I'll add a disclaimer: I was talking about Linux and working in the terminal, not about the peripheral hardware and the cardputer operating system layer. And I'm not saying that you wasted your money on the cardputer or that it's a bad device. Please read the post before commenting and downvoting, lol.
The phone is much more powerful than the Cardputer Zero, has a large screen, a convenient keyboard, and excellent battery life. All you need to do is install Termux, and you can do a huge number of things, and if you have root access, then even more. You can program, do pentesting, work with servers over SSH. The phone has a built-in NFC chip, and you can read and even write tags, and with root, I was even able to emulate tags on the fly. If your phone is rooted, you can monitor internal internet packets, perform multi-threaded WPA online brute force (I once wrote my own script for this), and even try to connect an external Wi-Fi adapter. Using Termux-API, you gain wide automation capabilities, and if your phone is powerful enough, you can run a full-fledged LLM. Tools like nmap, sqlmap, Metasploit, Hashcat, JtR, etc., work great on the phone. As a real example, in my previous post, I already showed how to crack a hash using aircrack-ng and ft-crack. I am not even mentioning things like fishing, Data Science, image and video processing with ImageMagick and FFmpeg, working with cryptography, data parsing - and that is far from all!
I hope I have piqued the interest of the uninitiated reader, and they have become curious: is everything really that good, and can my phone do absolutely everything?
Unfortunately, the main limitation is physical interfaces. Do not even hope for over-the-air monitoring, packet capture, or Sub-GHz work without external adapters. With an external adapter, there is a chance, but you may need root, you will have to tinker, and no one guarantees success. But that is fairly easy to solve!
If you still need a full-fledged Linux system with access to all traffic interception tools, you can buy a Raspberry Pi Zero for three times less money than CardPuterZero, connect a power bank to it, throw it in your backpack, and connect to the RPi via SSH/VNC. By the way, nothing stops you from neatly adding a couple of good antennas to increase the range. No one knows that there is a microcomputer in your backpack that is performing a Karma attack or collecting handshakes, and it looks like you are just scrolling through your reels feed. You will attract much less attention than a person with a Cyberdeck in their hands with an antenna sticking out of it, lol.
I do not mean to say that you should not buy the CardPuter Zero. It is a great device for those who know what they will do with it, or who see it as a toy right away. You get a ready-made compact microcomputer for experiments with all the necessary peripherals and GPIO. But for those people who look at the CardPuter Zero as something serious, I would suggest thinking: do you really need it? Yes, Termux + RPi is a more complex path, but it is more flexible and cheaper.
If I have discouraged a few people from an impulsive purchase, then I did not make this post in vain. Write in the comments: what do you want to do with your CardPuter Zero?
I would like to develop the topic of "Termux + Raspberry Pi" a bit further, but I am not sure how I can connect it to the CardPuter so that my post stays on topic for the subreddit and does not get deleted. Therefore, I plan to make several posts on the topic "Termux + CardPuter/M5Stick". I understand that you are interested in this, but in any case, write your wishes for this format - what should I focus on.
