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Flipper One – we need your help

blog.flipper.net

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Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#391

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

feelamee wrote: post #382
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because 70 of 140 comments under this submission are owned by this thread about AI. This is an effect, rather than a cause. The root cause is often (but obviously not always) that the submission was written with AI to begin with. In instances like this, it is useful to focus on the root cause, not a proximal effect. > And this is usually not what you want when you click on an interesting submission More importantly…

> In general, reading comments written by actual humans about how a submission is AI, is preferable to reading a long submission written by AI Not as in general as you think. I don't care who writes comments/article - be you human, LLM, anthropomorphic android, nexus five or six, or my neighbors dog. It definitely doesn't affect anything - if your thoughts are interesting to me, I will be interested in reading them.

In that case, why not instruct an LLM to generate an endless series of articles tailored specifically to your personal interest?

Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#392

Post by himata4113 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #264
himata4113 wrote: post #19

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?

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 ma…

I understand that much, but we have the firmware - we don't have to extract it or rebuild it in a white-room? Or is some of that information baked into the firmware that we cannot flash? I've reversed some camera sensor binary blobs recently and I didn't have too many issues, only took a really long time (5 days) of running in a loop until source matched the original (sematically). I parsed the blobs into an intermediate language, exported to llvm and optimized it to recover the functional structure I also used this sematics structure to rebuild the source in rust(kinda, it's a variant of rust with snowflake features cause I hate the language). I think I got lucky because the sensors used the same mips opcodes (sv class) rather than some proprietary state machine.

Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#393

Post by greatgib »

jmole wrote: post #354
mrandish wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 so…

I've had the same frustration with rockchip, but if you search the lkml you'll find that they are indeed trying their best: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/?q=rock-chips.com the biggest issue is that actually contributing to upstream is an *incredibly* difficult and painful process.

Maybe also because they don't release proper specs?

Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#394

Post by azalemeth »

iamtheworstdev wrote: post #285
semolino wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

probably means - more expensive than any of us would spend on a "toy", but far cheaper than what an expert might on an industry standard version of this.

Exactly. A decent digital communication, spectrum or vector network analyser from the likes of Keysight (AKA HP or Agilent) or R&S is crazy money – many thousands.

Compared to any piece of "proper" test and measurement equipment even if Flipper 1 is $1k it's a steal, for example. Heck, the last thing I put on a grant application was a 220 GHz AWG that was something like $1.5m. Admittedly quite different from a single m2 plugin socket but a 1 GHz spectrum analyser starts at $2.4k and everything fancier is "price on application" [0].

I realise this is not the same piece of kit as Flipper One, but with the right daughter boards, hackability, and graduate student labour I imagine you could do a lot (I am interested in RF at [0] https://www.rohde-schwarz.com/us/products/test-and-measureme...

Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#395

Post by JacobKfromIRC »

milesvp wrote: post #349
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…

Would you happen to know where the requirement that "“there is no way” you can make the radio do what the FCC doesn’t allow" comes from? I found an FCC compliance guide [1] but it's very long and not easily searchable as far as I can tell.

If there has to be no way to change the radio's functionality, would that mean that simply using a binary blob wouldn't be enough. Wouldn't device vendors have to sign it as well?

Also, that makes me wonder about the one Wi-Fi chip I know of that does have free firmware: AR9271 [2]. I wonder what makes that situation different. Maybe I'm misunderstanding and there's firmware on a separate chip stored in ROM.

[1] http://www.fcc.gov/documents/compliance-guide [2] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/AR9271

Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#396

Post by wepple »

lambda wrote: post #351
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.

Near the top: TL;DR With Flipper One, we're reimagining what a Linux cyberdeck can be — it's a huge project. We're opening up the development process and asking the community for help. Then later: We're asking the community to help us polish RK3576 support so we can build a truly open platform together. We'd be glad for any kind of contribution, not just code. For example, maybe you can find a way to convince Rockchi…

It was recently edited. I assume they saw this feedback

Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#397

Post by Computer0 »

meatmanek wrote: post #390
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: the on-device AI, most people don't know what they don't know. And they don't know that there's dozens of on-device AI applications that already exist in the real world using tiny AI models. ESP32-S3's have been doing on-device AI for years . That's a 240MHz processor with 512KB SRAM, 16MB PSRAM and no GPU, and AI works great on it.

> AI works great on it. Define AI, and define "great"

Any ml model can be called AI now.

Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#400

Post by jagiammona »

kesor wrote: post #140

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 came here to say this, too.
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