I had similar feelings but the comments below about adding an SDR to it with an M.2 slot got me looking a little closer. This has an 8-core Rockchip A72/A53 processor and 8GB of RAM. This is not an incremental improvement over the Flipper Zero, this is something else entirely. Hmmmmm...
It's more like a portable Raspberry Pi with better efficiency and more IO. And hopefully even better mainline Linux support out of the gate.
The key question will be how much it costs. Beyond $250-300, it's a lot more of a niche product. Below $250 would be very interesting. I don't think it will be below $300. With current memory and storage pricing, probably $350-400 is more realistic :(
Its got 8gb of ddr5 in it. That's already a huge chunk of $300 - I'm not even sure they will get the BOM down to $300.
I'm guessing it'll be $1000 or so. (Which is good for me. Well above my impulse buy threshold. I don't regret buying my Flipper Zero, because it was within my impulse buy and not regret it threshold.)
I had plenty of fun reverse engineering a 433.92 MHz protocol curtain motors at my house use. Once that was done and I taught first my Flipper Zero, then a RPi with a C1101 to actuate the motors, the Flipper is sitting idly in the drawer.
I've had more success. Flipper taught me about sdr, and I was able to reverse quite a lot from my garage door pilot. Then I went on an adventure of cracking Keeloq cipher, and I haven't stopped since.
I've been happy with my Zero, cloned some friends apartment building door fobs, and using it for missing remotes for TV's and fans. But that damn dolphin is always angry with me for not using it enough.
I have done exactly the same type and amount of stuff with my flipper zero, probably in the target demo. still, no complaints! I think the one is a cool toy that I will one day (if I’m lucky) use as the perfect solution for a problem. If I can do that just once, it’ll be worth the price for me.
Im the same way. Ive used it maybe twice to change tv channels. I mostly got it for the novelty value, probably gonna sell it.
Ive been more excited for this https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/interrupt/
interrupt-linux-powered-hacking-gadget/description. I used to have a One Plus One with Nethunter. That was a lot more useful as a hacking device. The only issue is that it required external adapters for things like wifi deauth, ir remote, e.t.c. But the ability to customize things on the fly was way better, compared to Flipper which you really can't do.
Display connected to the microcontroller instead of the Linux SoC is an interesting choice
Actually, putting all of this powerful hardware into a custom aluminum enclosure with gorilla glass and then using a 6-bit low resolution grayscale display is a weird choice. I guess they were going for a certain grayscale low-fi vibe?
The "needs verification" and "needs clarification" lines are weird. Like they asked someone (or ChatGPT?) to review some docs and post something, but forgot to review it first.
> Display connected to the microcontroller instead of the Linux SoC is an interesting choice
There's a comment at the bottom about that. Quoting the response:
> From the Linux side, it's a standard framebuffer and keyboard that applications interact with as usual. However, our connection allows the MCU to intercept them and overlay additional content — for example, if the CPU hangs, we can still show a menu on the display and respond to button presses, say for a reboot. This also lets us have a low-power mode with the display still on.
Re:choice of display, I'm betting it's for power saving. If you need a better display you can use the HDMI port or DisplayPort USB-C port and just hook it right up to a monitor/TV
I'm guessing it'll have a similar phone app to the Zero. I quite often use that, sometimes foe stealth so i can have the FZ in my pocket and look like I'm doomscrolling and not sniffing the airwaves, and sometimes just because almost 60 year old eyes have a better time using my phone screen instead of the tiny/grainy FZ one.
The Flipper Zero's screen is transflective, I suspect this one is the same. While this technology is possible on larger color displays, it is more common to find these manufactured as small grey-scale screens. They're ideal for battery operated devices because of their low power requirements -- they are legible with the backlight entirely off as long as there is light in the room.
Grayscale displays have no subpixels (or just one, depends how you view it) which should allow for more light from the backlight to pass through compared to a color display, thus reducing energy needs for a given brightness.
maybe I'm blind, but it looks like there's no radio! like there's wifi and bluetooth, sure, but I don't see NFC or RFID or sub-1ghz radio, at all.
imo the flipper always needed to be a software-defined transciever, with a small FPGA to drive it, like the other SDRs on the market. I'm disappointed they seem to have forsaken radio completely.
No pricing on that sSDR yet, but their single channel M.2 SDR is $360. My guess it the dual channel one would be close to $500. Nice, but above my impulse buy threshold... (It won't surprise me if a Flipper One with that sSDR in it will cost close to $1,500.)
Lots of laptops have M.2 ports. You can also get M.2 for Raspberry Pi. I don't know why I would buy this device. I guess it's cool that it's small, but the screen sucks.
The flipper zero was already in a grey area because it easily enables one to do things in licensed bands and do things you’re not allowed to do in unlicensed bands. They can’t plausibly add even more functions in this area and still sell to the public. Presumably all of the interfaces they added are for users to add the functions under their own responsibility.
Most likely you will have to buy the M2 adapters, for cellular, wifi, maybe zigbee and others radios, and you will switch between them, it’s also good for their profit but bad for your pocket.
I wasn't expecting the Ethernet ports. I would love to be able to plug this in an know in a second what tagged vlans are preset, what addr/mask the DHCP server offered, is PXE an option? blink an LED if there's a new RA, ipv6 neighbor, etc. Blink an LED if there's been a 802.3x pause frame in the last 500ms, or 802.3Qbb while we're at it. With the pair of ports, let me MITM so the 802.1X negotiation can take place before I start sniffing.
I like a device with these kinds of specs and this size, but I'd want all of this and all the hardware on the flipper zero as well. Seems all the RF/radio stuff is gone :/ I'd want at least that and more.
I mean, one of the very first things I would do on a such powerful device is to run a voice-controlled agent with access to all the IO the Flipper has and let the agent take over the device to do whatever I want.
I can imagine having your agent of preference writing python scripts on the fly for whatever scenario you have in mind based on your spoken desires is like... literally a dream device, at least for me.
Dual gigabit ethernet + even 6ghz wifi means this will likely work nicely as a travel router, which would mean I might actually carry it. There are a whole bunch of portable server use cases this opens up especially as it seems to have a bit of CPU grunt. My Zero was fun but has languished in drawers.
I've heard some professionally inclined RFID engineers dismiss these as mere toys and not useful compared to professional grade hardware. Perhaps some of those folk are on HN if so what are the tool sets you actually use that can be sold to the public?
RF design is very much an art, and the difference between works and works really well without harmonics and noise is a matter of design subtleties and often expensive parts. There are decent SDR setups around $500-700 that are known to be pretty good, but you have to go out of your way to buy them from the actual design houses, because despite being “identical”, the clones are not the same. In RF, the devil is in the details.
I like my HackRFOne, but be aware it's half-duplex, so it can transmit as well as receive - but can only do one of them at a time. For a little more money you can get full duplex SDRs, which opens up a bunch of extra interesting sttuff you can do.
A hackrf is less expensive than a flipper and more capable in every way, except the dolphin gifs.
The flipper's primary use is that looks like a children's toy, which makes it far more effective for demos of how bad an orgs security is to not-especially-technical stakeholders than something like a hackrf or chameleon
It’s not a toy, it’s an AIO portable hacking budget device, it’s like comparing your pocket swiss knife to your workshop. Obviously your workshop will be better, but you are not taking it anywhere! I have for example a bladRF and limeSDR for more in depth work in radios, but I do still use flipper occasionally where bringing a laptop+sdr+antenna is hard or impossible, let alone looking like a dork doing so. For rfid, it’s great to put all your keyfobs in one place and backing them up, the condo I live in right now charges $50 if you lost your fob and needed a replacement, among many other usages. And those are some of the very basic use cases where it’s handy to have it portable.
Lots wondering about the dropping of NFC/other contactless radios. I'd argue Flipper never did this as well as a real Proxmark, and the Flipper One does well to stray from the half baked implementation in the zero
That's pretty simple - the chosen display is best for core usage. Cleay visible in bright sun or dark, sharp angles, easy on the battery. For anything else, there's a HDMI out isn't there.
While I am fan for all the extra nerdy stuff, especially the cellular connectivity, but I doubt the battery endurance will be impressive, my current zero lasts weeks on a single charge. This is more of rpi plus addons in one package, great, but until we get to know the heat and battery life.
They mention in the comments intending to have modes that solely run on the microcontroller, so I imagine that might help somewhat.
This also feels like the target market is people who said they dangled this off an RPi-alike to do something that the microcontroller simply did not have the processing to do.
