KeepKey first impressions and teardown

I emailed the KeepKey folks, and they sent me a developer unit!

So I guess the 'full disclosure' here is that they sent this to me and I didnt send them any money in exchange.  Or the promise of anything.  They really didnt ask me much other than the address to send it to.

Oh well.  Now we're all on the same page here.

It comes in a classy box.

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This is kinda-sorta what it looked like when I opened the box for the first time.  Its a lovely shade of green inside.

It comes with a nice fabric-covered USB cable and a quality paper to write down your seed words.

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The back of it is a pleasant aluminum.

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The front is plastic, with a tinted window for the screen to shine through.  You can see the damaged clips that held the two halves together.

It was a bugger getting the thing apart.  Those retention clips are solid, and its not going to go back together in any pretty way.  Inside there is a custom molded plastic bracket that holds the board and screen in place, and that was glued solidly in place.

I dont believe that it would hold up submerged in water, but I'd say its fairly tamper-evident.

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And here's the guts.  I havent looked at this in close detail yet, but there are some nice surprizes in here.  The ZIF socket for the screen is very nice, the silkscreen comments many components nicely, and it looks like there's a set of debugging pads nicely lined up in the lower left there.

There's even a pair of LEDs on the board that most people will never see.  I assume those will be gone in future revs.

I was hoping to see a second button hidden on the board.  The one button is labeled SW2, but I didnt find a SW1 on there.  This is a fork of Trezor, but with the omission of a second button, there's no hope of running original Trezor code on this.  What a shame for a product with such great fit and finish.

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The backside is not very interesting.

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powered by an STM32F205RGT6, along with its full MB of flash (more than Trezor, same as the Black Arrow eWallet)

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. . .and she still works!  I'll be taking a look at the software and the user experience soon.

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From a hardware quality perspective, KeepKey is solidly designed and feels 'premium'.  I have no idea what the expected price is going to be, but I sure hope they can be very competitive with Trezor pricing.