those of you who read my reports about the seedsigner know that i love it. it is a great way of signing your bitcoin transaction securely and keeping your seed offline all the time.

i started the project by using a pi2 zero which i had bought for 25 bucks together with a pi4 which i intended to use for a lightning project. i had to solder the pins and the heat of the solder iron removed the camera port from the pi2. it worked but without a camera. i had to manually type the seed every time i used it. as you know this is very tedious. my fingers started to hurt after some time. anyway i was excited that it worked flawlessly with sparrow, specter and even with bluewallet. i decided to buy another pi zero for 25 bucks which already had the pins installed. i ordered a cam from aliexpress and scanning the qr worked flawlessly.

recently i had to travel and packed the seedsigner into a travelbag and the sim tray came slightly off from the board. i superglued it on again because soldering is too hard on this extremely small and narrow board. i have to add that i never got hold of an enclosure. the prices and shipping cost were prohibitive. i could screw the camera on the back and it worked. after the sdcard tray came off it stopped working. also the seedsigner/balena etcher or something else rendered 3 sd cards useless. i have tried to detect them with a card reader on windows, linux and osx. no os could detect them. i tried diskpart without success. i had saved corrupt usb sticks before...

as a backup for the seedsigner i had bought a maix amigo from aliexpress. it can be flashed with opensource firmware krux. when the second seedsigner went down, i started to use maix amigo and i was stunned about the superiority in terms of user friendliness, modern features and just the general experience with it:

the maix amigo is much smaller than a phone, thicker, very light and features a touch screen. it also has a battery included which allowes you to use it completely disconnected from any cable. the battery charges via standard usbc cable. the maix amigo cost me 48 bucks only. that is all. even the cable was included. the maix amigo is a standard opensource industrial board which is used for different technical programming projects. no one would ever guess that it is a wallet (which it is not anyway).

more advantages: three choices of installing the software: you can build the software from source you can use a prebuilt image, connect the maix amigo and flash it to the memory, or you can just copy the code to an sd card, insert the sd card and it will start up with the firmware installed. no need to use any software wrecking your sd card.

you also have the option to store your seeds, as many as you want, encrypted on the sd card. you can also use it without any sd card. it will delete all information as soon as you shut it down.

i find it the best solution at the moment. large screen, intuitive, secure. highly recommended.