Flipper Devices Unveils the Flipper One, a Powerful Pocket-Sized Computer
The creators of the Flipper Zero want the community to pitch in to make this Linux-powered follow-up the best it can be.
Flipper Devices, creator of the popular Flipper Zero electronics multitool, has announced its long-teased pocket-sized fully-functional computer, the Flipper One — and it's opening up the development process to contributors.
"Flipper Zero taught us how much you can do with a tightly-scoped, open product and a community that pushes it further than you can," says Flipper Devices co-founder and chief executive officer Pavel Zhovner. "Flipper One is what happens when we apply the same approach to a much bigger problem — building a fully open ARM Linux device that doesn't go obsolete the moment it ships. To be honest, it’s hard, and we can't do that alone, which is why we're opening the development process from day one."
The Flipper Zero launched on Kickstarter as a "hacker's multitool," before a rebranding saw the company move away from the H-word — preempting calls from governments, including Canada's, to ban the gadgets following mostly-but-not-wholly spurious claims they could be used to steal cars. The best-selling devices combine a Tamagotchi-inspired virtual pet with tools including sub-gigahertz radio, RFID and Near-Field Communication (NFC) reading and writing, infrared, and even wired general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins compatible with optional expansion boards both first- and third-party.
Flipper Devices didn't launch with the intention to build the Flipper Zero, though. The company was founded to build a more powerful gadget dubbed the Flipper One, pivoting to the simpler Flipper Zero to raise funds in pursuit of its original vision. Now, the Flipper One is a reality — almost: Flipper Devices is still working on its development, but has decided the time is ripe to call in the community for help.
The Flipper One, as envisioned, shares the rough design of the original Flipper Zero — which will still be manufactured and sold alongside the new model, targeting microcontroller-centric workloads — but in a scaled-up format. A 256×144-pixel 64-grey LCD sits at the top, with a five-way direction pad to the right — but there's now a touchpad to the left, too, with haptic feedback, while a push-to-talk button for vocal communication sits at the top, with five more buttons below the screen.
Crack open the housing, and you'll find something a little more powerful than a microcontroller: a Rockchip RK3576 system-on-chip, which includes four high-performance Arm Cortex-A72 cores and four more efficient Cortex-A54 cores, an Arm Mali G52 MC3 graphics processor, and an accelerator for on-board machine learning and computer vision workloads delivering a claimed six tera-operations per second at INT8 precision. There's 8GB of LPDDR5 RAM, 64GB of storage plus microSD expansion, and a Raspberry Pi RP2350B microcontroller as a real-time coprocessor.
In other words: we're talking a full single-board computer. To back that up, there's a full-size HDMI connector supporting up to 4k120 video output, a DisplayPort v1.4 on one of the USB Type-C ports, analog audio out and in, triple-band Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 radios, and even an M.2 B-key slot for high-speed storage, cellular modems, accelerator boards, and more. There's still a GPIO header, too, though this has shifted to the rear of the device rather than the top, along with a debug port with UART and serial wire debug (SWD) support. Finally, there are two USB Type-C ports and one USB Type-A port, all supporting USB 3.1 at 5Gb/s, two wired gigabit Ethernet ports, and nano-SIM slot for an optional M.2-slot cellular modem.
"With Flipper One, we’ve set ourselves a list of ambitious goals," Zhovner says. "Build the most open and best-documented ARM computer in the world, with full mainline Linux kernel support. Push vendors to open up their existing closed-source code and ditch binary blobs entirely. Build an unconventional hardware platform based on a co-processor architecture that pairs a microcontroller with a CPU, and port tons of low-level MCU code. Rethink how people use Linux and develop our own GUI framework with wrappers around existing CLI utilities."
"Many of these goals come with a lot of uncertainty," Zhovner admits, "which is scary. But we believe this is the only way to make a truly meaningful contribution to the open-source community and to education. We're asking the community to help us push [Rockchip] RK3576 fully into mainline so we can build a truly open Linux platform together. We'd be glad for any kind of contribution, not just code. For example, maybe you can find a way to convince Rockchip to open up that last [DDR5 memory trainer] blob. Or maybe you work there and know who to talk to. Or maybe you know someone who can help."
While Flipper Devices is sharing the specifications — subject to change, the company warns — it isn't quite ready to start taking orders, and isn't sharing pricing nor estimated availability yet. It is, however, soliciting contributions alongside RK3576-mainlining work by project partner Collabora, with a developer portal covering everything from firmware development to documentation. Information on joining the development process is available on the Flipper Devices website.