It's a doomed project. There are no mobile PowerPC parts on the market anymore; they're trying to make do with a QorIQ networking part, which has an inappropriate power budget for a laptop. (The specifications are a little hazy on the matter, but by my reading of the datasheet, it idles around 7W and draws closer to 20W at full power.)
“Pocket P.C. w/ LoRa packs a LoRa radio capable of low power, long range communication ideal for IoT developers. Build custom LoRa peer-to-peer applications or build apps for the rapidly growing worldwide LoRaWAN community. With access to LoRaWAN at your finger tips you can prototype and build cutting edge applications faster than ever. Ready to operate on frequencies EU868, US915, and AS923.
Pocket P.C. w/ LoRa is the tool for developing LoRa solutions on the go.
Some Flippers have an i.MX6 running Kali Linux, but they do seem like completely different products.
Many more radios, but many fewer buttons and pixels.
It's nice that we have so many options for tiny computers these days, but sooner or later, someone is going to have to find something useful to do with them.
The UI and developer experience has never gotten quite good enough to drive a market the size of smartphones or laptops, so...what are we doing here? Is it time to acknowledge that the masses don't particularly want general-purpose computing machines? That there isn't much of a market for anything that isn't plug-and-play? That's a depressing thought.
> someone is going to have to find something useful to do with them
Looking at that pocket pc website... If that usb c port could drive a display it might be interesting to dock that thing and get a full desktop experience. Then take your work with you when you are ready to go mobile. On buses and trains or other places where it might be clumsy to use a laptop.
I guess this was a thing many people have fantasized about for a long time but nobody has really made practical. I guess laptops, phones and tablets being separate entities is good enough.
Is that going to be a great experience with an Allwinner R8 and 512 mb of RAM? The PocketCHIP had similar specs but a much more low res display, and it chugged under load.
Some hyphy SBC that's all flash and style. It's got a basic SDR and a few common SPI/i²c devices. It's 99% a marketing play.
All off the shelf and any engineering team could clone it in a few days while substantially undercutting their price. I'd place bets someone already has. The cheaper clones will probably beat their flashy device to market and work better.
But they'll do fine regardless because branding matters way more than it should.
They're selling a fashion accessory targeting the fanboy tech crowd. They haven't thought of putting a clip on the bottom so you could wear it in public yet, but it's probably coming soon. They're running a bunch of ads for it on social media.
It's really irritating how transparent and obvious of a smoke and mirrors act it is AND how successful that strategy is.
Good on them for making the play but bad on us for hitching on to any caravan that sells silicon like it's the National Enquirer.
TL:DR; Flipper Zero has at least some purchasers who are only going to be users of the U2F or NFC features, not hacking on or with it much. The fact that it has useful applications out of the box separates it from some of the SBCs etc that need many more parts and code to have a useful application IRL.
> All off the shelf and any engineering team could clone it in a few days while substantially undercutting their price
Perhaps. And perhaps Dropbox is just a glorified rsync FTP target. (Sarcasm here, boiling down to saying that talk is cheap, shipping is hard)
> They're selling a fashion accessory targeting the fanboy tech crowd
I guess that makes me a 'fanboy tech' then.
Unlike the breadboard + parts + wires + needed case of some kind + SBC/microcontroller +need to learn yet another proglang or dialect to make whatever you built DO something, this device comes with a working battery, controls, screen, Bluetooth and U2F, NFC cloning out of the box. No instructables or breadboard required!
While I'm interested in circuit design, there are no simple books that will take you from plugging in a battery to a single led to something that can run c code. Maybe NAND to Tetris? Have had a hard time finding a physical book for that.
Learning to do embedded stuff as a result would require more time than I'm willing to invest right now vs what I could get done by reusing old phones or retro computers to do stuff, or by purchasing a Turn-Key device like this.
And for once the marketing may mean that these people have answers to questions, and do not disappear for months on end while the engineering types silently work and don't dare talk about their problems. Sort of like the opaque development of signal versus the open development of this week in matrix.
at the very least, the dolphin character and marketing or branding on this device shows that there is at least some ux care taken, and there will be at least one or two glossy coats of paint applied over top the bare metal. I compare this to something like a Chinese pen plotter that while technically being only a cheaper version of the do-it-yourself pen plotter or axidraw, has much worse software that barely works and is not intuitive.
Regarding the flipper itself, I purchased it to function as a simple NFC clone for my work badge if I ever go back to work, and as a u2f key manger since I don't already have one of those, not as a hacking or embedded development aid.
Those capabilities and gpio pens are optional to me as a user, which may confirm your suspicions, I don't know.
Like most finished products, this device can provide a high-value to user supplied code ratio. There's definitely a place for devices that are 'merely' hardware and a software platform that enable a one-to-one value to user supplied code device... even I run things like pihole on a dedicated raspberry pi zero since the cost benefit is there. Why, at some point, I'm going to learn native Linux development so that I can write applications for the pine phone whenever it comes out with a keyboard. not everything has to be a completely finished product with applications after all.
Having the ability to hack on something is great, but this fanboy prefers to purchase products that can actually do something for him, yet are extensible, as opposed to buying some pcbs and hoping that one day some way somehow you can make them do something. I have enough almost started weekend projects already :)
/End rant , thanks for your patience with my clumsy delivery skills
While I'm interested in circuit design, there are no simple books that will take you from plugging in a battery to a single led to something that can run c code. Maybe NAND to Tetris? Have had a hard time finding a physical book for that.
I don't want to address any other point, but I can share an experience here.
I went from very basic electronics knowledge (what most discrete components do in the abstract for, though not how to use them properly) to building a couple of SBCs by googling "home brew 6502" and reading whatever came up. I was a very rewarding journey, though there was certainly no book, I had to follow up on a lot of things myself.
Obviously a home brew 6502 won't do much modern, but you'll be left with way more knowledge than you need to build something with bare microcontroller / cpu and the kind of SPI/i2c bus peripherals you're talking about here.
Certainly it's a bunch of effort, but everything is there is you want to research it, and the 6502 forums are stupidly helpful.
Just in case you decide you do want to persue more DIY digital logic. It's well within reach!
PS. Nand to tetris is an awesome project, but it's waaay overkill for what you're talking about. There is a huge amount of cpu and compiler design that you don't need. And actually, not enough electrical engineering...
It's far simpler. Flipper is closer to a custom built PC, where you buy the parts online and then assemble them.
They got someone to probably use solidworks for the case design and they have some brilliant artists but beyond that you can buy all of these components online and basically snap them together, read some short documentation and be on your way.
Their initial goal was $60k, which would have covered 500 units which they probably presumed they'd be manually involved with each of them so it was basically set up for exactly what I described. They just had some runaway success, which is the problem because they still only have a cheap project that takes no special talent or time
I'm mostly jealous how much of success is just pure luck like this
A very smart move by the political system to make activists hate some impalpable company moloch named "Disney" instead of the concretely named congressmen/congresswomen who voted for the law for copyright extension.
Notably, Sonny Bono for whom, along with the other sponsers I withhold invective purely out of respect of this community and its value of civil discourse.
I find the extension from 50 to 70 years extremely distasteful; manifest contempt by 'artists' for the commons and society's investment in their success.
Don't misunderstand; they're hated too. The US Congress has something like a low-teens approval rating.
But between the two organizations, gerrymandering means the politicians can't be voted out but people can "vote" to lower Disney's status with their dollars.
It's weird though, because they are roughly about as effective at lowering Disney's status as they are at voting the politicians out because collective action problems are hard.
I think the implication is that "rent seekers gonna seek" is a fact of life, and that "a government that resists rent seeking" is the part of the equation we might be able to control.
> Why should we accept rent seeking as inevitable?
In my mind, a couple big reasons.
One, for the same reason that we accept a lot of awful things like murder as inevitable. Of course we'd rather get rid of these things, but it's unrealistic to think we'll get rid of them completely, so the systems we have in place for dealing with them when they happen will always be very important.
Two, because these things are often in the eye of the beholder. What I see as "rent seeking", you might see as "providing a public good". Most people (on HN at least) think current US copyright law represents a lot of rent seeking by Disney. But most of the same people still support some notion of copyright. There's no clear line where "public good that most people agree with" ends and "rent seeking" begins.
No, preventing it is the responsibility of the government. :-p
On a more serious note, there's not a lot that individuals can do about this – even individual politicians. The systems involved have to change pretty fundamentally to prevent lobbying from working. How do you think those systems can be changed to accomplish that?
Maybe to start there could be mandatory disclosure of all donations/vacations/other lobbying tactics that each senator is engaged in, correlated with their track record of voting and publicly disclosed and actively monitored.
I agree it's a hard problem, but I think with a big enough pool of information everyone could get a letter/email saying that politician x cost you y amount this year by voting this way. I know I would be compelled to make some changes.
1. Promise to give lots of money to the senators who vote for their interests well enough. This doesn't even have to be targeted.
2. A neutral party collates all that information, and publishes it.
3. Wait until the first sufficiently-helpful senator retires, and is no longer bound by the rules.
4. Reward them.
5. Wait.
6. Profit.
Better than the status quo, since only huge companies will still be able to effectively lobby, but introduces problems of its own. That is, assuming the system works as intended. Which it won't.
Because how do you make sure the disclosure is mandatory? This punishes honest lobbyers (and honest lobbyees) more than it punishes dishonest ones; if all politicians are being lobbied evenly from all possible causes, but cause B's lobbying is secretive, politicians are incentivised to vote for cause B (i.e. against ¬B, which they are being publicly lobbied by).
This system does incentivise not being the ones to lobby, though – assuming there's no way to do lobbying that appears to be ¬B lobbying, so the politicians can be virtuous and vote B, which makes the “¬B lobbyists” lobby harder because obviously their bribes weren't big enough…
It's hard to tell the difference between a bribe and extortion.
"I'll give you $1M if you extend the copyright timeline."
"If you don't give me $1M I'll let your copyright expire."
Does anybody else believe that congresspeople should be paid $10M/yr, indexed to inflation? This would be a drop in the federal budget, but would do a lot I think to curb both bribery and extortion.
I definitely disagree about that. Look at how much time a Congressperson spends raising funds. They clearly don't have the funds necessary to influence their own behavior. They seek out donors and act in those donors' interest in legislative matters. (I'm not saying they work exclusively in donors' interest, but it's clear that donors' interests are taken into account.)
Eh?
Even if a person would not end up with enough funds to secure re-election if they chose to vote against a measure, does not mean that they don’t have the freedom to vote against it.
They are still responsible for their actions even if the alternative actions would be highly against their self-interest.
Even a person who is threatened with death if they don’t take an action, is still free to either take or not take the action. They might be justified in taking the action on the basis of said threat, even if the action would ordinarily be forbidden, but they are still making a choice.
Sure: Legislators have to prioritize lots of different things, not just copyright terms, and the skill of making deals while operating within the rules and traditions of a legislature is one they must learn on the job. Having a bunch of short-timers wouldn't make copyright law reform any more likely, and it certainly wouldn't make anyone more likely to vote their conscience. Further, copyright law isn't an issue of conscience for most legislators to begin with, no matter how long they've been in office, as most of them, like most of their constituents, don't understand the value of public domain or the importance of shared culture.
