Do all closed blobs need to be open? Why pick RK3567 when RK3562 is already supported in Debian?
Flipper One – we need your help
261–270 of 501 posts
Re: Flipper One – we need your help
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Why is it entitled for other people to complain about certain types content, but fine for you to do it here?
The entitlement is in the "make me", no one is "making you" do anything, it's as much of a free world as it's always been. Complain on, but make it an actual complaint that raise some issue, instead of just "I don't like it", HN is meant for thoughtful discussions, those can include complaints, but complaints about the design, line-height, if the author used AI to spellcheck, that the scroll doesn't work and more just makes for a very boring and repetitive reading.
Re: Flipper One – we need your help
#263What about LoRa (Long Range)? that would be perfect for the Flipper Zero!
Re: Flipper One – we need your help
#264Does 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?
Some of this stuff you need to probe with very, very expensive equipment and fine-tune parameters, and to make it worse, RF performance also depends on the composition of the PCB layers, the amount of vias, hell even just rotating an unrelated component on a PCB can affect the RF performance of nearby components or traces. If you're into that, Hans Rosenberg has some darn good yt videos [3].
RF is a world of black magic, especially at the frequencies, symbol rates and encodings used for stuff like RAM. And the higher in frequency you go... the less "conventional wisdoms" apply.
There's in fact a very old article from 2007 [1] describing the issue from the other end. Some researcher tried to have a primitive form of what we'd call "machine learning" a few years later write FPGA bitstream to get a tone discriminator. Turns out the algorithm and test harness got a working bitstream... but it made no sense at all, it was very finely tuned to individual physical characteristics of that chip.
Link training blobs on modern chips do something very, very similar, at each link initialization they evaluate a lot of different parameters per pin to account for the current state the device is in to get the best (i.e. highest stable bit rate) possible link. And the parameters, value ranges and timings all vary between different chips, so if you write a blob for one combination of SoC and memory, it might very well be possible that you need an entirely different blob for another combination. And that is what the BSP vendor does and what is inside the blob... a tuned version of parameters that this specific board's firmware can use to achieve a working good link in the shortest possible time.
It's one hell of a ride that Flipper is on, and I seriously wish them all the best. There's a darn good reason this stuff has been proprietary, at best you'll get a high-level summary like [2].
[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
[2] https://www.ti.com/lit/an/snla415/snla415.pdf?ts=17793056953...
Re: Flipper One – we need your help
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The AI writing doesn’t help. Why do you say there is AI writing?
> So today we're going public not with a big shiny announcement, but to tell the whole story straight. Honestly? We're genuinely terrified, and we need your help. > Flipper Zero and Flipper One operate at different protocol layers [below a graphic with features like "Power Bank". Do they know what a "protocol layer" is or do I not?] > Flipper One isn't an upgrade to Flipper Zero — it's a completely different project…
So the em-dashes is the new AI taletell? I mean, I have noticed them, but never thought it was such a characteristic.
Re: Flipper One – we need your help
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man, they put 2 processors in the thing and are building their own OS. They even say they are not sure how to get it accomplished. Scope creep to hell and back. Could just let the device get turned off like literally any other device on earth, and not have to build a whole new fucking OS to get it running. They even - for some reason - want to waste time "training their own AI model because general ones don't cut it"…
> Could just let the device get turned off like literally any other device on earth, and not have to build a whole new fucking OS to get it running. This is actually quite common in embedded devices and even elsewhere. Every Apple device does this, for example (the Secure Enclave is a completely separate OS running on a separate computer). If you think about it, most laptops have been doing something like this for de…
Yeah, CPU + MCU isnt exactly a foreign or strange idea. And they're hardly developing "their own OS", just configuring a default linux distro with various integrations particularly around display, IO and custom applets to interface with existing linux terminal programs and libraries.
Re: Flipper One – we need your help
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. This will likely never ship with all the bloat. Custom AI model, custom OS, extremely custom architecture (2 "main" processors running independently...), barely reuses any of the previous work from Flipper Zero.
A combined MPU and MCU architecture isn't that exotic. ST microelectronics currently sells a single chip with that contains a two core Cortex A7 Microprocessor combined with a microcontroller. Admittedly more tightly integrated with ability to communicate via shared memory. The "custom os" part could also be done easilly enough with the correct approach. Specifically systemd has a less-known feature known as system e…
> A combined MPU and MCU architecture isn't that exotic. ST microelectronics currently sells a single chip with that contains a two core Cortex A7 Microprocessor combined with a microcontroller. Admittedly more tightly integrated with ability to communicate via shared memory.
Going with an SoC is much simpler than trying to set up custom communications between two processors, I'm not sure why they didn't think of that.
Re: Flipper One – we need your help
#268This 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 impress…
Could you clarify what you mean by saying it may be both unaffordable and surprisingly cheap? (Expensive but less than expensive than it could be? Expensive but of poor build quality?)
Also why would you want/need someone else to purchase it for you? Because of your country's import laws, or reasons related to privacy/anonymity?
Re: Flipper One – we need your help
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So today we're going public not with a big shiny announcement, but to tell the whole story straight. Honestly? We're genuinely terrified, and we need your help. > Flipper Zero and Flipper One operate at different protocol layers [below a graphic with features like "Power Bank". Do they know what a "protocol layer" is or do I not?] > Flipper One isn't an upgrade to Flipper Zero — it's a completely different project…
So the em-dashes is the new AI taletell? I mean, I have noticed them, but never thought it was such a characteristic.
New telltale? I mean this in the most polite way but have you been living under a rock? Its been a clear sign people have been more than noticing since at least 4o back in mid 2024.
Re: Flipper One – we need your help
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
But still be bothered to leave a generic complain on HN, which you ideally can copy-paste across all potential LLM-written comments? Something doesn't add up there, don't spend energy writing the comments if you cannot even be bothered to read it because no one was bothered to write it.
Personally I detest AI generated creative content with every fibre of my being any will gladly rubbish on it without bothering to read the slop first.
Same, nothing I said is in conflict with that. I just equally despise HN comments vaguely complaining about maybe AI written content.