KERN

Kern is an experimental project that explores the capabilities of the ESP32-P4 as a platform to perform air-gapped Bitcoin signatures and cryptography.

Hardware

Early development uses the Waveshare ESP32-P4-WiFi6-Touch-LCD-4B.

ESP32-P4 does not contain radio (WiFi, BLE), but this board has a radio in a secondary chip (ESP32-C6 mini). Later the project will migrate to use radio-less, simpler and cheaper boards with ESP32-P4 only.

An OV5647 camera module is also required.

Prerequisites

• esp-idf v5.5.1

Build

Cloning the Repository

This project uses git submodules. You have two options:

Option 1: Clone with submodules (Recommended)

When cloning the project for the first time, make sure to clone it recursively to include all submodules:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/odudex/Kern.git

Option 2: Initialize submodules after cloning

If you've already cloned the repository without the --recursive flag, you can initialize and update the submodules with:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Building the Project

Build the project from the root directory with:

idf.py build

or flash the project to the device with:

idf.py flash

and if you are debugging you may want to run monitor too:

idf.py monitor

Optional: Using just

If you have just installed, you can use the provided .justfile:

just build   # Build the project
just flash   # Flash to device
just clean   # Clean build artifacts

Build Options

Enable/disable Auto-focus

To enable camera auto-focus, enable camera focus motor on menuconfig:

CONFIG_CAM_MOTOR_DW9714=y
CONFIG_CAMERA_OV5647_ENABLE_MOTOR_BY_GPIO0=y

Roadmap

• ✅ Basic UI

• ✅ Camera video pipeline

• ✅ Static QR codes

  • ✅ Scan
  • ✅ Display

• Animated QR Codes

  • Scan, parse and export
    • ✅ UR
    • ✅ pMofN
    • ❌ BBQr

• New Mnemonic

  • ✅ From dice rolls
  • ❌ From camera

• Load Mnemonic

  • ✅ From manual input (typing words)
  • From QR codes
    • ✅ Plain
    • ✅ SeedQR
    • ✅ Compact SeedQR
  • ❌ Encrypted

• Back up

  • ✅ Words
  • ❌ QR codes
  • ❌ Encrypted

• ✅ Passphrases

• Networks

  • ✅ Mainnet
  • ✅ Testnet

• Policy types

  • ✅ Single-sig
  • ❌ Multisig
  • ❌ Miniscript

• Descriptors

  • ❌ Loading
  • ❌ Exporting, saving
  • ❌ Encrypting/Decrypting

• Script type

  • ✅ Native Segwit
  • ❌ Nested Segwit
  • ❌ Taproot

• ❌ OTP based secure boot

• ❌ KEF encryption

License

MIT