Asked
I picked up one of those flipper zero things at a garage sale on the weekend. It's portrayed as a hacking device but really it is just a store and playback controller for a bunch of different devices. You can record RF/RFID/NFC/Infrared signals etc and use it to control everything from lights, garage door, ceiling fans, TVs etc.
I figured this would be a good add on for my robot dog so it could actually do something useful. Haven't really looked at interfacing with it yet but there is a CLI, API and various wrappers and you can connect via a com port so was thinking this may make a nice addon to ARK. So has anyone played with one of these yet? Anyone started interfacing one to ARK?
@Athena what would be the best way to interface a flipper zero to ARC
While the Flipper Zero sounds like an interesting device, ARC does not currently support it directly. However, ARC is a very flexible platform and there may be ways to interface with it indirectly.
One possible method could be to use the UART/Serial robot skill in ARC. If the Flipper Zero can communicate via a COM port, you might be able to send and receive data from it using this skill. You would need to know the communication protocol of the Flipper Zero to interpret the data correctly.
Please note that this would require some advanced knowledge of both the Flipper Zero and the ARC platform. You may also need to write some custom scripts in ARC to handle the data.
Remember, I am not able to provide code or programming. You will need to use ARC to create your own scripts and configurations. If you need help with scripting in ARC, you can refer to the scripting section in the Synthiam support documentation.
I am a customer support GPT-powered AI and still learning. If you have doubts about my response, please use the support documentation to verify my answer.
I think Athena is correct that you could use it as some sort of remote control via a com or uart. I guess the com over Bluetooth. But it would make more sense to buy a joystick or use the remote interface app
if it’s something you wanna tackle as an ezb, not sure how that would work. But here’s the communication protocol:
https://synthiam.com/Support/EZB-Firmware/communication-protocol
I was actually going the other way. So ARC controls flipper.
Robot go into the garage, turn the light on, open the garage door and start the car.
Robot turn on TV change to channel 27 and turn the volume up.
Robot go into the kitchen and turn on the ceiling fan and preheat the oven to 350. So you tell ARC all these things and ARC controls the robot to go into the relevant room and the robot uses the flipper to control all the devices.
Looks like you can use Node.Js via websockets to talk to this. https://fbflipper.com/blog/2022/02/21/js-flipper-announcement/
Are you sure that's what the article is mentioning? Because it looks like it helps debug apps via ADB. The article is very confusing and also it seems to have been written by Meta, even though it's about the flipper..
Your Right LOL thats what happens when you google flipper javascript and blindly post page.
I went to https://lab.flipper.net/ and you can connect via web to the flipper zero so I did a view source and saw it was javascript so I googled flipper javascript looking for documentation because it was undocumented mess and ended up on what turns out to be an obscure article on some facebook thing with the same name.
OK off to find out if someone documented this or has some sample code.
I read that the flipper has a uart. Maybe post on their forum and see if it can be controlled by that.
the challenge might be the way the flipper works. From what I read, it’s based on apps. Itself is just hardware and needs software. But every peice of software is different. So there might not be a common ui or api for the software. Meaning, different apps might take different commands (if they accept remote control)
the apps themselves may need to be modified for uart access to control them
OK found a python CLI wrapper https://github.com/wh00hw/pyFlipper
So it turns out I was way over thinking this. Yep UART is the easiest way.
Example Turn LED Green and turn it on you just send the command to the com port
Now I just need to work out the syntax for all the other commands.