One of the hacker toys to own over the last year has been the Flipper Zero, a universal wireless hacking tool which even caused a misplaced moral panic about car theft in Canada. A Flipper is cool as heck of course but not the cheapest of devices. Fortunately there’s now an alternative in the form of the CapibaraZero. It’s a poor-hacker’s Flipper Zero which you can assemble yourself from a heap of inexpensive modules.
At the center is an ESP32-S3 board, which brings with it that chip’s wireless and Bluetooth capabilities. To that is added an ST7789 TFT display, a PN532 NFC reader, an SX1276 LoRa and multi-mode RF module, and an IR module. The firmware can be found through GitHub. Since the repo is nearly two years old and still in active development, we’re hopeful CapibaraZero will gain features and stability.
If you’re interested in our coverage of the Canadian Flipper panic you can read it here, and meanwhile if you’re using one of those NFC modules, consider tuning it.
Cool project. Bruce, which uses M5 products, is another interesting project that has a lot of the same functionality. It’s being ported to the very affordable LilyGo T-embed cc1101 as well, which has many of the required modules built in. Don’t forget to check out M5Launcher while you are at.
When I see the popularity of the Flipper Zero, despite its absolutely inflated price, it´s no wonder that others want to jump in the bandwagon. But to make a real difference, it needs to be as polished as the Flipper Zero and cheaper.
You don’t always get what you pay for, but you don’t get what you don’t pay for, and a slim margin over the base hardware cost doesn’t pay for polish. People like a portable device that feels well made and doesn’t give you trouble in use.
Well flipper has given me trouble since day 1, and I don’t use it unless I have to which is now down to less than once a week. Due to poor programming from developers, it always crashes esp in RFID apps. Many times it reboots itself, I go back in then complains about memory and reboots a second time.
Never happened to me; only thing that has ever crashed is individual third party apps. If it happens on every firmware version you’ve used, then it sounds like your particular copy is defective.
Oh, because the people doing the thousands of manhours of work to get it to that high level of polish should be doing it for free, yes?
Once of the key features of the flipper is that you can not only read nfc cards, but emulate them as well.
To my knowledge, the pn532 used in the capybara, while a capable chipset, cannot emulate cards – it’s only a reader.
https://shop.mtoolstec.com/solved-emulate-ndef-on-pn532.html
That’s NDEF, which isn’t (most) HF NFC cards… but, to be fair, that’s more than I thought PN532 could do!
PN532 can emulate MIFARE and FeliCa also(check page 151 of datasheet here, https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/user-guide/141520.pdf). Despite this, I have not yet managed to get it to work despite reading the datasheet and implementing the code accordingly. However, there is hardware support
I love that your name is valid hexadecimal. It reminds me, I actually have a laptop that has de:ad in the mac address
oh, there are plenty of easy to remember mac addresses, like coffee baobab, feed dead beef, a defaced face …
And it´s a simple game compared to writing a WHOLE BOOK without the E letter (G.Perec “la disparition”)
Other hex names are available!
^^^ ;)
My favorite is “A55E55EDAB0A710AD0FB10A7EDDEADBEEF”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexspeak
I think I remember that the AIX debugger (dbx? not sure, it was in the 1990s) could fill allocated heap with 0xdeadbeef repeated to make pointer logic errors easier to spot.
I’m quite sure it can do emulation, see for example https://github.com/Seeed-Studio/PN532/blob/master/PN532/emulatetag.cpp
I /think/ it can’t spoof any possible UUID, only dynamic ones.
Huh, I have two of Seeed’s cheap PN532 clone boards, but somehow, I missed this. Thank you!
Possible typo in the “Canadian Flipper panic” link? Goes to the GitHub repo.
It’s “CapibaraZero”, not “CapybaraZero”.
Source: the project
There’s a guy on YouTube who monetizes scaring ordinary people with what flipper zero can do. It’s lamer than it sounds and is frustrating to watch.