Yeah the flipper zero is very expensive for what it is. If not I'd have had one. Since it's open source I was hoping for Chinese clones like what happened with that similar device with the round clickwheel but it hasn't happened yet.
Why is it expensive tho? It seems to be this little bridge between digital and somewhat analogue world that you can use for many things. What price would you suggest? Or what alternative way is there to achieve things like this?
The problem with this particular hack is (like with many others where flipper zero is mentioned) that you might just use some 10 BLE micro controller to achieve the same thing.
Usually the things that were glued together in the flipper are never used together for a complex use case. Not sure about what Apple does here, though, so I might be wrong.
Anyway, the cases where you can employ IR, BLE, RFID and the flipper's custom radio in some useful combination seem to be rare and it usually always seems to make more sense to list the needed components for the hack instead of giving some folks finally a (destructive) use case for their expensively acquired gadget.
Of course the idea of delivering the solution as software/declaratively is the interesting part. But applications are rare and seldom new (at some point replaying your old garage door might only deliver so much long term motivation)
It's just an STM32, display and a few radio modules. But with shipping and VAT it's around 250 euro. I imagine the component cost wouldn't be much higher than 50.
But the main issue isn't the component cost, it's just how much I'd pay for something like this. Here in Spain it's a lot of money. It's as much as my current smartphone cost.
