The Flipper Zero has skyrocketed in popularity since its launch. For those not in the know, it’s a small, customizable hacking tool meant for penetration testing, RF sniffing, RFID card spoofing, and just about any hardware hacking you may want to do. The brilliant part is it’s fully extensible, allowing modules to be added through a GPIO port on the device. This CC1101 Mini Extension board increases the RF capabilities of the device in the sub-GHz bands.
This is a popular extension for the Flipper, as it increases the transit and receive range of the device drastically — from 150 feet transmit to 450 feet! Keep in mind, however, that many of these extension modules don’t work with the standard firmware. This isn’t a big deal as there are multiple competing firmware that all have great community support and are constantly adding new features. For this board, you’ll need to flash your Flipper with one of the Unleashed, Roguemaster, or Xtreme firmware packages.
So what’s there to do in the sub-GHz band? People always focus on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, which are at 2.4/5GHz. But there’s a lot that happens below 1GHz. The 868/915MHz ISM bands (depending on where you live in the world) are available to play with; you’ll also find all of the common LoRa frequencies down here, too. Most car key dongles transmit and receive on 315MHz, and of course, there’s a lot of other mysterious digital data floating around down there.
So if you want to give your Flipper some more splash, pick up this CC1101 GPIO board and get hacking!
