Show HN: FlopperZiro – A DIY open-source Flipper Zero clone

This rocks; the idea of flipperzero phoning home is the(my) primary concern given its use case

What use case?

I got mine to make a backup copy of the remote controls that I'm worried about losing, which happen to be sub-GHz and infrared.

There's also https://capibarazero.com/

Would you be willing to elaborate on the FZ phoning home?

I wonder if modern smartphones could bus power one of these in a phone case. I love my Flipper, but it's a chonker and I have to charge it.

It's a very dumb device. If you don't put in a separate wifi module it literally has no way to phone home.

I know this is a hobby project, but the whole appeal of Flipper Zero is that you can get one for $200 and it instantly grants you a seat on Joe Rogan or Shawn Ryan show where you can wave it front of camera, flip a switch and say "all you base are belong to mine".

Yes is possible, it doesn't consume too much, but the hardware remains bulky

nope, the whole appeal of flipper zero to me and for my friends is what you can do with it, not that you can get one for $200.

yes, but it's not fun

Do this device and the other alternative mentioned (Capibara Zero) have the same level of software support as the Flipper Zero? I imagine the strong community behind the Flipper Zero is a big factor in its ongoing popularity.

Don't suppose anyone has seen in person one of the clones of the flipper zero that are on Aliexpress?

Exactly, the flipepr have a enormous community that help, beyond all the people that work for flipper. So in this case is no, the software support is not even remotely comparable

I love the name

thanks, i have a lot of fantasy

Not seeing it mentioned here but the big difference from a first glance is the RF capability. This is little more than a 433 MHz replay attacker. Maybe you can generate arbitrary data out, as long as it's the ook modulation. I'm sure there's a great use-case for this, but avoid any delusions of grandeur, this is very cut down.

" Important Notice: This is just a fun project, it was started to pass the time, it is not at all professional and is not intended to be. Is not an alternative for professional device."

But does it look like a Tamagotchi?

The title blurb seems to present it as a functional clone, rather than a limited copy.

"A Flipper Zero clone, but cheapest, DIY and simply Open Source, made with Arduino IDE"

Why not?

"A hobby partial Flipper Zero clone, cheaper, DIY and Open Source, made with Arduino IDE"

So it doesn't have to be clarified further down. I get that it's not that down, but the title is what will be shared and seen in web previews everywhere.

That being said, it looks very cool, and the name is fun.

yes i know that is simply a replay attack, for now i was all that i want, in the future I will see what can be done

Is it not...a bit of both? There's some dollar amount where "what you can do with it" wouldn't make up for the price, no?

In the first version i added It, probably on the initial commit you can see It, but It have a problem with the microcontroller that i use, so for now i removed it

Mr. Ryan hands out gummy bears.

That's my thinking. It's not a clone. I finally remembered the term I was looking for. It's a "demake" - a remake but worse

And that's very fair but an OOK replayer is not a clone. The hardware isn't nearly the same capability. That's fine, it's just a different product entirely

The firmware is open source

Edit for all replies: I'm coming from a place of lack of education; it's not that I know FZ is phoning home, it's that I know I wouldn't be able to tell if it was.

The LilyGo T-Embed CC1100 has similar hardware capabilities of the FlipperZero plus WiFi/bluetooth and runs the Bruce Pentest firmware all for under half the price of the flipper. The Bruce firmware works well on it but is not as polished as the flipper zero but both hardware and software are open source and easily modded.

It is exactly same problem like Raspberry Pi vs all other (cheaper, better) single board computers.

Yes i know It, but when i started It this, It didn't exist yet

Also the Kiisu which is 1:1 with capabilities, plus a few more.

What is going on with the PCB? It looks like the soldered several dev boards to a big PCB. I can't think of a good reason to do this.

Some good reasons off the top of my head:

It’s easier to do pcb-layout wise. Allows you to re-use most components between board revisions, or when you’re done with the project. Probably less ewaste overall because of that.

I mean, yeah, why not? You take a bunch of off the shelf boards and put them together on the PCB as is. To make a PCB with all of the components on it would not be very DIY. That's a custom board and out of scope for DIY.

Except the RPi competition isn't better, only cheaper, because it has terrible software; and without a big community, no support?

Its sometimes fun re-inventing the wheel, at least you get to understand it all better.

Totally depends on what “better” means to you and your use case.

The firmware repo was archived Apr 12, 2025. I don't think it's going to be revived or be feature-competitive.

Wondering what the hotels in Vegas around Defcon will think of it this year lol.

I’m not sure I’ll ever understand HN aggression with certain downvotes. This is the OP from Italy and likely English is not their first language. Why is this comment so bad?

The FZ itself is very unlikely to even be capable of phoning home.

I do sometimes wonder how concerned I need to be about the companion app though.

If that is a boundary one sets up for him or herself, then I question why set up that boundary? Is it an identity matter? "I'm a DIYer (maker?), not an engineer. I have have no interest in doing anything deeper." I was thrilled when I learned about the Maker movement; then disappointed after observing that so much of it is done without ambition to learn more, or become better at the craft.

The popularity and usefulness of many devices like the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi doesn't stem from the hardware capabilities, but the "communities of scale" (lots of people use it -> it's much easier to find compatible software, hardware, guides etc.)

I would expect this to be the same for the Flipper Zero.

A good reason to do it (IMO, as someone who has done it) that it's a lot faster, easier, and often cheaper than designing a fully custom board.

Not only would designing a fully custom board require a lot of error-prone effort, getting a lot of components in tiny quantities can be prohibitively expensive.

Good engineering includes optimizing for cost (monetary and non-monetary), and I'd argue that for many hobbyist one-off projects that won't be manufactured at scale, dev-boards-on-PCB is good engineering.

FlopperOne when? :)

Okay, have you ever tried to "become better" to the point you researched what would be needed to have a custom PCB built with all of the components on a stock Arduino and any additional shields you might use? You'll see that you will need minimum orders. You'll also have a much more difficult time creating the PCB, as you'll have create all of the traces to connect everything. The method chosen allows for off the shelf components with a much more easily created PCB with minimum traces created connecting pins from shields/LEDs/etc. These will be dirt cheap and can be order in tiny quantities.

This is also a hobby project. To custom build a PCB with all of the components brings this into the Kickstarter world of something. So the person can buy <5 PCBs to play with as hobby or attempt to fund say minimum 500-1000 pieces. From TFA: "Important Notice: This is just a fun project, it was started to pass the time, it is not at all professional and is not intended to be. Is not an alternative for professional device."

Even with the method chosen, if you think the person did not become better after making the simple PCB or any of the other coding required, you're off your rocker. Every build like this comes with mistakes and learning how to correct them.

Having a SATA or M2 is something what I would consider definitely better, however software is usually garbage stuck on one specific Linux Kernel and that's the reason why better hardware will never catch on.

what do you mean "terrible software", as long as they have linux kernel for it, i don't see how it's more terrible than raspberry

It is absolutely possible to DIY a custom board and it is extremely common.

Terrible as in you will be stuck in the pretty much only kernel image that runs on it without being able to update things beyond the kernel

The name alone deserves a project hahah thanks for the laugh

On the one hand, sure it has a big effect, especially with hardware addons.

But on the other, I think this is overstated, I lose count of how many "How to X on Raspberry Pi" pages I've seen that were really "How to X on linux" or at best "How to X on embedded Linux". Often they were worse than existing "How to X on linux" resources but picked up traction because of the association with a popular board.

But then I'm just an old curmudgeon who's been messing with embedded linux since long before there was a RPi...

really excited for the NFC support

considering it has no wifi or gsm capabilities that is going to be pretty hard trick to achieve

This is like asking a painter why the hell he used ready made paints and did not create his own for each color he needed. Not everybody has a hobby of spending time and money fixing tracing mistakes of PCB revision 11, playing with working contraption is fine as it is.

> Read rf signal and emulate it or save it

I assume it checks that you actually have the licensing requirements to be transmitting on whatever frequency?

True, but while there is a decent sized Flipper Zero community, I found it to be significantly smaller and less prone to fresh development than the other two you mentioned by comparison. The Flipper Zero is stunted by a good portion of that community being individuals who want a pocket hack toy without having to do any work to make it go, resulting in perceived stagnation of the device.

Perhaps I missed something when I owned mine? So many people I encountered in said community really just wanted a wifi deauther, which could have been built or purchased in a variety of cheaper ways. I got bored with it quickly, and returned to doing interesting things with Arduino and ESP32, but YMMV.

I've done the same thing for a few reasons.

- Certain things need good layouts - I think I can see a DC-DC Converter, you need to minimize certain loop areas, etc. You also need to ensure that you use the correct footprints for the chips. Way easier to just use a bunch of modules with a simple pcb.

- It reduces the components you need to aquire - you need to select a inductor with the correct specs for the dc-dc converter, a bunch of different resistors and capacitors for all sorts of uses or you just purchase a cheap module from china.

- It's easier to solder. Fancy chips with packages with no leads are not trivial to solder. LED's might be a bit sensitive to temperature and can get destroyed by a not-so-great solderer. Small pitches on IC make it easy to create solder bridges or bad connections.

Why not assume people are responsible for following their local laws instead? They're not selling anything, so kind of feels it has to fall on the user, not the person who shares a thing.

Because people obviously cant be trusted to follow their local laws when using flipper zero-esque devices https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/wall-of-flipp...

People ignoring laws isn't a new thing, does that mean things that could potentially be used for illegal things should be outright outlawed?

That article you shared seems to say the problem is bigger than the used hardware even:

> Soon after, developer Simon Dankelmann ported the attack to an Android app, allowing people to launch Bluetooth spam attacks without needing a Flipper Zero.

How do you solve that without outlawing Android devices?

> People using Bluetooth-enabled hearing aids and heart rate monitoring tools also reported disruption, which could put their well-being at risk.

This is probably the most bananas part of that article, and it's great that they managed to find these issues in relatively trivial conditions, since the company's own testing apparently doesn't include very basic security checks. If those devices are failing when they aren't connected to the main device, what makes these companies even remotely suitable for building critical devices like that?

Who knows how long time it would take to discover these security issues with medical devices if people weren't able to prototype these sort of attacks at home?

Similar project https://kiisu.io/kiisu-v4a/ runs flipper code and modded flipper code

You're not the audience that is going to Google 'how to connect eBay humidity sensor to raspberry pi'. You have to remember that there is an experience gradient, and everyone starts somewhere.

You’re not wrong, I guess my point is that “the community” that produces guides and tools may be wider than the specific popular device, whether deliberately or by accident.

Everyone does start somewhere, and as much as the breathlessness over Raspberry Pi in the early days irritated me (many people seemed to think there had been no Linux on ARM before then), you absolutely can’t fault them for building a community and getting people interested in the whole area, and lowering the informational barriers to entry.

The bluetooth-enabled devices are failing to connect to their devices because of deauth attacks. If you know how to prevent that, I'm sure they'd be happy to implement a fix

As someone who's been an IT ops support on a hacker-firendly conference, from an admin perspective - not great! But at an operational level our team could just blame Kevin Mitnick (RIP to a real one) for any single thing that we wrong in the building,

Flipper Zero: Sweded Edition

If you stick to RockChip stuff, it's not bad.

> The bluetooth-enabled devices are failing to connect to their devices

And that happens in lots of other cases too, when it's too far away, out of battery, damaged, does that mean their vital health devices stop working if that's happening? Sounds like they need to work on reliability if that was true.

My brains the sort of a-hole that only understands if I reinvent it or break it in ways I was told not to.

Yes, you're nit the first telling me this. At first i wanted to make full custom pcb with smd components. But it cost me too much to make just one and some components were difficult to find, so i opted to make more like a shield so is more easy to find the componets and piu easier to solder than SMD for those who have never done it before. This is the same.The last one is also valid for the reason why it was written in Arduino and not in C, that at least even those who are not so familiar with it can modify it

i'm working on it but the nfc module that i use have some limitation,let's see what comes out

It's microservices, but for hardware.