COLDCARD Hardware Wallet

Coldcard is an Affordable, Ultra-secure & Verifiable Hardware Wallet for Bitcoin. Get yours at Coldcard.com

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Quick Links

Reproducible Builds

To have confidence this source code tree is the same as the binary on your device, you can rebuild it from source and get exactly the same bytes. This process has been automated using Docker. Steps are as follows:

Install Docker and start it.
Install make (GNUMake) if you don't already have it.

Checkout a specific version of the code, and start the process.

git clone https://github.com/Coldcard/firmware.git
git checkout 2023-12-21T1526-v5.2.2
# get a copy of that binary into ./releases/2023-12-21T1526-v5.2.2-mk4-coldcard.dfu
cd firmware/stm32
make -f MK4-Makefile repro

At the end of the process a clear confirmation message is shown, or the differences.
Build products can be found firmware/stm32/built.
If you do not trust the results of make repro refer to docs/notes-on-repro.md which breaks down the process.
Process for Q firmware is the same, but change MK4-Makefile in last step to Q1-Makefile

Long-Lived Branches

We are now maintaining two branches: master and edge.

"Edge" will contain features that may not be ready for prime time, such as Taproot or Miniscript. Our standards for releasing new Edge versions are lower, so we can iterate faster and get these advancements out to other developers.

Q and Mk4 share the same code base. Individual files that are added, or removed, can be see in differences between shared/manifest_mk4.py and shared/manifest_q1.py. Common files are in shared/manifest.py.

Check-out and Setup

NOTE This is the master branch and covers the latest hardware (Mk4 and Q). See branch v4-legacy for firmware which supports only Mk3/Mk2 and earlier.

Do a checkout, recursively, to get all the submodules:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/Coldcard/firmware.git

Already checked-out and getting git errors? Do this:

git fetch
git reset --hard origin/master

Alternatively, to get the latest release, you checkout a tagged branch:

git clone https://github.com/Coldcard/firmware.git
cd firmware
git checkout $(git describe --match "20*" --abbrev=0)
git submodule update --init --recursive

Do not use a path with any spaces in it. The Makefiles do not handle that well and we're not planning to fix it.

Keep in mind that python requirements may change between versions, so at the top level, do this command:

pip install -r requirements.txt

macOS

Python 3.5 or higher and Homebrew is required.

If working on an ARM-based MacOS system, you may want to create a new shell with arch -x86_64 bash before starting, or continuing to work on this source tree.

Setup and run the desktop simulator

You'll probably need to install at least these packages:

brew install sdl2 xterm swig
brew install --cask xquartz gcc-arm-embedded

Used to be these were needed as well:

brew tap PX4/px4
brew search px4/px4/gcc-arm-none-eabi

Then install the newest version, currently 83:

brew install px4/px4/gcc-arm-none-eabi-83

You may need to brew upgrade gcc-arm-embedded because we need 10.2 or higher.

Then:

brew install automake autogen virtualenv
virtualenv -p python3 ENV
source ENV/bin/activate (or source ENV/bin/activate.csh based on shell preference)
pip install -U pip
pip install -r requirements.txt
# apply micropython patch
pushd external/micropython
git apply ../../macos-mpy.patch
popd
make -C external/micropython/mpy-cross
cd unix; make setup && make ngu-setup && make && ./simulator.py

You may need to reboot to avoid a DISPLAY is not set error.

The next time you want to run the simulator, you can simply do

source ENV/bin/activate && cd unix && ./simulator.py

Building the firmware

cd ../cli; pip install --editable .
cd ../stm32; make setup && make; make firmware-signed.dfu
The resulting file, firmware-signed.dfu can be loaded directly onto a Coldcard, using this command (already installed based on above)
ckcc upgrade firmware-signed.dfu

Which looks like this:

[ENV] [firmware/stm32 42] ckcc upgrade firmware-signed.dfu  
675328 bytes (start @ 293) to send from 'firmware-signed.dfu'
Uploading  [##########--------------------------]   29%  0d 00:01:04

Big Sur Issues

defaults write org.python.python ApplePersistenceIgnoreState NO will suppress a warning about Python[22580:10101559] ApplePersistenceIgnoreState: Existing state will not be touched. New state will be written to...

See https://bugs.python.org/issue32909

Linux

All steps you need to install and run the Coldcard simulator on Ubuntu 20.04:

# Install (system) requirements, tools and libraries
apt install build-essential git python3 python3-pip libudev-dev gcc-arm-none-eabi libffi-dev xterm swig libpcsclite-dev python-is-python3 autoconf libtool python3-venv

# Get sources, this takes a long time (because of external libraries), then open
git clone --recursive https://github.com/Coldcard/firmware.git
cd firmware

# Apply address patch
git apply unix/linux_addr.patch

#  * below is needed for ubuntu 24.04
pushd external/micropython
git apply ../../ubuntu24_mpy.patch
popd
#  * 


# Create Python virtual environment and activate it
python3 -m venv ENV  # or virtualenv -p python3 ENV
source ENV/bin/activate

# Install dependencies
pip install -U pip setuptools
pip install -r requirements.txt #general requirements
pip install pysdl2-dll # Ubuntu needs this dependency

# Build the Coldcard simulator
cd unix
pushd ../external/micropython/mpy-cross/
make  # mpy-cross
popd
make setup
make ngu-setup
make

# Run the simulator in the active virtualenv
./simulator.py

# Later, if you want to run it (after a reboot). This assumes you extracted the git repo in ~ (home)
cd ~/firmware
source ENV/bin/activate
cd unix
./simulator.py

Also make sure that you have your python3 symlinked to python.

Code Organization

Top-level dirs:

shared

shared code between desktop test version and real-deal
expected to be largely in python, and higher-level
new code found only on the Mk4 will be listed in manifest_mk4.py code exclusive to earlier hardware is in manifest_mk3.py

unix

unix (macOS) version for testing/rapid dev
this is a simulator for the product

testing

test cases and associated data

stm32

embedded binaries (and building), for actual product hardware
final target is a binary file for loading onto hardware

external

code from other projects, ie. the dreaded submodules

graphics

images which ship as part of the final product (icons)

stm32/bootloader

32k of factory-set code that you cannot change (Mk3)
however, you can inspect what code is on your coldcard and compare to this.

stm32/mk4-bootloader stm32/q1-bootloader

128k of factory-set code that you cannot change for Mk4 or Q
however, you can inspect what code is on your coldcard and compare to this.

hardware

schematic and bill of materials for the Coldcard, all versions.

unix/work/...

/MicroSD/* files on "simulated" microSD card
/VirtDisk/* simulated emulated virtual Disk files.
/settings/*.aes persistent settings for Simulator

Support

Found a bug? Email: support@coinkite.com