Flipper One – we need your help

This looks flippin' amazing, but also like the definition of project scope creep. I imagine it will be brilliant, unaffordable, surprisingly cheap, terrible and awesome (in both senses of the word) all at the same time. 3GPP really needs a light shining through it.

I sincerely hope I work out a way of getting someone else to buy the thing for me. And the push towards all in-tree source is fantastic. Genuinely impressed.

This lacks the sharp idea the Zero had. I have the feeling that in order to do something different, and not an evolution, the result will be borderline useless: a portable ARM computer with Wifi / satellite connection / ... And, then? What I can do with it? The evolution that I could like is a Zero with more CPU power, SDR and LoRa. Then let's implement all the cool protocols that it is possible to implement.

Sounds like the second system effect. (The Mythical Man Month)

First one is simple and focused, the second one tries to be & do everything. And frequently never ships.

What about LoRa (Long Range)? that would be perfect for the Flipper Zero!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa

Can someone explain why Flipper is making these decisions, or what advantages Flipper One has vs a Flipper Zero, RPI, and Linux machine?

The (EDIT2: maybe not) AI writing doesn’t help.

EDIT: looking more, it seems like the goal is to be a fun project like Playdate, except a Linux multi-tool instead of game console. Which is actually great, a step towards healing today’s corporatized tech culture. It’s unfortunate that the website non-explains this with AI and marketing speak.

EDIT2: I wrote too soon, AI is making me too cynical. My only remaining critique is that they explain the motive instead of just stating features and repeating “we’re doing something exciting and important [for reasons not really explained]”

I hope they let you disable the 6ghz wifi easily as Wifi 6E without the band steering of wifi 7 just gives you low range 6ghz which is a waste on a device that probably doesn’t need a high speed connection.

Love my flipper zero!

Instead of re-inventing Linux distributions for FlipperOS on top of Debian. They should just choose to base it on NixOS which already has these "profiles" as a built-in feature called "Specializations" https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Specialisation

I would REALLY like to see the Piratebox project added into this amazing all in one device.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PirateBox

It's interesting that the d-pad is on the right and the mouse pad on the left. I would have thought they'd be flipped, and indeed that's how it was in the prototype picture. I'm curious as to the reasoning for the change, though I don't know anything about the UI.

Also, what's a "survival desktop"? I've never heard that term and I couldn't find it used elsewhere.

Do all closed blobs need to be open? Why pick RK3567 when RK3562 is already supported in Debian?

Most articles I click on in the HN homepage turn out to be written by AI, judging from the phrasing. I'm weirded out by the fact that people don't seem to find it important to write their own thoughts down. The writing in TFA is clearly supervised by a human, but still, the wording is not human at all.

If I wanted all of that, at that size, I would just use a laptop with USB/PCIe/M.2 expansions. I don't really care about openness, I care about functionality (and not having to carry extra stuff around)

Does anyone know why the binary blobs cannot be reverse engineered in the age of AI and recompiled to closely match the original source? Is it for legal reasons? Is it firmware signatures?

> the current state of ARM Linux is depressing. Every vendor bolts on their own custom mess: closed boot blobs, vendor-specific patches, "board support packages" that nobody outside the chip maker can really understand

Fixing this is a noble goal but won't sell a lot of devices by itself. And it will only fix the one specific hardware configuration used by Flipper. This seems to be the only interesting part of the project and the actual hardware is otherwise completely uninteresting. Not sure how they expect to succeed here.

If you have to spend a few paragraphs explaining that One isn't a replacement for Zero - they they are different classes of product, you know that your product naming is a problem,

> So people end up running full desktop environments (KDE, GNOME, etc.) squeezed onto a tiny 7" touchscreen. It's miserable.

to add on to this: you can definitely make great UI's for small screens and unconventional controls -- Playdate [1] builds their UI around a physical crank on the device, and it feels fun to use it :)

[1] https://play.date/

Cool, but I think they're holding themselves back with that weird form-factor. I would've preferred if they'd included a full QWERTY keyboard, like the the GPD Pocket 4[1] or the GPD Win Mini. With a proper keyboard, I could write code on the go, easily edit files, navigate a terminal and mess with things... and do so much more in general.

Also, 8GB RAM is barely enough these days, whereas the GPD comes with upto 64GB RAM - and an X86 CPU too, which means you can run your favorite Linux distro and all your apps without any compatibility issues.

I really don't see a reason why I should buy the Flipper One.

https://gpdstore.net/gpd-pocket-4/

Wow. That really doesn’t know what it is.

Love the idea of a hackable ethernet tool though.

looks amazing. i just hope it doesn't cost a fortune. the portable hdmi alone makes it worth it to me.

I've said a bunch of times that I really really wish that Pebble had gotten a chance to finish the Pebble Core:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/getpebble/pebble-2-time...

This reminds me of that in a good way – a small Linux device that doesn't have to maintain a screen all the time (power) or focus on real-time but has physical buttons, connectivity, a microphone and a sealed case so it can be thrown in your pocket would be... an absolute dream.

Counter to some others here, I would buy this at whatever cost if it lived up to that intent!

I want it but I do not need it.

Is a DDR trainer really that hard to write?

I imagine you dump all the config registers of a running system, and then adjust everything that looks like some timing or drive strength parameter upwards till it stops working properly, downwards till it stops working, and then choose a middle value.

Do that repeatedly for every parameter pre-boot, and then use that config. Perhaps redo that every few hours or when the temperature changes.

Really worried about the pricing, will make or break.

@zhovner, would you consider reverse engineering of the blobs as a temporary measure? in 2026 it's very doable and scales

Curious about the design choice. Why not use the TI parts with integrated microcontrollers rather than two separate chips? Or even a FPGA with integrated ARM9 like the Zynq family?

No binary blobs. Not even cellular and wifi?

“The two processors communicate over a set of interfaces we call the Interconnect: SPI carries the framebuffer to the MCU for display output”

Even with peripheral DMA this idea sounds terrifying.

What is the best HW to do "penetration testing" of Bluetooth communication.

Not BLE, but Bluetooth. For BLE you can have nordic nRF chip.

I'm curious if someone experienced here have some recommendation.

Thank you.

for reference, Flipper Zero was $199.

does anyone know how much they're thinking for Flipper One?

I have read the whole thing, and I'm not sure what you would build with it. Can anyone give me some examples? I'm genuinely curious.

I see a lot of people are worrying about scope creep but I feel like we're missing the bigger picture here: this is cool as hell. Sometimes that's enough.

Protip: asks need to be simple. This is cool, but long: "congratulations, or sorry, but I'm not reading that".

If they had a "preorder" button at the top I would give them money and be done with it.

All I can say is take my money!

> Build the most open and best-documented ARM computer in the world, with full mainline Linux kernel support.

Not even the Pi foundation could manage that. Why not go RISC-V if compatibility is the main goal? This thing does not need bleeding edge horsepower.

Here is a similar story of creating a smartphone that exclusively runs FLOSS on the main CPU and has WiFi and modem on M.2 cards: https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/

>We want to train a specialized AI model that knows Flipper One's internals and applications inside out, so general-purpose models won't cut it. We invite the community to get involved.

I think a general purpose model would actually cut it pretty well if it has access to proper documentation and search. Since everything will be OSS, the model can have "full" introspection of the system.

Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48212046

This project looks similar to Librem 5 to me. The same goal of open drivers and minimal blobs everywhere.

"It's not this, it's that"

Once you see this phrase, you know it's AI written.