Russignol: Raspberry Pi Hardware Signer for Tezos Bakers — Full Demo & Setup
Save ~900 MB of consensus data per day by upgrading from a Ledger Nano to a purpose-built BLS signing device. The Russignol is a hardware signer built on the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W with a Waveshare 2.13" e-ink touch display that signs blocks in under 6 milliseconds.
In this video I walk through:
Device overview and live signing demo
3-second boot on a stripped-down, security-hardened OS
Custom Rust e-ink display driver (replacing the reference C driver)
Downloading and flashing the SD card image using the host utility
First-boot key generation (keys never leave the device)
Baker setup — automatic device detection, network config, and key registration
Fully compatible with the Octez Signer protocol
Tezos features aggregate signatures, but they only activate once 50% of bakers uses BLS. The Ledger Nano hardware can't compute BLS signatures fast enough for 6-second blocks — this device solves that.
Get started: https://russignol.com
Source code: https://github.com/RichAyotte/russignol
I'm Richard Ayotte — 30 years in software development, 8 years baking on Tezos.