this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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From the limited reading I've done on the subject, it seemed like a lot of power in the Flipper was based around wireless testing (both wifi and bluetooth) although I also saw a number of things based around other bands. I guess I'm just not following why this was considered an add-on when the ESP32 has all that stuff built in already (and you can certainly shut down the radios to save power when you're not using them)? Plus it also includes native support for other popular busses like I2C, I2S, and CAN so it seems like it could be useful for sniffing out what's attached to a lot of different types of connections. Maybe I'm just straying outside the realm of basic pentesting, the idea just caught my attention about how handy it might be to have a small device that could work with a lot of different types of electronics.
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.
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.