Birbla

Discussion summary

Discussions about Flipper Zero's open-source status and its versatile use cases. Users highlight its features like RFID, IR, and sub-GHz support, with some questioning its practical value.

What the discussion says

  • Some users question why the software isn't fully open-sourced.
  • Many appreciate its multifunctionality as a Swiss Army knife for short-range communication.
  • Use cases include cloning remotes, RFID keys, and acting as a universal IR remote.
“It's a great tool and community, like a Swiss Army knife.”
— drunken_thor
“Flipper Zero is one of the handiest tech pieces I've owned.”
— natbennett

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  • Hacker News
  • I get ads for this all the time but still have no idea what I could do with it.
    by ughitsaaron
  • I use mine mostly as a universal IR remote.
    by quietsegfault
  • Logical NAND of a laptop featureset. Has things like IR, a subghz HDR, NFC+RFID, USB device support, iButton, and the like.

    Some people get a lot of use out of it, but if you just saw that list of hardware and couldn't think of one area you'd apply it in, it's probably not going to be a useful device for you.

    by DaSHacka
  • Anything you might want to do with a radio or IR device but don’t have specialized hardware for. It’s kind of a swiss knife/leatherman tool for short range communications standards.
    by devmor
  • What a great tool and community they have built. I find my flipper0 is like a computer Swiss Army knife. It’s so fun to carry around a tool of my own trade.
    by drunken_thor
  • Flipper Zero is one of the handiest little pieces of tech I’ve ever owned. Being able to copy RFID keys is occasionally fantastically useful.
    by natbennett
  • Is this something you do often? I could see a few use cases and also for copying garage keys. But I don't think I would use it enough to justify the investment
    by gonzalohm
  • I use it to clone remotes of "dumb" devices and emulate them with ESPHome to make them "smart" fully offline under my control.
    by pornel
  • Is... that possible? I thought the whole point is that those were a challenge-response specifically to avoid ever them disclosing over the air the material necessary to impersonate one.
    by mikepurvis
  • > TL;DR: We've allocated resources to maintain Flipper Zero firmware and support community contributions.

    Is that the tldr? It sure sounds like it's still on minimal life support.

    by yjftsjthsd-h
  • Why would you need any support for things that are fully open source and flashable yourself?

    Most everyone who has a flipper runs something like Unleashed firmware, and most of the functionality is in the apps that people built, not in the actual firmware.

    by ActorNightly
  • Why can't something be "done"?
    by jagged-chisel
  • It is. As the article says, all development goals for FZ had been achieved and even overachieved - providing solid and feature-rich firmware, powerful SDK and developer tools. With that and development shift towards new products, updates to core firmare became infrequent - and we tried to address that.

    Src: I'm one of the developers behind Flipper Zero.

    by hdgr
  • I wonder whether that future includes sending me the device I initially backed on the very first kickstarter. It's been >4 years of back-and-forth with support.
    by egorfine
  • Please send me your support ticket ID to pavel[at]flipper.net
    by zhovner
  • Might be an unpopular opinion, but:

    1. They open sourced the entire Software under GPL from the start, and always pushed all their changes to that public github.

    2. They supported the first-party firmware for years, including huge rewrites of the interfaces used by applications, etc.

    3. They actively involved the community on many topics around the product and were always responsive.

    They did their job very well, financed ONLY by one-time sales of hardware. NO subscription or additional licensing fees were ever charged.

    There is still alot of potential in the hardware itself (e.g. Bluetooth/BLE, NFC Tag writing,...), and the Community is working on alot of different topics.

    --

    Tl;DR: The Flipper team is free to go and invest resources elsewhere now. Thanks for your support, keep up the great work!

    by rickdeckard
  • Everyone I know who owns a flipper almost immediately installs some 3rd party firmware like Momentum on it.
    by AJRF
  • Yes, this is the way things should be, imho - let the company building the hardware have the say on the base OS, but then let there be forks/contributions from the wider community, which will keep the hardware alive long past the cutoff valve on the production line.

    There are many good examples of this working out great for the community, one that I am playing with recently is the community firmware for the Synthstrom Deluge music production workstation, where the community is just taking it into the stratosphere in terms of capabilities beyond the original factory firmware.

    There will always be folks who want to share their work.

    Another good example is the pwnagotchi scene, where the project is kept alive by its users due to the open source nature of the original firmware images.

    by MomsAVoxell
  • Tough spot with community that expects firmware updates while hardware sells only once
    by pastaj36
  • Then just open source the firmware. We'll update it ourselves.
    by matheusmoreira
  • Which is just another way of saying "this is why most developers prefer subscriptions over one-time sales"
    by miki123211
  • Easy fix: Allow donations, merge updates once donation pool is enough to pay for the maintainers' time.
    by underdeserver
  • It's sort of a self imposed problem as well because the community produces a bunch of pull requests, but only the corporate staff members can approve and merge them into the official firmware. It begs the question why have an official firmware if it's not at least slightly maintained.
    by EricBetts
  • It's slightly funny that the post says firmly that they aren't doing any form of real time engagement with the community anymore, then ends by announcing an AMA date and time.
    by stevage
  • I read the post as implied they were talking about continuous realtime engagement.

    Which TBF, answering every monkey with a typewriter on the internet is a huge time commitment from any team.

    by ethbr1