The Canadian government plans to ban the Flipper Zero and similar devices after tagging them as tools thieves can use to steal cars.

  • zik@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    9 months ago

    The STM32WB55 in the flipper has a versatile wireless peripheral built in which can be used to implement various protocols including Bluetooth, zigbee, etc… Support for I2C, I2S and CAN is pretty standard stuff - the ESP32 is nothing special in these respects.

    Maybe they chose the STM32WB55 because its wireless support is more flexible than the ESP32 and allows them to implement a wider variety of protocols? Or possibly just better documented, giving them the chance to do things they can’t on the ESP32? I haven’t compared the inner workings of the two chips’ wireless support so I can’t say for sure.

    • Shdwdrgn@mander.xyzEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      Hmm interesting. I’ll have to dig more into this chip to see what it’s about. I know the ESP32 is usually avoided when battery life is a high consideration, I haven’t really played around with anything other than a few ardunos and the ESP8266 so I don’t have much to compare it with. I guess I’ve just seen so many projects where someone tagged on an ESP chip to an arduino project just to get wireless capabilities with no understanding that the ESP series is quite a lot more powerful than the arduinos (some people I’ve talked to literally had no idea the ESP chips were programmable microcontrollers) so it’s easy to jump the gun and assume that’s what is happening in other projects also.