Flipper Zero Manufacturing and Shipping Plan | Hacker News Reader

Flipper Zero Manufacturing and Shipping Plan

blog.flipperzero.one

94 pointsskibz14 comments

I'm absolutely amazed at the level of detail and effort that's been put into this update. Really impressive from a Kickstarter. I happily backed it a while ago, and I'm looking forward to getting one.

It’s certainly interesting to see it being shared in the open. As someone who’s been doing product development for years, it seems a bit like “today we tied our shoelaces and brushed our teeth”. RF issues and DFM feedback from molders are part and parcel of this kind of product.

This is one of the most professionally handled hardware kickstarters I've put my money in.

Well, I didn't know what it was, a nice 3 minute video can be found here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/flipper-devices/flipper...

Its a utility tool for developers/ techy people, it can remember RFID cards, car key signals, plug into computers and emulate a keyboard, has GPIO pins for connecting to other hardware, and lots more.

can i still "buy" one?

and how much would it be ?

Not at the moment - they're filing Kickstarter orders first and then will have preorders for the next "public" batch on the website directly. My guess is early Q2. I think I ordered mine on Kickstarter for $119 during the campaign, so expect the non-Kickstarter price to be a few dollars more than that.

> Flipper Zero is a portable multi-tool for pentesters and geeks in Tamagotchi body. It loves to hack digital stuff around such as radio protocols, access control systems, hardware and more. It's fully opensource and customizable so you can extend it in whatever way you like.

I'd love to buy one of these, but I can't get over the potential legal repercussions of running one, especially within ones own home.

In college, I was terrified of even attempting to research drone hacking due to the federal restrictions on tampering with radio signals, especially those outside the range for Wifi 2.4gz. They even still applied to researchers with approval, from what I understood, and it was just considered a gray area.

Can someone please explain how others are so accepting of the risk? Am I missing something? Sorry if it has been addressed and I'm just late to the game.

Well... if you don’t do anything to upset anyone else, your risks of getting in trouble are pretty low. These just have a bunch of transceivers that operate in ISM bands - which are more a less a free for all in the status quo.

What exactly do you think you could want to do with this that would be illegal?

If the product is anything like the pwnagotchi, many could use this as an alternative to research intercepting / cracking local wifi.

My understanding may be a bit dated, but unauthorized access of any network in the US is a crime. There's exceptions in other countries, but with the potential passive nature of the device, it seems terrifying that you could keep this in a backpack, leave it on when passing a major corp office in the city that cracks their wifi, and get charged with something serious.

Go easy on me if I'm over thinking this or if I've got it all wrong here. I haven't looked into this since around 2013ish, after reading laws regarding hacking non-wifi 2.4ghz radio waves used in drones and RC scared me out of going any further. Also asked a professor who told me basically it's not worth the trouble to even get approval for research.

hack the planet, man.

(really, just use responsibly, like any tool. You’re overthinking it)

I keep reading the headline as “Flipper (Zero Manufactoring) and (Shipping) Plan”, which makes me wonder if there exists a manufactoring version of serverless.

Well there's sites like https://www.3dhubs.com/ where you can upload a design file and they will make it for you/farm it out to people with the requisite machines to make it.

It's the same zero capital investment but higher incremental cost per customer as with serverless deployments.

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