The Canadian government plans to ban the Flipper Zero and similar devices after tagging them as tools thieves can use to steal cars.
Yeah I saw there was the add-on board for wifi testing, but it seemed like this plugs in externally and isn’t a normal part of the toolkit? So if the Flipper itself isn’t performing the wifi test then I guess I don’t see why the ESP32 couldn’t just add in everything else the Flipper does? All the other hardware I saw, for IR, NFC, RFID, and one-wire connections… that could all easily also be added to the ESP32 with pins to spare, so what am I missing?
…the same reason you don’t see Sony releasing every PS5 with a dev board. Of course you can extend the ESP32 or whatever microcontroller to do anything the Flipper can. That’s obvious. Go search around on GitHub there are thousands of projects you can do with the ESP32 that will have the FBI making a personal visit to your house. The whole point of the Flipper is it’s turnkey and makes it easy for people that are less skilled or don’t have the patience to do all that.
Gotcha. Yeah I have plenty of experience with getting circuit boards made and even working with SMD parts (actually working on some boards right now) so I tend to forget that not everybody just has this stuff lying around. Maybe the hardware is the limitation preventing a lot of ESP-based clones of flipper from being available out there.