I coded my first “serious” app for the Flipper Zero this week, and it’s the first time in my 30-odd years as a programmer that coding something felt slightly weird for two totally silly reasons:
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Each time the Flipper crashes, the dolphin makes a sad face. I know it’s just an animation but… somehow it bothers me each and every time 🙂
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Most of the API calls start with Furi-something. And each time I write one, I can’t help but think of this. Also, there’s nothing furious about cute dolphins - apart perhaps when I keep clubbing them with null pointer dereferences… And yes, I know its stands for Flipper Universal Registry Implementation. Yet my brain can’t help conjuring up images of cute dolphins being clubbed in a post-apocalyptic desert.
Call me weird I guess…
It’s a tester app for the products the company I work for manufactures, which sport a UART serial interface. Fielding a bunch of Flipper Zeros with the app on the production floor is cheaper and more convenient for the workers than fielding laptops.
It’s not a public app obviously.
Still interesting, as I haven’t seen anything until now on homebrew Flipper apps.
There are plenty of homebrew Flipper apps out there. In fact, I’d argue a majority are homebrew at this point.
What’s more unknown is how many haven’t been published because they’re running on Flippers used in a traditional business or manufacturing environment rather than for hacking - profesionally or recreationally.
Me, I looked at the cost of those devices, how established and stable the hardware is (i.e. is it likely to change unexpectedly or disappear tomorrow), how quality it is (i.e. whether it come from some nondescript company in Shenzhen), how stable the API is, how well documented the SDK is, how well supported it is, how vibrant the community is and how much we have to invest on top of the cost of the devices to turn them into the production tools we need, and I made a business case for a fleet of Flippers rather than laptops on the production lines at my company. And it was approved.
Surely other companies have decided to go with Flippers as a rational business decision, but you’ll almost certainly never hear about those Flippers or the custom software they run.
If I get permission from the higher-ups, I might rip out the company-internal code from my app and release it under some open source license for our customers, or anybody who wants to use our products on the go. It’s 95% there and it is useful if you have a need for what we make, even without the advanced functionalities. But at the moment, it makes calls to undocumented features and has a hard-coded extended API unlocking code that makes it impossible to release.