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Flipper One – we need your help

blog.flipper.net

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Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#431

Post by milesvp »

JacobKfromIRC wrote: post #395
milesvp wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?…

I'm far from an expert, but from what I understand the FCC cares most about consumer electronics is devices that stomp on the spectrum. And so frequency, antenna power, and signal band matter a lot. So you need to make sure that your antenna is only ever emitting in the band it's allowed, and that the total power never exceeds some amount, where the allowed amount is a function of the area under the curve of bandwidth vs antenna strength.

So when I say "there is no way", what I'm referring to, are the functions that configure drivers don't accept out of bounds values. And functions that ultimately drive the antenna can't drive them hard enough to be in violation. The main reason I know any of this, was that I found a function when working on firmware for the ESP32 on a commercial device, and I thought I could set the power to a level that I thought was too high. Well, that's when I learned what the binary blob that Espressif supplies was for. The guardrails are baked into the API for that blob.

So, does that mean you can't go out of your way to subvert those guardrails? No, but you would be incredibly foolish to knowingly create a device that will get the attention of the FCC. Similarly, there's nothing stopping you from building a circuit that amplifies the signal the device sends to the antenna. But when you're potentially talking about fines per event, and fines per device, it's wise to make sure you play nice.

If the wi-fi chip you're using has free firmware, where none of it is obfuscated, it's very likely that the limitations are baked directly into the chip, such that there is no register combination that would allow it to be out of compliance. Also, I'm not sure that all chips have transitive FCC licensing, so it might be wise to look into that before releasing the device commercially.

And keep in mind, I'm not even talking about creating accidental radios from poorly designed analog circuits, or unshielded high frequency digital circuits. That's a whole other can of worms.

Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#432

Post by zem »

a1o wrote: post #428

I am looking at this now, and to be frankly it not having a keyboard makes this uninteresting for me. Either a slide one (like old Linux Nokias), a small blackberry like one or one like the phone in Die Hard 4. Having no keyboard reduces a lot what I can do on the go vs a GPD Pocket.

that was my first thought too, I was increasingly surprised scrolling down the comments that no one had mentioned it yet. it sounds extremely clunky to use without one, though perhaps the idea is that you connect it to an actual computer, and upload very focused single-purpose software that doesn't need text input but is useful on the go. that contradicts the "cyberdeck" framing though.

Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#433

Post by d3Xt3r »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #410
d3Xt3r wrote: post #2

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 64G…

That GPD seems nice but it's not exactly a handheld.

There's also the Mini version which is handheld. Doesn't have the modular ports and RS232 etc though.

Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#434

Post by milesvp »

nullc wrote: post #427
milesvp wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> if I throw an ESP32 into a product and use wifi, I don’t need further certification Sounds like nonsense to me, at least from past reading of the regulation. These devices are supposed to be type-accepted-- your entire product is supposed to be certified. Is the FCC really allowing this? (not that I'm complaining, the FCC certification burden is outrageous).

Sorry, I was using imprecise (and possibly incorrect language). There are intentional radiators, and unintentional radiators. Using a given chip/SOC/module can greatly reduce the burden of dealing with the FCC for the purposes of intentional radiators. It's why you see products using Espressif's WROVER module have markings similar to

Contains FCC ID: 2AC7Z-ESP32WROVERE.

Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#435

Post by a1o »

zem wrote: post #432
a1o wrote: post #428

I am looking at this now, and to be frankly it not having a keyboard makes this uninteresting for me. Either a slide one (like old Linux Nokias), a small blackberry like one or one like the phone in Die Hard 4. Having no keyboard reduces a lot what I can do on the go vs a GPD Pocket.

that was my first thought too, I was increasingly surprised scrolling down the comments that no one had mentioned it yet. it sounds extremely clunky to use without one, though perhaps the idea is that you connect it to an actual computer, and upload very focused single-purpose software that doesn't need text input but is useful on the go. that contradicts the "cyberdeck" framing though.

Yeah. I remember like sixteen years ago, I think it was a N900 phone? A friend had it and I used it to fix a bug in a php website we had in the university through ssh. It was beautifully hacky, the website had no version control. It was awesome. I think the server actually ran Solaris at the time. I’ve been chasing a device with that form factor since forever, but sort of building my own I feel I will never get one.

Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#436

Post by zem »

a1o wrote: post #435
zem wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that was my first thought too, I was increasingly surprised scrolling down the comments that no one had mentioned it yet. it sounds extremely clunky to use without one, though perhaps the idea is that you connect it to an actual computer, and upload very focused single-purpose software that doesn't need text input but is useful on the go. that contradicts the "cyberdeck" framing though.

Yeah. I remember like sixteen years ago, I think it was a N900 phone? A friend had it and I used it to fix a bug in a php website we had in the university through ssh. It was beautifully hacky, the website had no version control. It was awesome. I think the server actually ran Solaris at the time. I’ve been chasing a device with that form factor since forever, but sort of building my own I feel I will never get one.

i had one of those! it was really awesome, and you could cross compile apps for it from a regular linux box. it was the only phone i've ever had where i wrote my own small apps just because i could.

Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#437

Post by vel0city »

dylan604 wrote: post #413
vel0city wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CueCat was just ahead of its time. These days scanning graphics to load links is quite common. I see QR codes and similar all the time.

Part of the success of QR codes is the ubiquity of the device to scan those codes. CueCat needed a wired device which is not something as easy to use as a wireless mobile device. So yeah, ahead of its time to be sure

Fully agreed.

Plus, CueCat used some dumb proprietary encrypted tag format that needed to go to their servers to look up the code as they thought the marketers would want to pay for their codes.

Too early. Too proprietary. Too greedy.

Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#438

Post by karlgkk »

rpdillon wrote: post #153
karlgkk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can’t be bothered to write it, I can’t be bothered to read it.

This is reductive. The author did write it, but used AI to polish it before publishing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48221934

If the author bothered to write it, then I can be bothered to read it.

Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#439

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

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"

A $20 battery-powered camera that can detect animals, humans, vehicles, and trees, and store + send an alert in real time of which it detects (as well as a description). Or a mini robot that can navigate obstacles and perform tasks while offline. Or a tiny industrial sensor that can detect a motor degrading due to the sound of its hum deviating from trained examples. Or an RF detection algorithm that ignores common band patterns and isolates unusual spikes in usage among dense noise. Or a motion tracking sensor that uses radar and video to track an object in a room. I mean really there's thousands of use cases. And this little Flipper One has 10x-100x the power of the ESP32-S3

Re: Flipper One – we need your help

#440

Post by ray_v »

csande17 wrote: post #313
Yokohiii wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The odd thing is that this disguises as some bare metal, hackable device. Their TUI[1] is planned to use react(!), to share logic with their BrowserUI[2]. In the repos you can see how they struggle to get anything gpu backed done (which is required by the browser). Then falling back to wayland to do it for them. (This all seems a mess that LLMs can't figure out.) Anyway, it does seem to end up in a custom linux deskt…

> The 256×144 px screen requires pixel-level rendering, which standard TUI libraries (ncurses, etc.) cannot provide. The proposed solution is an HTML/CSS rendering engine running as a background daemon — a lightweight browser-based renderer that draws menus, popups, and UI components. Truly, a design only an LLM could love.

What's a design an LLM would _loathe_?
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