Hello, and some questions :)

#1

Background:

I just ordered a flipper0 but I’m pretty new to this stuff. I am mostly interested in learning about the different wireless technologies out there, a bit about wireless or general hardware pentesting, and also to use this platform to learn how to develop for a semi-complex embedded platform using C. I am fairly knowledgeable in electronics from a while back (~2000) but not very knowledgeable about modern SoCs and such. I have a few ideas on how I want to use my flipper0 when I get it, but primarily I want to develop extensions to the stock firmware for myself to learn how to interface with these sorts of systems and wireless chips to learn about them for some home automation things I want to do.

Anyways, I’ll have to read up a ton on some of these topics (pentesting, digital wireless signal modulation, etc.) and I’ve already started to do so, but I had a few questions about the capabilities of the device below. I know the device has limited processing power, memory, etc. and I am not asking how to implement any of this, just if these things might be possible or if the chips simply cannot handle these use cases.

  1. Is the flipper0 capable of sampling a radio signal (on any of the available channels) without a modulation? I would expect the output would be some raw waveform format, if this was possible.
  2. Is the WiFi board just for packet sniffing, or can I “get online” with it? Can I send data over that WiFi signal, if I can “get online”? I was considering trying to setup an external processing node that I could send samples of things to and it would queue and process them and then I could retrieve some other data that would be the result of that operation.
  3. While I’m developing the C code for whatever I want, such as the above ideas, what is the best way to debug the code? I don’t mind if the devloop is something like “develop → build → upload → attach debugger → run code on device → loop”, but is there any way to emulate the flipper0, even just the primary core, on my PC?
  4. Has anyone had luck running an embedded language, such as Lua, on the flipper0? I imagine Lua might need to be an older, smaller version, maybe eliminating floats, and the stdlib would need be truncated somehow. I just want to be able to run some quick scripts to interface with the device’s features, even if it’s not a turing-complete language but was instead more like a macro language.

Thanks in advance :slight_smile:

1 Like
#2

Keep up n mind, the flipper zero project is still at the beginning. There are heavy waves in development, as I understand, right now there are a lot of improvements on the RFID part in the pipeline.

  1. The Flipper Zero is not a SDR. The receiver are doing most of the job, so the Flipper is only getting 0 and 1. No wave… This applies to the SubGHz as well a the IR.
  2. The provided Wifi Board is mostly a way to ‘wireless debug’. Even if you could ‘connenc’, what than? There is no Email client, browser or even telnet client.
    As far as I know, most functions from the wireless board are available via BLE with an android phone, meanwhile.
  3. There is no Emulator available, right now. Your described way is the one I am dealing with, right now. Bus as mentioned in the introduction, maybe in future it will.
  4. The 32bit with 64MHz should be enough, but I think 1MB of space in the Firmware is not much for an interpreter. Maybe if the ELF loader is ready, there will be more languages available, via plugin on the sdcard.

I’m just a user, maybe in one or another point I’m wrong. But these are my experiences, so far.
I’d enjoy my Flipper every day and learn something new nearly every week.

#3

Thanks for the reply, I’ll respond a little bit:

  1. I understand you have to interface with the embedded communications “device” to perform most of the wireless functionality, but my question was more like: is there a C API I can interface with to sample a wave or perform more low-level sampling and transmission? There is an SDR somewhere in this device, so what are the limitations on it’s user interface? Like I said, I’m not super familiar with this stuff, I guess I should start reading the tech specs for the chips and stuff onboard, which might answer a lot of my questions.
  2. Yea, I guess the WiFi board is my answer to my 3rd question; and if it can interface with gdb there must also be a way for me to do some sort of bi-directional data transfer… I’ll check that out.
  3. Thanks
  4. Yea, I saw the firmware has to be small, so I’ll definitely check out the ELF loader.