Much better thanks. I see now what my mistake was: clicking the logo in top left of TFA takes you to blog.flipperzero.one when I was expecting it to be what you've linked.
THIS! Oh, so much this! I never get it why they do this... I don't know how many times I clicked the logo expecting to get to the product's homepage, but, instead, I get to the blog's index. It escapes my mind, why nobody seems to think about this.
Seriously, I thought I was crazy for not being able to figure out what this device actually does, despite scrolling through the whole site.
I still thought it would be an mp3 player after reading about the battery modes and the sd card installation and the file system menu...then I gave up.
From what I gather, it does whatever you want it to do with a whole lot of interfaces. From the homepage I gather it has Bluetooth, GPIO, Antenna, iButton, RFID, NFC, infrared
It's an extremely marketing driven device and trivial to clone. Look it as a PC kind of - off the shelf components connected together with a proprietary case and a marketing department.
And similar to the early days of home computers, there's plenty of kits you can buy to build your own.
By that definition, every embedded device is extremely marketing driven and trivial to clone.
With devices like these, you're buying time. People doing reverse engineering for a living or as a serious hobby do not want to fuck around making their own. Robust hardware design/validation and supply chain handling are NOT trivial except for the most simple designs. The firmware is NOT trivial to recreate. The target market has already bought products that do most of the shit this device does, and now they can have a lot of it in one place instead of scattered across multiple devices.
I was comparing it to a Heathkit versus a pre-built PC, suggesting that there's a nascent industry of a lower barrier to entry for the sbc/Arduino hobbyist market forming in the same way that the microcomputer world of 1977 was a way way different than 1974 - you could just buy a thing and plug it in - no assembly code or assembling parts required.
It's an interesting marketing play. I wasn't suggesting people go out and make it themselves instead. Do it if you want. Buy the thing if you want. Whatever
Would probably be cheap to clone it for yourself, but not at scale:
> TI CC1101, the chip powering the Sub-Ghz feature, is in extreme shortage. To date, the supplier has shipped just a fraction of our initial order. The same situation is with our LED driver — TI LP5562. To overcome this we have to purchase these components on the spot-buy market at a much, much higher price (3-5x for CC1101 and 20-30x for LP5562)
>It's an extremely marketing driven device and trivial to clone. Look it as a PC kind of - off the shelf components connected together with a proprietary case and a marketing department.
Same could have been said for the original iPod. Design matters.
