Flipper One — we need your help

We're finally ready to talk about Flipper One — a project we've been grinding on for years and have rebuilt from scratch several times. It's an incredibly hard project, both financially and technically. So today we're going public not with a big shiny announcement, but to tell the whole story straight. Honestly? We're genuinely terrified, and we need your help.

TL;DR With Flipper One, we're reimagining what a Linux cyberdeck can be — it's a huge project. We're opening up the development process and asking the community for help.

With Flipper One, we’ve set ourselves a list of ambitious goals: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, 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.What is Flipper One?Flipper One isn't an upgrade to Flipper Zero — it's a completely different project with its own goals. Flipper One is an open Linux platform you can build almost anything on: from a 5G-enabled IP network analyzer to an SDR-powered radio signal analyzer with local AI. We focused a lot on the hardware expansion system. You can connect high-speed modules to Flipper One over PCI Express, USB 3.0, and SATA interfaces. Add an SDR, a fast SSD, or a cellular modem — just plug in the right module.Flipper One comes with several network interfaces: 2x Gigabit Ethernet, USB Ethernet (5 Gbps), and Wi-Fi 6E (2.4/5/6 GHz). You can add 5G connectivity by plugging in an M.2 modem.

That means you can use Flipper One as a router, a VPN gateway, or a bridge between wired and wireless networks.Zero vs One Flipper Zero and Flipper One are completely different projects built for different tasks. The easiest way to think about it is in terms of networking layers:Layer 0 — Offline point-to-point access-control protocols: NFC, low-frequency RFID, Sub-1 GHz radio, Infrared, wired protocols like iButton, UART, SPI, I²C. Based on a low-power microcontroller.Layer 1 — Everything that's IP-connected: Wi-Fi, Ethernet, 5G, and satellite. It's all about networking, data transfer, and high-performance computing. Running on powerful hardware and an open Linux toolkit — enough computing power to handle SDR and local AI.Flipper Zero and Flipper One operate at different protocol layers and are not meant to replace each otherSo they're not "newer" and "older" generations of the same product. Flipper One doesn't replace Flipper Zero — they're different categories of devices.Truly Open Linux platformWe want to build a truly open Linux hardware platform — the best-documented ARM computer, one that works out of the box on any recent upstream kernel. It will never go stale because it'll keep getting the latest updates. Our goals:Full mainline Linux kernel supportNo binary blobs, closed drivers, or proprietary firmwareNo vendor-locked BSP (board support package)We say "truly open" because the current state of ARM Linux is depressing. Every vendor bolts on their own custom mess: closed boot blobs, vendor-specific patches, "board support packages" that nobody outside the chip maker can really understand. You can no longer just read the specs and understand how computers work — you can only learn the workarounds for one specific chip with one specific BSP. We're sick of this ourselves, and we don't want to be part of the problem by shipping yet another product that just adds to the mess.To pull this off, we've partnered with the Collabora team to push full support for the Rockchip RK3576 SoC into the mainline Linux kernel.

Practically, this means you can download the kernel directly from kernel.org, with zero vendor patches, and run it on your Flipper One.👩👩👧👦Flipper + Collabora — Making things open together We've partnered with Collabora to bring the RK3576 SoC into the mainline kernel and give Flipper One full upstream support.Read more: Collabora blog postCurrent RK3576 mainline support is in pretty good shape, and all the major components are working. But there's still one last binary blob in the boot chain — the DDR trainer, which initializes RAM during early boot.

We're asking the community to help us polish RK3576 support so we can build a truly open 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 blob.

Right now, we're focused on power management and USB DP Alt-mode support. There are also drivers and accelerators that aren't fully upstream yet — the NPU, hardware video decoding, and other accelerators. Collabora maintains a public list of what's already working in mainline and what isn't, and we'd love help closing those gaps.Current status of RK3576 support in BSP kernel and mainline Linux kernelRK3576 open source roadmap — what we plan to do and how you can contributeOpen tasks — where you can help usRK3576 mainline status from CollaboraDeveloper Portal – let's build togetherOpenness has always been our thing. With Flipper One, we want to go further — not just open-source code, but an open development process. We're publishing our task trackers, internal discussions, half-finished docs, and architectural debates. All the messy stuff companies usually keep behind closed doors.Introducing → Flipper One Developer Portal This is uncomfortable. We've never been this open before, and there's a real instinct to hide the unfinished work, the wrong turns, and the arguments. But we believe the educational value of building openly is worth more than the polish of pretending it was easy.What is the Developer Portal?Flipper One Developer Portal is a public wiki with all the development documentation for Flipper One, and anyone can edit it.

The portal describes the project's structure and ways you can participate in development.Flipper One is a massive project, and several teams are working on it, each responsible for its own part. We call these parts sub-projects:🔌 Hardware — electrical hardware development. This is where the printed circuit boards (PCBs), antennas, and everything related to the electrical connections of chips, connectors, and processors are designed.⚙ Mechanics — mechanical engineering and industrial design. This is where the enclosure, buttons, plastic and metal parts, and mounting components are designed. Everything the user physically interacts with.🐧 Linux (CPU Software) — software development for the RK3576 processor. Linux kernel, modules, drivers, userspace, bootloader, Rockchip tools, etc. This is the largest and most complex sub-project, spanning many repositories.🕹 MCU Firmware — firmware development for the RP2350 microcontroller, which controls the display, power subsystem, and CPU boot process, and handles button and touchpad events.🎨 User Interface — UI/UX development. This is where the user interface, the device's visual language, and all graphics are developed.📚 Docs — developer portal wiki, technical docs, guides, and datasheets. All documentation, including the Developer Portal itself, is developed here. It covers the Flipper One product, development processes, and contribution guides.🧪 Testing — tools for testing device subsystems and hardware validation. Includes scripts and programs for testing power, networking, CPU, audio, graphics, etc., as well as interface prototypes, demos, and test apps.Anyone can joinWhether you're an engineer, software developer, designer, or simply an enthusiastic user with ideas to share, you're welcome to participate in development and help shape Flipper One.We're also hiring a Developer Portal Manager — someone to act as a proxy between our dev team and the community, help shape the Developer Portal, and engage with contributors. Apply for the Developer Portal & Community Manager role.Co-processor architectureFlipper One runs on two processors: a high-performance CPU and a tiny low-power MCU. They run in parallel, and each manages its own part:High-performance CPU — the 8-core RK3576 SoC that runs Linux.

It comes with a Mali-G52 GPU and an NPU for running LLMs and other models locally. There's also 8 GB of RAM on board. Read more in CPU Software.Low-power MCU — the 2-core Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller that controls the display, buttons, touchpad, LEDs, and the power subsystem. It runs its own MCU Firmware.Flipper One runs on two processorsThe device can run on the MCU alone. Even when Linux is off, you can control Flipper One with its buttons and LCD screen, configure the boot process — all without the main CPU running. This is what's missing on most SBCs: when Linux is off, the device is dead.MCU ↔ CPU interconnectThe two processors communicate over a set of interfaces we call the Interconnect: SPI carries the framebuffer to the MCU for display output, I²C carries commands to the MCU and button and touchpad events back to the CPU, and UART plus a few GPIO lines handle CPU boot control. This is a non-trivial architecture.We plan to land the display and input drivers in the Linux kernel. We want to do it cleanly, without out-of-tree vendor hacks. We'd love for the kernel community to review this design, push back on it, and help us upstream it the right way.Flipper OS + FlipCTLHow we're reimagining Linux cyberdecks

I'm a fan of Raspberry Pi and use it in my own projects, including carrying one around as a travel tactical Linux box. A typical Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian OS) workflow looks like this: today it's a router, tomorrow it's a TV box, the day after that it's a logic analyzer for a debug session. You install dozens of packages, compile some from source, edit system configs, tweak the device tree, patch the kernel — and very quickly the system turns into a mess. There's no clean way to undo it. Roll back to factory? Doesn't exist. Every new project starts with re-flashing the SD card.

Even though we'll be criticizing Raspberry Pi a lot, we genuinely love and respect the company. Their products inspired ours in many ways — they make incredible things and have contributed massively to the embedded industry. And that love is exactly why we keep comparing ourselves to them.