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Comment by NietzscheanNull | Hacker News Reader

I received mine recently, and I’ve been consistently impressed at both the build quality and overall attention to detail. I know many Kickstarter projects (and hardware startups in general) end up aggressively compromising on features and construction to meet deadlines and cut down on BOM costs, so I was very pleased to see no evidence of that with the Flipper Zero. It’s one of those products where you can immediately tell that a very passionate team invested a ton of time and took special care with the engineering and design process.

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> [...] aggressively compromising on features and construction to meet deadlines and cut down on BOM costs, so I was very pleased to see no evidence of that

Tbh the team made the right decision to push the deadlines in order to deliver the quality they would be satisfied with. And I wholeheartedly support them in doing so.

I am totally ok with the device being delivered to me almost a year after the initially promised deadline, as long as that extra time went into getting the quality up to the level. So props to the team, I am happy that they actually took that time to polish up to the current level, instead of trying to meet an arbitrary deadline.

Their development blog played a heavy role in convincing me that they were not just stalling (which, sadly, has been my previous experience with quite a few promising hardware Kickstarted projects). Every single post has so much attention to even the most minuscule details that 90% wouldn't care for, it definitely reassured me that they were trying to be as transparent as possible about the whole process and their decision-making. I cannot say enough good things about writing quality of their dev blog posts. It was incredible and easy to digest, even for someone who hasn't worked much with such close-to-hardware level.

I wanted to know what a Fipper was. I went to the website's hope page. It never told me what a flipper is. I walk away not knowing what a Flipper is. What a waste of my time. Their website home page is a failure.

What?

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

Third line on the page.

If you know what it is already, maybe that helps. But I still only have a vague idea after reading that.

It is hard to make an introductory explanation to someone with close to zero context of what you are talking about when you yourself know it very well.

I had also never heard of this device before and found that statement less than helpful. You don't learn what the device is until way down the page.

Agrred. I have no idea what the device is about until I do a quick Google search and visit their main page. The product looks promising but the explaination for what it is is poor.

Blog entries are rarely good starting points for people new to the topic. Their main page gives a much better introduction: https://flipperzero.one/

This page? [0] Seems pretty extensive. IF you just clicked on the upper left Flipper image you're still in the blog page which isn't going to be the full sales pitch. The main page has their initial sales blurb:

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

[0] https://flipperzero.one/

That's the point - the statement you quoted is very uninformative, and a strong example of bad, unclear communication. It literally does not say anything about what it is what it does, what capabilities it offers.

That statement is essentially "It's a multitool for this target audience of users. It's really good for everything they want to do." - without giving any information about what that "everything" is. It does not provide an example use case - "hacking digital stuff such as radio protocols, access control systems, hardware" is not an use case but just an application domain, but an example use case would be some hint of how this tool would be actually applied to help someone do a security analysis of some radio protocol for an access control system.

Why not say something roughly like

"Flipper Zero is a portable multi-tool that includes transceivers for arbitrary interactions with most popular wireless systems - RFID, NFC, BluetoothLE, infrared and sub-1 Ghz wireless devices. It allows you to run custom exploit or analysis code for these protocols interactively from a convenient small hardware device." ?

That would actually tell a potential radio hardware hacker about its capabilities and limitations; e.g. the original description could just as well be said about the hackRF SDR system, which is substantially different piece of hardware but aimed at a similar audience.

Luckily the main page continues on past that if you scroll down and tells you about the modules included and things that use the frequencies those modules speak.

That first page should provide enough information 'above the fold' to decide if it's worth scrolling down. Currently it does not.

If you're not curious enough to read past a few lines of content, you're not really the target to be honest.

Pentesting (or hacking in any sense of the term) often involves spending a lot of time researching and learning about things, typically heading onto paths where you don't know where you will end up.

Above the fold explanation sounds pretty much BS. I doubt that BS is a good filter for any audience.