Flipper Devices Unveils the Flipper One, a Highly effective Pocket-Sized Laptop

Flipper Devices, creator of the favored Flipper Zero electronics multitool, has introduced its long-teased pocket-sized fully-functional laptop, the Flipper One — and it is opening up the event course of 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 govt 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,” earlier than a rebranding noticed the corporate transfer away from the H-word — preempting calls from governments, together with Canada’s, to ban the devices following mostly-but-not-wholly spurious claims they could possibly be used to steal automobiles. The best-selling units mix a Tamagotchi-inspired digital pet with instruments together with sub-gigahertz radio, RFID and Near-Field Communication (NFC) studying and writing, infrared, and even wired general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) pins appropriate with non-obligatory enlargement boards each first- and third-party.

Flipper Devices did not launch with the intention to construct the Flipper Zero, although. The firm was based to construct a extra highly effective gadget dubbed the Flipper One, pivoting to the less complicated Flipper Zero to lift funds in pursuit of its authentic imaginative and prescient. Now, the Flipper One is a reality — virtually: Flipper Devices continues to be engaged on its growth, however has determined the time is ripe to name locally for assist.

The Flipper One, as envisioned, shares the tough design of the unique Flipper Zero — which is able to nonetheless be manufactured and offered alongside the brand new mannequin, concentrating on microcontroller-centric workloads — however in a scaled-up format. A 256×144-pixel 64-grey LCD sits on the prime, with a five-way route pad to the best — however there’s now a touchpad to the left, too, with haptic suggestions, whereas a push-to-talk button for vocal communication sits on the prime, with 5 extra buttons under the display screen.

Crack open the housing, and you will find one thing a little bit extra highly effective than a microcontroller: a Rockchip RK3576 system-on-chip, which incorporates 4 high-performance Arm Cortex-A72 cores and 4 extra environment friendly Cortex-A54 cores, an Arm Mali G52 MC3 graphics processor, and an accelerator for on-board machine studying and laptop imaginative and prescient workloads delivering a claimed six tera-operations per second at INT8 precision. There’s 8GB of LPDDR5 RAM, 64GB of storage plus microSD enlargement, and a Raspberry Pi RP2350B microcontroller as a real-time coprocessor.

In different phrases: we’re speaking a full single-board laptop. To again that up, there is a full-size HDMI connector supporting as much as 4k120 video output, a DisplayPort v1.4 on one of many USB Type-C ports, analog audio in and out, triple-band Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 radios, and even an M.2 B-key slot for high-speed storage, mobile modems, accelerator boards, and extra. There’s nonetheless a GPIO header, too, although this has shifted to the rear of the system relatively than the highest, together with a debug port with UART and serial wire debug (SWD) assist. 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 non-obligatory M.2-slot mobile 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 specs — topic to vary, the corporate warns — it is not fairly prepared to start out taking orders, and is not sharing pricing nor estimated availability but. It is, nevertheless, soliciting contributions alongside RK3576-mainlining work by challenge accomplice Collabora, with a developer portal overlaying the whole lot from firmware growth to documentation. Information on becoming a member of the event course of is accessible on the Flipper Devices website.