BUILDING AN APP FOR FLIPPER ZERO, PART 1: GETTING STARTED

BUILDING AN APP FOR FLIPPER ZERO, PART 1: GETTING STARTED
 2023-05-05  11-minute read
FlipperZero is a digital signals multi-tool. Here’s a short guide to the basics of building an app for it…

The Flipper Zero is a digital signals multi-tool device, with some fun applications. It has an infrared module, a sub-GHz radio, RFID and NFC capability, iButton, USB, a screen, input controls, and GPIO pins. It’s small enough to fit in your hand, and it can communicate with your home appliances, or help you to learn about the signals that fly around our world. It’s also extremely customisable.

Let’s build an app for Flipper Zero
Flipper Zero features several apps built directly into the firmware, but you can also create and install external apps onto the SD card which are then available through the Applications menu.

Resistance is futile
With the help of several folks from the Flipper dev community, I recently built an app to calculate the value of resistors by decoding the coloured bands on them.


More detail and source code at:

instantiator/flipper-zero-experimental-apps
Thanks to

Derek Jamison for helping to debug a thorny issue or two, and
Kuronons for the graphics in the app.
In this tutorial, we’ll walk through the process of setting up an app, and building a simple user interface, using the same techniques.

Community
Before getting started, it’s helpful to know that there’s a thriving and welcoming FlipperZero community on a public Discord server: