LoRa is not an open physical layer protocol standard, but rather an interesting niche chip product from a small manufacturer.

Like all unicorn chip products, setting up a link in SDR is not officially supported without violating IP rights. =3

LoRa has different frequency bands in different parts of the world. Getting boards that work well across all bands is all but impossible - EU is 868 MHz, US/CA is 910 MHz, AUNZ is 915 MHz. Either you make different versions of the boards with filter stages tuned for the region-specific bands, or you use next to no filtering at all which means you'll end up with the RX stage getting saturated by nearby stations (especially phone networks). The third idea is to use RF switches with different filter networks attached, but that's adding a lot of complexity and BOM and you got to deal with insertion losses on not just the filters but also the switches, and filters that can deal with higher output powers than 22 dBm can get pricey.

Oh and then you got the question of the bandwidth of the filter. Ideally you want as low of a bandwidth as possible (e.g. Meshcore is 62.5 kHz, Meshtastic 250 kHz), but the SRD band in which you can legally run LoRa in Europe is 821-870 MHz... yeah good luck, you can't really do that, you need hardware for any serious usable filter that doesn't get stuffed over by nearby disruptors.

The antenna question is a different thing. That one is easier to solve as you can just ship different antennas tuned to different bands to different country SKUs, but it is nonetheless a pain to deal with.

Edit: Oh and I forgot, LoRa is proprietary IP from Semtech. There's lorarx written by some hams that can work on your average rtl-sdr... but as the name says, it's receive only, I'm not aware of anyone doing SDR transmission for Lora.

Idk, with the One they already seem to try to claim too many things for a single device. Adding a keyboard and a bigger screen will be even bigger scope creep. As a Zero user, I really like the compact form-factor

And just personal imo, for coding on the go something like macbook air seems to be a way more comfortable option. I know that you wrote that you fit gpd in you pants, but man, you know that this use case is even more niche than flipper zero

The product you’re suggesting is $1400, where as the zero sold for a 1/8 of that. Do we expect the Flipper One to have such a price hike as well?

I dunno, I loved the form factor of Flipper Zero, with the addition of a PTT and a more rugged design, this is quite literally an instant buy for me. It has sufficient connectivity that it'd be trivial to bring your own keyboard, in whatever size you'd like, and I'm surely not alone in not wanting a static keyboard attached to the device as I'd never have any use for it, the Flipper (in my view) is a portable device you use for enumerating and executing, but everything else I do on my desktop transferring data to/from the Flipper.

I'm also not sure what I'd do with more than 8GB of RAM, I could literally run my entire OS + dekstop environment + the current applications I have open on my workstation desktop right now with that, and still have room to spare.

Here is an alternative that I think has real potential:

https://m5stack.com/cardputerzero

Today, I think so too, but I think they're onto something with the idea of a PTT-like local LLM interface. With 2-3 orders of magnitude more local inference power, I could really see this work out!

"Hey Flipper, log onto Wi-Fi SSID FooBarAir, pick the free "messaging only" plan, and set up an IP-over-WhatsApp proxy exposed over the second, encrypted SSID" :)

Surely you've seen the price of 64GB of RAM lately?

GPD already makes such things, as does ClockworkPi. The Flipper One is exciting in significant part because it offers a different, smaller form factor.

The form factor is indeed strange. It reminds me of an N-Gage if they had a "rugged"/durable version that was made for construction sites.

The thing has a 2 color display. 8gb is massively overkill. Theres not much you could do on this that would even need 2 gb.

I don’t think the Flipper market is trying to compete with devices like this.

Have you considered Pinephone with the keyboard?

This was my first impression too, but it's actually quite simple: It's everything all at once.

It's an incredibly ambitious plan, but buy would I be in the market (unironically!) for an offline, LLM-powered, voice-controlled, satellite-connected, tactical pocket Linux set top box.

I will buy one, use it once and then it will gather dust. Such is life

maybe repebble will pick it up again, sometime :) but i guess they're focused on more watches and a ring right now.

The honesty here is refreshing. "We're genuinely terrified" is not something you typically hear from a hardware company, and it makes me more inclined to trust them, not less.

The ambitious goals list is interesting because it reads like someone who's been burned by the exact problems they're trying to solve. Mainline Linux kernel support means they've dealt with downstream kernel hell. Pushing vendors to open binary blobs means they've fought with NDA-encumbered firmware. Building a custom GUI framework means they've tried to use existing ones and hit walls.

The co-processor architecture (MCU + CPU) is the smartest design decision here. It means you get real-time I/O handling on the MCU side without the latency and determinism issues you'd hit trying to do the same on a Linux userspace process. It's how serious embedded systems work, and it's why Flipper Zero was able to do things that a Raspberry Pi running Kali couldn't.

The part that concerns me is scope. Mainline kernel + open firmware blobs + custom GUI framework + hardware expansion system + co-processor architecture... that's five hard problems, any one of which could sink a company. The ask for community help makes sense but community hardware projects have a rough track record on delivery timelines. I hope they can keep the scope tight enough to actually ship.