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Flipper One – we need your help

blog.flipper.net

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Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#341

Post by normie3000 »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #240
wateralien wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some projects are meant to scope creep. Like this one. If the project manager of the swiss army knife had defended it from scope creep it would have 1 knife.

IIRC the original scope was the 8 most common tasks that literal Swiss soldiers did. that was their scope. sewing and maintianing clothes was one of them, for example, so thats why it has a punch. They'd need to be able to open cans, as that was the most common long term ration, and they'd need to be able to maintain their rifles which had screws, thus screwdrivers. a version with a wine bottle opener was made for of…

How often do they get stones out of horses' hooves?

Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#342

Post by h14h »

The RK3576 is a really interesting/versatile chip and it is awesome to see major effort going into baking full support into the linux kernel. I could see it opening up a ton of doors for awesome FOSS hardware projects w/ AI accelerated workloads.

One idea I have (but realistically will probably never build) is an e-ink notepad with a microphone that I can ask to generate custom note-taking templates. As a niche example, I'm imagining I'm at a baseball game and I can tell my tablet "hey give me a baseball scorecard template" only for it to generate one for me. Then if there are a ton of subs or the game goes super long, I can modify the template in place with follow-up commands like "add more rows for player substitutions" or "make it support up to twelve innings".

I imagine having a chip like the RK3576 fully supported in the linux kernel could make building a device like this much much easier.

Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#344

Post by mrandish »

embedding-shape wrote: post #314
arjie wrote: post #307

I have a Flipper Zero and these guys made a great tool, so I clicked this headline because it said "we need your help". After scrolling two pages I couldn't find what they need my help with, though. I scrolled to the end and couldn't find it there either. If I'm being honest, I like their stuff but not enough to dig through 8 pages of content to find out what helping means.

This effort seems less of a "Help us by buying our product" and more a plea for contributors as a FOSS effort, they want to do things like this: "Collabora + Flipper: Opening up the RK3576" https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/coll... , and are basically looking for developers and other technology enthusiasts to help them both with the projects themselves, and also try to network (socially) their w…

> to help us polish RK3576 support

Having a few various RPi's (as one does), when they've been out of stock, I've looked into the huge variety of similar SBCs (OrangePi, etc) which can be even faster, with more ports and features for around the same money as an equivalent RPi. Many are powered by various RockChip SoCs, which extend up to desktop replacement-level, but the Linux driver support is usually lacking in some important way.

It's not Linux's fault, it's a small group of volunteers struggling with little manufacturer support or documentation. I don't get why RockChip doesn't budget the money in the business plan to fund full driver support for at least some of their more capable chips. I guess maybe too many of these chips are used in non-OS contexts to be worth it?

Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#345

Post by swiftcoder »

rincebrain wrote: post #327
swiftcoder wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really get why they didn't go with HDMI alt mode here, and stick with usb-c ports

They say pretty directly in the post that they didn't want to deal with the hassles around dongles and uncommon ports for using this as a Linux PC in their pocket.

is usb-c really an uncommon port these days? I think I have more usb-c to hdmi cables lying around than actual hdmi cables

Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#346

Post by jjkaczor »

dylan604 wrote: post #337
hyperbovine wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow this crazy -- "Built-in Pomodoro timer" means they are literally replacing a $5 plastic tomato-shaped mechanical timing device with something that costs $220 and features WiFi and app integration. What could be more antithetical to the original pomodoro ethos, I don't know. It's like an episode of Silicon Valley.

If that's crazy to you, let me introduce you to Juicero: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero

Am so "teh old", that honestly - I can't say whether or not that product was worse than the "CueCat":

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

(Naw - the CueCat was better, at least it was a generic barcode scanner)

Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#347

Post by lxgr »

reaperducer wrote: post #217
lxgr wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The idea of the "single OS, single CPU computer" has been a myth for a while now. At least since they started running Java on SIM cards.

Good point, and quite on topic given that this thing will have a SIM slot, so we're at at least three OSes and CPUs and counting :)

The Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chipsets usually have their own CPU as well.

Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#348

Post by tombert »

verelo wrote: post #340
embedding-shape wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This effort seems less of a "Help us by buying our product" and more a plea for contributors as a FOSS effort, they want to do things like this: "Collabora + Flipper: Opening up the RK3576" https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/coll... , and are basically looking for developers and other technology enthusiasts to help them both with the projects themselves, and also try to network (socially) their w…

A good Tl;dr; is never a bad thing in a world where everyone is being pulled in different directions for attention. I agree with you for the most part, but after reading the post, it's a mess and could do with a clear summary at the top...hell, even an index of relevant sections and sub-headings.

I feel like especially when someone is asking something from me, they sort of have an obligation to make it clear, early on, what they're actually asking for.

Tangential but related; when I used to work for BigCo, I would get old acquaintances message me on LinkedIn. They would act like they're really interested in my life and I'd interact, and then after a day or two they would ask me for a referral for a job, I'd do it, and then they wouldn't be all that interested in talking to me anymore.

I wouldn't have had a big problem if they had just messaged me and asked for the favor, but I do find it pretty irritating that they're pretending to be my friend just to get a favor. I don't need more friends, I have plenty. Hitting the "refer" button and uploading a resume takes ten seconds of work on my end, but wasting my time with a pretend conversation takes considerably longer.

Nowadays when I ask for a favor from a friend or acquaintance I pretty much immediately ask for it. I might still want to converse with them afterward, but I figure it's better to lay my intentions out on the table immediately so there's no false expectations.

Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#349

Post by milesvp »

arjie wrote: post #307

I have a Flipper Zero and these guys made a great tool, so I clicked this headline because it said "we need your help". After scrolling two pages I couldn't find what they need my help with, though. I scrolled to the end and couldn't find it there either. If I'm being honest, I like their stuff but not enough to dig through 8 pages of content to find out what helping means.

> ditch binary blobs entirely

I agree there is not much of a clear call to action. As a firmware engineer who has worked with bluetooth amd wifi, this is a key phrase. It’s also a big fantasy. FCC compliance is a big headache, and part of why people buy a given chip is the FCC certification comes with it. For instance, if I throw an ESP32 into a product and use wifi, I don’t need further certification. That can only happen if “there is no way” you can make the radio do what the FCC doesn’t allow. A general stategy for this is for the company to give a binary blob for radio related functions that limits the radio capabilities that you need to link to in your final build.

So that means there is almost zero chance the chip makers will ever publicly move away from binary blobs. At best they might quietly support reverse engineering efforts by open source driver projects.

That said, I would love it if all the chips I worked with had a battle hardened non vendor alternative. One major downside to these binary blobs is that they can be buggy. We were recently able ro rewrite our Bluetooth firmware to use an opensource version which greatly sped up the data throughput since it didn’t have a bug that killed byte transfer. But we don’t use this code lightly. FCC violations are crazy expensive and not something you take lightly.

Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#350

Post by zhovner »

hyperbovine wrote: post #323
Aurornis wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> surprisingly cheap, What would you consider surprisingly cheap? Their last product announcement was the BUSY bar, a desktop timer with a display to show that you're busy. Pre-orders launched at $250 but they dropped the price to $219. Has not shipped yet: https://busy.app/ The Flipper One specs are significantly more expensive to manufacture than the Flipper Zero or Busy Bar. I don't think this will be a surprising…

Wow this crazy -- "Built-in Pomodoro timer" means they are literally replacing a $5 plastic tomato-shaped mechanical timing device with something that costs $220 and features WiFi and app integration. What could be more antithetical to the original pomodoro ethos, I don't know. It's like an episode of Silicon Valley.

Can you name the pomodoro timer that support Matter?
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