Flipper One — we need your help
123 points by strugee
123 points by strugee
I would buy one of these. Or three.
I wonder if they have the linux side of these boards going so far... I'd love to try one of my immutable Void Linux setups on that device. This could be an always-on computer in my pocket, if I can use something to get bluetooth on the device for my keyboard and audio setup.
I would buy one too, it looks like a fun Linux computer to have around when traveling.
I looked at their developer portal to see if I could contribute, but I really dislike Discord. I think that if they really want to "build it openly" they should use something else.
Because I enjoy spitting into the wind, I'll point out that Zulip offers hosting for open source projects, offers opt-in actually open publishing for channels, and is itself open source (Apache 2)
Unfortunately the people behind Zulip were bought by Anthropic. (https://lobste.rs/s/2whryd/announcing_zulip_foundation)
…and they’re transferring the project to the non-profit foundation they announced so I don’t see the issue here?
So 3 out of 4 of the initial board of directors will be from Anthropic.
https://lobste.rs/s/2whryd/announcing_zulip_foundation#c_wa5dms
The board of the Zulip Foundation is the people who were already the leaders of the Zulip project, and the foundation provides a mechanism to replace them. I far prefer this to "we set up a foundation led by some folks who you don't know, but they control it now. Bye!"
I wonder why they removed so much radio technology as opposed to the Zero.
Ah well, it's probably going to be too expensive for me anyway. I'm currently ogling one of those soon-to-be-Kickstartered M5Stack thingies. Granted, way less powerful, but at least more buttons and LoRa is only one additional module away.
(I have up to now owned neither a Flipper nor an M5Stack device)
What are you likely to use it for? I find the use cases to be rather limited for my day to day.
Granted, it's a toy. But I actually could make use of the IR Tx in my home, use it as a music player, tinker with it, and I'm genuinely curious if LoRa messaging is a good option to call the kids home without having to give them phones. Walkie-Talkie range is too low for that.
Off-topic: I would love to hear about your immutable Void Linux setups, if you have written about it anywhere!
immutable Void Linux
Tell me more please! I use OpenBSD on the desktop these days instead of Void, but I still keep it around on another machine to stay up to date on the distro. Is this something you built yourself or is there an "immutable Void" project out there?
I have a flipper zero. It's mainly fancy e-waste, now. Just like the various raspberry pis that you buy to do "projects" but end up catching dust in my closet.
Unfortunately, I've ended up in a similar boat. Its such a cool little piece of tech and I enjoyed writing little things for it for a while, but there isn't much I found myself using it for that I wouldn't rather do on my laptop. Occasionally the pocket-sized form factor was rather convenient but I found it usually didn't matter as I already had my laptop (or even my phone) anyways.
Build an unconventional hardware platform based on a co-processor architecture that pairs a microcontroller with a CPU
How is that unconventional? Has everyone forgotten the BeagleBone Black? The new Qualcomm Arduinos are like this too.
What's a device in 2026 without AI, right?
A device hugely attractive to everyone who's tired of "AI"..
All the RockChip boards I know of have NPUs built in. My PineNote has one, even. It just kinda sits there unused like all the NPUs built into laptops these days. Think I might try to write a program for fun that runs on a NPU one of these weekends, just kinda sad thinking of all that unused silicon.
How is that unconventional? Has everyone forgotten the BeagleBone Black? The new Qualcomm Arduinos are like this too.
You don't have to be "the first and only" to be unconventional. So there was some other board that did the same, so what? It's still not a conventional design, don't you agree?
It is an incredibly conventional design beyond what the person you're replying to knows. Heterogenous architectures have been around in strength in embedded, something I can personally verify starting from at least 2020 as I've been keeping up with embedded since then. Most ARM processors, in fact, already pair application cores with microcontroller cores.
Your desktop CPU has at least one microcontroller inside it.
Even implemented in two chips, it isn't unique. Devices with multiple power domains are likely to follow this pattern as well.
It is an incredibly conventional design beyond what the person you're replying to knows. <...> Most ARM processors, in fact, already pair application cores with microcontroller cores.
Sure, and every single desktop CPU in widespread use has an Intel ME or AMD PSP on it. I'm very much aware of that. However, it's a materially different thing, because none of these cores are intended for running user code.
Heterogenous architectures have been around in strength in embedded, something I can personally verify starting from at least 2020 as I've been keeping up with embedded since then.
Also true of embedded — it is full of specialized heterogeneous solutions, because the entire field of embedded computing is made of unusual and specialized problems. That still does not make them conventional.
When you ask a hobbyist to imagine an ARM SBC, it's very likely that they won't imagine a board with a programmable MCU coprocessor on it. A heterogeneous machine isn't what an average developer instantly thinks of when asked to imagine a computer that their code is going to run on. Thus, it is "unconventional" within context of general-purpose computers (or hobbyist platforms). That's all.
Indeed, this was all about specifically programmable, real-time, full-of-low-speed-IO microcontrollers, not the general concept of having an MCU core to do anything including a service tasks, nor about accelerator style cores (lmao, beyond what I know, as someone who's been around for longer..)
But I don't agree with the strict line between hobbyist stuff and "professional serious business" embedded. Only thinking of Raspberries and Arduino Uno clones is a very reductive view of what hobby-ism is, I think. Heck the BeagleBoards are very much hobby market stuff.
I'm not sure if you noticed the audience of the linked post was the "hardware hacker" community. My response fits the context perfectly. The average developer's misunderstandings about their own hardware shouldn't be relevant. The Flipper One is also obviously not a general purpose computer, despite your confusion.
It's ironic that you suggest that this is non-conventional and not what a hobbyist would imagine. This is exactly what they've been imagining for a while. It's an application-spec SoC (RK3576) and a raspberry pi MCU (RP2350) glued together. Notably, with highly-integrated firmware including user-supplied blobs, which I'm just going to assume are run in some environment that ties them all together.
I love writing little kernels. Having a (relatively) modern platform with no binary blobs would be the bees’ knees.
Collabora are amazing. I've been stunned by how good the rock5b+ is, given all their open source work. The last thing I'm waiting for is usbc displayport to be merged, and I can probably retire all my x64 home machines and just use my 3588 board for day to day web browsing and films.
on an unrelated note the site was blocked in our corporate VPN
URL: blog.flipper.net/flipper-one-we-need-your-help/
Category: hacking
The fact that they are using X as their social channel (and Discord as their chat / community platform) tells me that this is not the project I want to engage with.
This LLM-written blogpost that repeats itself doesn't come as professional either.
I doubt it was LLM-written.
To me it very clearly is, and a commenter on the blog said the same. There are tons of LLMisms, not just em dashes but comma separated lists of three or four things with no conjunction, and punchy phrasing like "Honestly? We're genuinely terrified," and more. They're also clearly pro-AI given they're integrating it into the device. What would give you doubt?
It's a marketing piece. That's the kind of writing LLMs are, in large part, trained to emulate.
The local AI stuff is part of marketing too. They're gonna want investors with bigger pockets than nerds like us, and those investors are going to ask about their "AI story".
Add that the issue tracking, task management, & code collaboration are also locked behind proprietary, US-based Big Tech in Microsoft GitHub.
This is an amazingly ambitious project, which for some reason reminds me of similarly ambitious projects in different areas from the 1990s and onwards. I wish the team all the best, but I honestly doubt they will manage to fulfil their dreams.
It's a shame they don't actually say what are the capabilities of the SDR. I wish it could do 2.4GHz without resampling, but we'll see...
I could certainly use a tool like that at a simple "plug in on site" device for IT debugging. It's nice sometimes to not carry the whole laptop.
I think most of this stuff is "free" once you have Linux working, no? If you get Linux, you get things like desktop mode, "TV box" stuff free. I think the true value add is giving people who don't already have a cellular modem and a satellite connection something to play with in a small form factor. I initially read this as scope creep, but in hindsight I think almost all of this comes free with a working kernel and userland.
Product marketing aside, the real CTA here is to help them get actual product development done in an open-source way. I applaud this thinking, but I don't know who would be willing to help outside of the curiosity of a Linux bringup and trying to mainline everything. Hector Martin tried very valiantly to get stuff into Linux for Asahi and it didn't go very well. I'm worried that the biggest roadblock they face isn't technical, but bureaucratic on that front.
I really want one. I have no use for one. But still..
What could a non-hackery type do with this? I'm just thinking if I could write games for it and use it as an MP3 player, and some sort of beeper/PDA.
I wonder what kind of battery life this will get, and how big a battery it will need to meet their battery life goal.
I am not particularly knowledgeable about these devices but I don’t appreciate their use of the term local ai, it seems to have little place in a flipper device, and I find their claim to seek to push closed source code to open as too big a dream.
Edit: this reads like the Star Citizen flipper
This isn't scope creep, this is a scope explosion. I'm not sure yet what I could use it for, but I know for a fact that I want one.
It look me a while to figure out what they were asking for because it was buried in so much fluff. As an exercise, I rewrote the first part of the post.
Flipper One is our ongoing project to build an even better Flipper. Supporting new hardware and features has been a technical and financial challenge. We're afraid we will not be able to complete this product without additional help. Today we would like to ask for your help finishing open development tasks on the open source operating system stack.
You can get started immediately by looking through the open tasks and hopefully there is something that fits your skillset and gets you excited to jump in and help.
Please keep reading for details about the upcoming Flipper One and our plans for the future.
It looks fun but after having a meh experience with a Cardputer I'm not sure if this would be markedly better?
I found the Cardputer to be difficult to get into and even figure out how to get software to work on it because of poor documentation. Most of the software available was limited or buggy and switching ROMs more than a bit annoying.
I like the idea of a multipurpose deck like this, but I'd need to have a full fledged linux system with multiprocessing, shell, disk and keyboard.