Catching up on September progress
You may have noticed we weren't verbose enough last month, so it's time to explain why. The truth is that we paused our marketing activities to focus on lots of things besides Flipper Zero development, including supplier and manufacturing contracts, legal questions, hiring more employees and many other. This took our attention so much, we didn't even have time to post an update. Now we are ready to share some news with you.
New blog engine
Meet the Flipper Zero Blog! Starting now, it will be the main place where we speak, ranging from important updates and learning videos to some geekish production insights from our developers.
Don't forget to subscribe, and yeah, we even have RSS.
Kickstarter's updates section is too inconvenient for that, so don't be surprised that most of the further updates won't appear on Kickstarter. The crowdfunding campaign has ended, but Flipper's story is just starting, so we needed a new way to keep you updated on Flipper Zero and our further products.
System Core API is ready
During this month, we have developed a firmware architecture and basic system APIs, abstractions for interacting with hardware, managing threads and multitasking. This is an under the hood work and cannot be shown, but it is an essential part of development.
Our main goal in developing firmware is to make it as convenient and understandable as possible for developers so that they can write their programs for Flipper Zero easily. So after the campaign ended, we threw away all the dirty code and started developing the architecture from scratch. Now it's done!
Mechanical and electronics improvements
The case has changed a lot since the first prototype. We've completely redesigned the buttons and components layout on the inside to keep the Flipper Zero durable, and able to withstand heavy use without falling apart.
We also moved RFID and NFC modules to a separate board under the battery. It's connected to the motherboard with FPC cables.
New buttons mechanism
We added 3 springs to the D-pad for better tactile feedback.
Replaceable battery
Non-removable batteries are the scourge of modern devices. For easy battery replacement, we have taken a battery with a three-pin connector, so that users can change the battery themselves if necessary. We are also planning to sell extra batteries separately on our website.
InfraRed moved to the corner
After some tests we found that previous IR placement was not optimal: it was overlapped by the index finger and covered by an external module. We moved it to the corner.
More GPIO
We have redesigned the GPIO pinout. Now there are as many as three Ground pins — you can never have too much of them.
New feature: USB NFC Reader
There are many use cases that are impossible to run directly on Flipper Zero. Most of these cases require powerful CPU for cryptographic attacks:
- Mifare classic attacks: mfoc (Nested), mfcuk (Dark Side)
- Mifare Plus attack: Hard Nested
We decided to allow to use Flipper Zero as a regular USB NFC adapter along with the LibNFC library, so all existing software will work out of the box without any modifications. In this mode, all commands from the PC will be forwarded directly to the ST25R3916 NFC chip via USB serial interface.
Flipper Zero DevKit
No, it's not what you think.
We designed a special kit for developers to let them test Flipper Zero with all its peripheral. NFC, 125 kHz antennas and battery are separated, all PCBs and components are easily accessible, making the development process easy as never.
Flipper Lab
To integrate real-world processes into Github CI workflow we designed a remote hardware test bench controlled via API that can run tests.
It is a real Flipper Zero DevKit with its buttons connected to relays making it possible to control the device remotely. The screen is captured by a camera and streamed in real time on the website.
The Lab is currently in its pre-alpha development stage, but later we will open it publicly so any developer will be able to:
- Upload their own firmware or plugin on real Flipper Zero instance
- View logs in real time and even send UART messages to the Flipper
- Click all the buttons remotely
- Test peripherals with physical RFID cards and iButton tags
As for now, you can play with the view only live stream on lab.flipperzero.one.
Live updates on Discord
We added a live stream of all the firmware commits to our Discord server. You can check out how devs are going in real time with the new #updates channel.
Our Discord server has surpassed 4000 members! 🎉
Join our Discord server to:
- Stay in touch with our engineers
- Monitor development progress in real time with
#updateschannel - Discuss Flipper Zero use cases
- Meet thousands of geeks
- Access secret backers-only channel (contact
@Backers Botin private messages to get a special role)
We are hiring!
Two months ago we launched Flipper Developer Program. We got hundreds of applications and picked some software and hardware engineers to invite to our core team.
Unfortunately, we realized that the open-source and horizontal management model doesn't suit us, because it is difficult to control and predict the result that way. Therefore, since now we only hire full-time developers. Perhaps after opening the main firmware repository, the contribution of the community will be easier to manage, but at this stage, we decided to abandon such a model.
Check out our open full-time vacancies here: flipperdevices.com/jobs. We're currently hiring only Russian-speaking people.
See you soon
Flipper Zero team has made the first big steps and we're so happy about following the roadmap on time, but there are lots of things to do and to share with you.
Stay tuned and that's it for today!