About the mod

Jargon and concepts that are important to know

OFW means Origninal (or Official) FirmWare. The OFW is sometimes refered to as HOS or HorizonOS, a highly customized 3DS operating system.
sysMMC in our jargon, refers to the chip physically soldered to the board. When you read about the Switch having 32 or 64GB of storage, it's referring to this chip (circled in red). Engineers and techs call this chip an eMMC package. It contains the OFW.
CFW means Custom FirmWare, the goal of the mod for many folks.
emuMMC is a virtual chip, an emulated eMMC, not physically soldered to the board, but rather installed as a file or partition on your microSD card.

Combine these terms and you get "sysMMC OFW" aka Stock. This is commonly shortened to just OFW and means a normal out of the box boot mode using the soldered, physical chip.

Combining different terms nets you "emuMMC CFW" aka Modded. This is commonly shortened to just CFW and means running a modified version of HOS from a microSD card.

You'll notice there may be other combinations of terms possible. There are, and the resulting boot modes can usually be ignored by most people.

The Mod equipment

Picofly is a kit, a collection of parts, that work together on all variants of the original Switch (not Switch 2) to allow free filesystem access. Because of this, the kit does not need a "blank" or reset device to start from, you can keep your saves

The Picofly kit mainly uses a controller chip called a Raspberry Pi. The controller chip convinces the Switch to potentially:

Backup the Switch
Backup your save games.
Use XBOX, PS, and PC controllers, wirelessly and natively
Run Linux, Android, previous HOS releases, other arbitrary code

Is it safe for the device?

Yes

The kit simply lowers the CPU supply voltage at a specific time
The kit writes that specific time to your microSD card.
The kit then passes control of the display to the Raspberry Pi
The Pi displays a menu and you choose the next step

The only danger comes from installation of the mod.

Soldering and modifying the thin and delicate circuit board can ruin it. The points are tiny, there's often grinding, and dangerous fumes. Spicy pillows are possible.

Sagebrush Repair has over 16 years experience improving our microsoldering skill, so good job finding us.

Uh huh, sure, and will I get console banned?

If you stay in EMUMMC CFW, you should never get console banned. Period.

Booting to OFW is perfectly safe as well. Enjoy multiplayer in OFW with game cards or purchased software and rest easy.

The above bullet points are always true until you mess with the other two modes.

More details:

Most people stay in CFW forever and ever.

OFW is literally just stock, you don't get banned there unless you break the TOS by being a racist, a creep, or pirating copyrighted content. DON'T.

CFW has safety blocks in place and always will, you can connect to the internet in CFW no problem, but you can't go to a specific corporation's servers at all.

Corporate servers mentioned also can't see your device in CFW

CFW makes your device think it's serial number is XAW000000000000, effectively anonymizing it.

emuMMC, the virtual storage chip, lives only on your microSD card. It does not touch the soldered chip at all. This is good, the soldered chip must remain "pure".

There are 2 other boot modes that are seldom needed and can get you banned if you do something stupid: Semi-Stock and "sysMMC CFW"

There are valid reasons to enter other boot modes, but most people just do what they need to do, and then reboot to CFW.

About the mod

Jargon and concepts that are important to know

The Mod equipment

Is it safe for the device?

Uh huh, sure, and will I get console banned?

Further reading

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