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OpenWrt One/AP-24.XY: new open source router board by OpenWrt and Banana Pi
- vmurthy 3y agoLooks like decent specs for a homelab (although not for "creators" :-P) SoC – MediaTek MT7981B (Filogic 820) dual-core Cortex-A53 processor @ 1.3 GHz *Networking* - 2.5GbE RJ45 port - Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 port - Dual-band WiFI 6 via MediaTek MT7976C (2×2 2.4 GHz + 3×3/2×2 + zero-wait DFS 5Ghz) - 3x MMCX antenna connectors From TFA "The router’s specifications have been selected with the goal of keeping the price under $100, and that’s why we have interfaces such as USB 2.0 instead of USB 3.0 since there aren’t any spare ones in the Filogic 820 SoC"
- geerlingguy 3y ago2.5G is still plenty for most creator use cases (even for editing a few 4K livestreams off a NAS). The only difficulty is if you hit certain types of routing, performance can't always keep up (sometimes even to a gigabit). One thing I'd love is if more vendors would give a bunch of examples and specifically list what things are hardware accelerated and which are not (MikroTik's been pretty good about this lately, though it's a lot of digging in docs).
- vmurthy 3y agoHey Jeff. Big fan of your channel :-).
- CyberDildonics 3y agoWhat is the difference between a "homelab" and a "creator"? I don't think these labels mean anything. Also you realize this is a router to connect to the internet right? If you want computers to have faster ethernet links between themselves you can have a switch with faster ports. It isn't going to make sense to try to mix your router and your switch at that point.
- vmurthy 3y ago> What is the difference between a "homelab" and a "creator"? lol. I meant it a bit tongue-in-cheek. A homelabber is someone who isn’t interested in showing off his/her videos of homelabbing. A creator is :-P
- opengears 3y agoI am really excited about this one. I have used the Turris Omnia in different settings, and can absolutely recommend it for people that want a great supported Open Source Hardware and OpenWRT router. This one seems to be an alternative to the Turris Omnia.
- themoonisachees 3y agoIsn't the omnia like $350? For me that's prohibitively expensive to spend on a router, whereas the projected $100 price point here is much more palatable (I probably still won't be buying it because I need SFP, but if not I would consider it)
- darkwater 3y agoSo, what are your options? I'm in the market for a "cheap enough" router supported by OpennWRT with an SFP because my FTTH is terminated in the ISP router currently (but that router sucks, even if I moved the wifi network completely outside it, it still hangs from time to time)
- jonhohle 3y agoI’m currently using a Banana-PI R3 which meets those requirements. It only recently got release support for OpenWRT, but SinoVOIP seems to be actively working with them (which is confirmed with this announcement). There are still small issues (last I checked the boot loader method of cloning to nand is broken), but it’s been pretty solid for the last 5 or 6 months. I was coming from a late model AirPort Extreme but needed something with more configurability. My biggest with it issue is that the BPI is a fast computer with lots of RAM and storage (and SD and M2 expand ability), but OpenWRT is made for the tiniest embedded systems and everything from configuration to pre-built packages prioritize space over quality of life. Busybox is fine, but when I have as much power as a desktop computer from 10 years ago, it feels like an unnecessary inconvenience. Or as I just went through, Ruby installs the Ruby interpreter and nothing else, each module in the standard library is a separate package and someone went through the work of configuring the dependencies of each of them. Likewise, LUCI is great, but sometimes I just want to configure a thing, not have to find the LUCI configuration for the thing.
- no_time 3y agoAbsolute steal for $100. I hope some EU distributor for have it near this price.
- mhitza 3y agoMy experience with EU pricing is generally: convert to euro, add 50-100 euros on top.
- themoonisachees 3y agoAt 150€, the banana pi r4 is available for not much more and has several nice to have feature not planned on this board.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoLove the idea. Underwhelmed by the hardware choices. Only two nics, and only one is 2.5Gbe. Wifi6 while 6E now and 7 is soon. What will probably be travel router level.
- magicalhippo 3y agoReally jealous of all those who are annoyed this can't handle their >1Gbps internet connection... I'm in Oslo, capital of Norway, and 500/15 Mbps is the fastest I can get...
- happymellon 3y agoI would love 500/15. Here in the UK I'm still stuck with BT who keep sending out flyers and public consultations saying they'll upgrade for about 5 years now, I'm assuming to try and dissuade altnets from coming through and taking away all their customers. They keep silently killing the plan after a year, and replacing with a new one for 2 years time so it never arrives. 50/15, not even that far out of a major town. Fucking BT.
- BenjiWiebe 3y agoWow, I wish I had 50. 10/3 here in the Midwest USA. :)
- rjsw 3y agoUK altnets are spreading quite fast in areas that OpenReach (BT) hasn't upgraded yet, it is worth checking regularly what is happening in your area. I have 500/500, could have 900/900 for £5 more per month.
- Tor3 3y agoThat's shocking.. in Oslo? I'm out in the sticks in Norway and I've had 1Gb/1Gb for years. And it actually provides 1Gb too.
- magicalhippo 3y ago
- rkwasny 3y agoIf you don’t want to wait I recommend GL.iNet Flint 2 - based on newer Filogic 830 - works great - supported by openwrt
- HumblyTossed 3y agoWas looking at this recently, but couldn't find any sort of range information. I have the Beryl (wifi 5 version) and it's good for a hotel sweet and that's about it. I would hope the Flint 2 would be better, but I can't find anything.
- rkwasny 3y agoTypical range for a flagship single-access point solution I would say, previously I had portalwifi (from kickstarter) and flint 2 has better range If you have 2+ story house you need a mesh.
- LeifCarrotson 3y agoI have had good results with the GL.iNet routers too, but the "supported by openwrt" just means that GL.iNet pulled an old version of OpenWRT and hacked it up until it worked on their board instead of making their own OEM firmware. They're not upstreaming their patches or collaborating with OpenWRT, just kind of leeching off them. I'm not even sure you can install vanilla OpenWRT on the Flint 2 yet. In contrast, this is made by and with the OpenWRT dev team!
- trillic 3y agoCan this chip manage line-rate QoS?
- aesh2Xa1 3y agoProbably not with QoS, but it probably can with hardware offload. It looks a lot like this: https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-R4 https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-R4 https://forum.openwrt.org/t/so-you-have-500mbps-1gbps-fiber-and-need-a-router-read-this-first/90305 https://forum.openwrt.org/t/so-you-have-500mbps-1gbps-fiber-... The chip would need to be powerful enough to process packets to do advanced QoS (like SQM) at line-rate. However, offload is supported on MT chips, so you can still perform hardware NAT functions, just not as configurable as those other methods for traffic control. Maybe some VPP integration into the proper distribution, instead of packages and custom compiles, would make that work. https://github.com/k13132/openwrt-dpdk https://github.com/k13132/openwrt-dpdk
- Dylan16807 3y ago> It looks a lot like this: https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-R4 https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-R4 With the extremely important difference that it has a dual core A53 instead of a quad core A73. I'm sure the board you linked could handle QoS just fine.
- aesh2Xa1 3y agoThere are other differences, too, including RAM and interface line-rates. It was lazy of me to reference the other system without a deep-dive, sorry. I was trying to answer the question regarding QoS as different from offload, where the CPU might be the bottleneck in the former. > I'm sure the board you linked could handle QoS just fine. A quick Google shows some complaints about line-rate on the BPI-R4, too, even for a simple traffic test. https://forum.banana-pi.org/t/banana-pi-bpi-r4-iperf3-speed-test/15813/7 https://forum.banana-pi.org/t/banana-pi-bpi-r4-iperf3-speed-...
- Dylan16807 3y ago
- thisislife2 3y agoA doubt - isn't the antennae an important part of any Wifi router? Are they too standardised now, with multiple options, and as easy to use as plug-and-play with such boards?
- anonymousiam 3y agoThere are basically three types of tiny push-on coaxial connectors in common use. You can get antennas for any combination of bands with any one of the connectors. You just need to be careful to order the right combination.
- agilob 3y agoWhat are those 3 slots on the top left? Looks like 3 slots for sim cards, but there's no mention of SIM support and only 3 quantities of something are antennas.
- Dunedan 3y agoThat picture doesn't represent the actual hardware. Pretty confusing, but at least they acknowledge it in its description: > For illustration only, not a rendering of the OpenWrt One/AP-24.XY board
- generalizations 3y agoThat looks like it's the Banana Pi BPI-R4 WiFi 7 router board: https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/11/23/banana-pi-bpi-r4-wifi-7-router-board-mediatek-filogic-880-processor/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/11/23/banana-pi-bpi-r4-wif.... And yeah, those are three nano SIM card slots. You can see the image of the underside with a bunch of places to attach the relevant antennas.
- ahepp 3y agoThe article needed a picture, so I guess they decided to use a picture of a completely different device.
- figmert 3y agoDoes anyone know a good late/5g dongle that works with OpenWRT?
- opengears 3y agohttps://forum.openwrt.org/t/5g-usb-dongle-recommendations/130550/20 https://forum.openwrt.org/t/5g-usb-dongle-recommendations/13...
- pedrocr 3y agoThe coolest hardware in the cheap router/APs that run OpenWRT is the programmable Ethernet switch. VLANs on such cheap hardware is an awesome tool to split up stuff at the ethernet level without having to have a bunch of NICs. This doesn't seem to have it. Does anyone know of a 5 or 10 port cheap switch that also has programmable VLANs? Those would be great for homelab kinds of uses.
- ahmedalsudani 3y agoYou can use a managed switch to get this working if you have a router with too few ports. I have several gl.inet routers running openwrt but they all have 2/3 ports total. I put a TL-SG108E in front of them and use that to tag ports. This particular switch has an interface that is quite easy to reverse engineer, so I have written a script that allows me to easily move ports between VLANs without bothering with the unintuitive web UI.
- amluto 3y agoThe usual suspects have cheap low-end switches: https://store.ui.com/us/en/pro/category/all-switching/products/usw-flex-mini https://store.ui.com/us/en/pro/category/all-switching/produc... https://mikrotik.com/product/RB260GS https://mikrotik.com/product/RB260GS If you want a serious switch, you can often find a big name used switch for $100 or even less. eBay has a couple of 12-port Ruckus switches listed right now, for example. Oddly, if you want to purchase a license to enable the fancier capabilities of Ruckus switches (those “12 port” 1Gbps switches actually have two 10Gbps ports), it’s surprisingly awkward to find anyone selling the licenses to individual users. On the other hand, the documentation quite strongly suggests that there is no verification whatsoever if you simply tell the switch that you have the appropriate license. (I assume that there are a few things going on here. First, big users who buy tens or hundreds of these switches will have accounts and will actually pay for licenses as needed and presumably get decent pricing. Small users are basically irrelevant to the manufacturer’s bottom line. And serious users will regularly use in a configuration in which they don’t have Internet access, and will quite sensibly refuse to purchase the switch if it needs Internet access.) (Whoops, the campus network is down because the core switch needs to re-validate its license. But it can’t re-validate its license because it can’t access the Internet until after it starts working again. Better choose a new vendor next time!)
- BooneJS 3y agoI wish I could get a decent mesh system. One router isn't enough to cover my house with some of the building materials used.
- _huayra_ 3y agoI've had good luck with the Mikrotik Audience, but it is not wifi 6 yet (likely coming soon). If you're in a country that uses steel / concrete to build, unfortunately physics is not so kind towards any signal propagation through that :(
- Haemm0r 3y agoWood is not either. The inside walls here are 100mm wood(CLT) with gypsum on both sides and the signal drop through 1 wall is big. 2 walls almost kill the signal. I don't have any wifi reception outside the house at all (65m² is floor area) using 1 UI Wifi 6 LR on each floor (with the U6Pro it was even worse).
- saltcured 3y agoIf there is any way you can run a few ethernet cables as a backbone, I think it's pretty simple to just setup additional OpenWRT access points on the same SSID to allow client roaming. Or, with dual-radio routers, setup WDS between the routers using one radio per router and clients on the other, so traffic does not compete for the same channel. I am not sure whether you can still do roaming this way as I've never tried it. But I did use it in the past to brdige wired clients from a secondary router back to the main router over WDS.
- beacon294 3y agoYes, i do this with 3x Archer C7 V2.
- ajb 3y agoThis could be a good match, because bananapi do a lot of boards but their software story has been a bit poor, as it tends to be an android build hacked together with a conventional linux distribution (or was a few years ago when I last looked). Whereas openWRT know how to build a software platform. bananapi have some kind of link with foxconn, but I don't know what kind.
- jonhohle 3y agoSINOVOIP is the major name associated with BPI, but it does seem like it is also affiliated with Foxconn. At least one of their engineers has been working with the OpenWRT team closely on the R3 and has been a wealth of knowledge in the BPI forums.
- squarefoot 3y ago> bananapi do a lot of boards but their software story has been a bit poor This is quite common with other board manufacturers too. I'd rather suggest to ignore completely their cobbled together distros, often also tainted by proprietary modifications, that become unmaintained in a few years, and see if they're among the many supported by Armbian or DietPi. https://www.armbian.com/download/ https://www.armbian.com/download/ https://dietpi.com/#download https://dietpi.com/#download
- jazzyjackson 3y agoI had a good experience with Armbian, it was my first time modifying a linux distro with extra packages so that we didn't have to run install scripts and compile on the orange pi (actually I started looking at how to build armbian because the build step for python's crypto module would fail after cranking away for an hour. Not enough memory or something timed out. Anyway running the armbian build process with a target cpu architecture was a breeze following their docs)
- dmarinus 3y agoI'm fairly happy with a Cudy WR1300, which runs openwrt out of the box. Only €40 euros on amazon.
- schemescape 3y agoHow paranoid should I be about routers from companies like Cudy that I’m not familiar with? My intuition is “very paranoid, even if I replace the firmware with OpenWRT”. Am I being too paranoid?
- deadlyllama 3y agoYes, you are being too paranoid. Once booted into Openwrt the router will only be running Openwrt code. I guess there's the tiny possibility of a backdoored bootloader but that would have to be a pretty sophisticated backdoor!
- champtar 3y agoThe mailing list announcement might be a better link https://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2024-January/042018.html https://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2024-Janua...
- password4321 3y agorelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38934013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38934013 OpenWRT turns 20; wants to launch their "first upstream supported" design https://lwn.net/ml/openwrt-devel/a8aaa495-da0b-4ddc-8c4f-3e1192d8b012@phrozen.org/ https://lwn.net/ml/openwrt-devel/a8aaa495-da0b-4ddc-8c4f-3e1... 180 comments, 3 days ago
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoThis reminds me of a recurring thought I have had over the past 15 years using UNIX-like OS. In the past, there were many more computer architectures commonly in use, and some UNIX-like OS projects made efforts to port their OS to a variety of architectures. (Not naming names, but please note I am not referring to Linux.) Today there are fewer archs in common use, but there is still variety in hardware. UNIX-like OS projects make efforts to port their OS to a variety of hardware. Assuming they make an attempt and are successful, this usually takes time. There will usually be a considerable period of time where the hardware is for sale but before the non-Linux UNIX-like OS project is running on the hardware, and able to utilise enough of its features to justify installing it. And so the recurring idea I kept having was "Why not prioritise support for a particular hardware product."^1 Of course this idea is unpleasantly inequitable, but the practical benefits could justify it. As it happens, eventually, the project I was using started to officially prioritise certain architectures. 1. The hardware product chosen for prioritisation should be one that is likely to be produced for many years, not the type that is a passing fad. The benefit I imagined is that someone who prefers to install a non-Linux UNIX-like OS themselves could purchase a new item of hardware and install the OS on it and have every feature working _immediately_. Generally, this would be potentially 100% of people using this non-Linux UNIX-like OS. There is no GUI, all are capable of installing the OS with or without an installer, all understand how to compile software from source. To some extent, this already happens. There are some particular hardware products, e.g., development boards, that are produced for many years that continue to work with this non-Linux UNIX-like OS and they tend to receive consistent attention by the OS project volunteers. To sum it up, the pipe dream here is that some non-Linux UNIX-like OS user who does not like pre-installed OS and likes to install the OS himself can purchase a brand new device and _know_ 100% that all the features of the hardware will work.
- Havoc 3y agoThe same page links to another Banana device at roughly same price but vastly superior specs? https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/11/23/banana-pi-bpi-r4-wifi-7-router-board-mediatek-filogic-880-processor/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/11/23/banana-pi-bpi-r4-wif...
- comex 3y ago> The Banana Pi BPI-R4 can be purchased for $103.15 plus shipping on Aliexpress, but crazily enough this does not include the WiFi 7 card which I can’t find for sale anywhere yet… Not the same price, since it doesn't include the card. But I for one wish the OpenWrt One had a higher price in exchange for Wi-Fi 7.
- rq1 3y agoWould this be able to carry a Coral mPCIe card? I can see 2 mPCIe slots in the back of the board (meant for the WiFi 7 module they say).
- solarpunk 3y agodo you mind me inquiring what use a coral tpu would have on a small machine like this?
- MadnessASAP 3y agoI'm not the person you replied too, but I could see myself using it to run object detection from my security cams. Frigate NVR specifically recommends a small ARM board with a Coral TPU.
- rq1 3y agoThat’s my use case too :-)
- Havoc 3y agoEven without that. 10gbe vs 2.5gbe. 1gb ram vs 4. USB3 vs 2. Quad core vs dual. Faster core.
- commandersaki 3y agoI really want to like this, but what interests and concerns me more is the finished product, specifically WiFi range. I have a TP-Link AC4000 which doesn't support OpenWRT, but I can have like 20 devices connected throughout my 4 bedroom house and 30m from the AP I can get about 500Mbps throughput at 0% loss, and the throughput is probably more a limitation of my ISP. Not sure I'll find anything better than this at the price point I paid ($150AUD).