallet: the engineer focused on spreading the word about open source projects.
"Open source designs are gaining more and more popularity and, in my opinion, this is the future," Cocos said, adding:
“You have full control over the safety aspects and it's always fun to create something yourself. For me personally, the idea of doing something useful for myself contributes more than anything else to the decision to start such a project.”
The entire process of creating and installing firmware on the DIY Trezor wallet took approximately 10 hours for Cocos, minus the time spent receiving the ordered PCBs and other components.
“It took me about two or three hours to evaluate the project and generate the necessary Gerber files to upload to a PCB manufacturing service and order all the necessary parts from well-known distributors such as Mouser or Digikey,” said the design director. After receiving the PCBs, it took about five hours to assemble the PCB, update it with firmware and get it up and running, Cocos added.
Building hardware for DIY Trezor was the easiest part, the engineer told Cointelegraph, adding that updating the firmware and getting it to work with the app was “a little more challenging.”
How difficult is it to build a DIY Trezor for an average user?
Since the entire build process didn't take long, one might think that creating a DIY Trezor might not be that difficult for an average user, but that's not the case, according to Cocos.
According to the engineer, it is "almost impossible" for the average user to build such a device without any knowledge of electronics. "If 10 is the hardest, then I'd give it a 10," Cocos said while trying to estimate the difficulty of building a DIY Trezor for the average user.
He added that the process could be simplified, but only at the cost of significant security risks related to supply chain and manufacturing vulnerabilities.
“Things could be improved by creating a 'fabricator package' for the project, with all the necessary fabrication files in their specific format and simply uploading them to one of the PCB and PCBA prototyping services available online. However, while at that stage the difficulty level would be approximately 3 on a scale of 1 to 10, control over the supply chain and manufacturing step is lost, so there is an additional security risk," stated the engineer.
Cocos suggested that efforts to build a DIY Trezor without proper knowledge could pose significant safety risks, adding:
“I wouldn't recommend building such a hardware wallet if you don't have experience with electronics and specifically soldering small surface mount components. If that's the case, the result is probably just escaping magic smoke or, at best, a brick that does nothing.”
Cocos, who described himself as a casual cryptocurrency user, has a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and has been designing and building electronics professionally for 10 years and as a hobby for more than 15 years. He believes that someone doesn't need to be an expert like him to build a DIY Trezor, but it still requires some experience.
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"Just a year or two of tinkering with electronics at a moderately fast pace by a person with moderate technical skills should be enough to greatly increase the chances of success," Cocos said.
As previously reported, some cryptocurrency users have victim of fake hardware wallets purchasing the devices from sources other than the direct manufacturer or official supplier. As such, hardware wallet manufacturers like Ledger and Trezor have always urged their customers to only purchase hardware wallets from official vendors.
As there are some regions where hardware wallets cannot be shipped due to issues such as sanctions, companies like Trezor suggested that the open source nature of the devices could be a solution. “Trezor is completely open source, anyone can build their own using the schematics and BOM on Github,” Trezor Bitcoin analyst Josef Tetek told Cointelegraph.
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