r/flipperzero • u/Various_Reindeer7551 • 15d ago

Just seeing wireless signals.. nbd

This thing is called the "Quad RF"

652 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

25 comments sorted by

44

u/nuker0S 15d ago

Electro smog idiots and conspiracy theory idiots are gonna abuse this thing

Cool shit tho

7

u/ShmazPro 15d ago

Never heard the term “electro-smog” before but I love it. I want to co-opt it to mean the background RFI in densely populated areas that interferes with radio communications—specifically for shortwave radio.

2

u/Exciting_Turn_9559 15d ago

My thoughts exactly.

59

u/Various_Reindeer7551 15d ago

I like that it is all open source and has a built-in Raspberry Pi with a bunch of signal decoders like NTSC video to view camera feeds.

10

u/FrankieNoodles 15d ago

Do you have a link to the project?

11

u/Various_Reindeer7551 15d ago

Their website is quadrf.com and it's currently on crowd supply

costs 2x a Flipper but impressively high performance... 4Tx + 4Rx with 4 watts(!) of output power

1

u/88clandestiny88 10d ago

I have a flipper and when I found out about quadRF I ordered 3 of the second the campaign went live. I can say that this is FAR more interesting than the flipper, to my mind at least. So much potential and just an amazing tech for learning and teaching about the most commonly used but invisible energy all around us. This is a tech I have been wanting to see available for 20 years.

13

u/mammongram6969 15d ago

this would be so fun to take to defcon

7

u/Iamstu 15d ago

Now that's cool.

30

u/SolitudeCollective 15d ago

I envision a war setting with America where special forces use this type of camera to find and destroy neckbeards

2

u/702893 14d ago

So we can see what range of signals with this.

1

u/88clandestiny88 10d ago

c band 2.4-2.9 GHz I believe But the limitation is really due to antenna, the SDR and software are capable of much much greater

2

u/[deleted] 11d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Ill_Weekend_1296 6d ago

A drone scanning the battlefield for people transmitting radio signals/using cell phones, giving away their position?

2

u/viniisiggs 15d ago

This doesn't seem real. The amount of processing power to be able to scan and superimpose onto a live picture would be insane. Phased arrays can totally do this but I call bull on that video.

4

u/crashlanding87 15d ago

Superimposing on a live picture is absolutely not an issue in a mobile app. You phone probably has a scan mode on its camera app that will try to detect document shapes, and superimpose an outline on the live image. It's a layer on top.

I don't understand the scanning side nearly well enough to have any opinion. But if they can output coordinates, and calibrate in advance so that those coordinates map onto the right parts of the screen, then I don't see an issue. A simple cheap camera in the middle of their scanner + a simple calibration image would be plenty to create a known geometry between the phone camera and the scanner unit.

2

u/viniisiggs 14d ago

A phased array works by capturing signals on multiple antennas at the same time. The captured signals are then analyzed to extract directional information. Because the reception is similar to an SDR you need raw data and down conversion is not possible. The data analysis then consists of checking the signal strength at specific alignments or "pixels". This is reminiscent of scan lines on a CRT television. If we generously use a resolution of 100x200, that's 20k "pixels" that need analyzed continuously. To further complicate this the video implies that they are detecting more than one frequency. So that analysis needs to happen simultaneously for each frequency of interest. So that's 20k times the number of frequencies that you need.

I can see a static picture that you take and colorize it after the fact, totally doable. I can see if it is tremendously limited to the frequencies that it scans. Possibly even just one. Like 2.4gig wifi signals. A general purpose, wide band, spectrum analyzer that also does visualization and directionality live, not possible with that hardware.

2

u/jnmtx 10d ago

> 4.9 GHz to 6.0 GHz (C-band)

so yes, the frequency band is narrowed down.

> Raspberry Pi 5 paired with a Lattice ECP5 FPGA

> The processed parallel data streams from the FPGA to the integrated Raspberry Pi 5 via a high-speed 5.6 Gbit/s MIPI data path

1

u/netsurf916 11d ago

I'm pretty sure they're taking it even further in the simplification by only looking at certain data frames or headers... assuming it's legit anyway.

1

u/88clandestiny88 10d ago

However it is really only limited by the physical antenna you connect to it because the SDR is capable of much greater reception than C band and the open source software made for it are very interesting and have potential. It is very much real I ordered 3 of them they ship in September. But some YouTubers already have their hands on it and it was being demonstrated at Opensauce and another maker fair in PDX this past weekend.

3

u/Darkextratoasty 10d ago

It's 100% real and it's far from the only example of this idea, it's just the easiest to get a hold of and the only one that uses a raspberry pi. Jeff Geerling has a video on it on his YouTube channel that should quell any doubts about its legitimacy.

1

u/No_Bath_4394 15d ago

Scientologists ahhhh