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OpenWrt One – Open Hardware Router
- phoneafriend 3mo ago[flagged]
- naturalmovement 3mo ago[flagged]
- nicce 3mo agoYes, POE with helps that. You don't need to plug in the power cable. Commenting "This reeks of LLM-generated content." is not helpful in general.
- naturalmovement 3mo agoA desktop computer does not source PoE power. Do you even understand what PoE is or how it works? It's a false statement and a pattern commonly found in LLM slop answers.
- nicce 3mo ago> A desktop computer does not source POE power. Well, mine does. Look for PCIe, PoE+/PSE cards.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- peddling-brink 3mo agoThis is the official shop page afaict: https://www.bpi-shop.com/products/banana-pi-openwrt-one-router.html https://www.bpi-shop.com/products/banana-pi-openwrt-one-rout...
- naturalmovement 3mo ago[flagged]
- stefan_ 3mo agoI think the purpose is to have a simple to hack on reference platform for developers. The problem with commodity hardware is the super short lifecycles (many of them stop selling before theres an OpenWRT port), they are locked down and the manufacturers will frequently make tons of internal revisions.
- kennywinker 3mo agoOpen hardware is nice. I love that you can take a commodity router and claw back some control, but why not start with that control in the first place?
- naturalmovement 3mo agoBut you can already do that with existing hardware that is 4x capable at the same price point, and runs OpenWRT. A reference platform makes no sense for OpenWRT as by its nature it runs on dozens upon dozens of different hardware, all which are different and must be tested independently.
- mistercheph 3mo agoIt will take time to build up to a point where it's competitive on paper, it's insane that you're comparing a first-gen product from a rag-tag crew to the hardware produced by behemoths that have thousands of engineers and billions of dollars to play with. Where my use cases don't permit it I won't use this, but if it fits I would rather buy an open-hardware device at ~10x the price of an equivalent proprietary device not out of charity but because that is how much more value it provides to me at equivalent hardware performance.
- drdexebtjl 3mo agoWhich hardware is 4x capable at the same price point and runs OpenWRT?
- williadc 3mo agoI switched from a Google Wifi to this and found it to be just as stable, but with better range/signal strength, and easier to apply the parental controls I want.
- freedomben 3mo agoDoes it have parental controls natively or did you have to install something extra? I would love to be able to whitelist which devices are allowed to access the internet during night time hours.
- williadc 3mo agoI do it the opposite way, disable my kids' devices at night, but I suspect your desired method would also be supported using native features. I have found LLMs to be very helpful in providing the right settings. There is a plugin marketplace that provides more features, like ad-blocking. I haven't played with those yet, so I cannot vouch for them.
- drdaeman 3mo agoJust two Ethernet ports (1+2.5GbE), and it’s dual-band (no 6GHz)… I’m not sure who’s the target audience or what’s the use case.
- daringrain32781 3mo agoIt’s for developers as far as I understand, it’s not meant to buy as a consumer router. There is far better hardware you can get that runs OpenWRT.
- petee 3mo agoIt does raise the question that if it is for developers, what exactly is being developed? Especially if its not representative of hardware that is available or desired; is there some advantage targeting a very particular chipset? This seems to be the only device using it (from what i could find briefly)
- aidenn0 3mo agoA 5 port 2.5GbE switch would upgrade this to 5 total ports (4x 2.5GbE), and costs less than $100. If you only need 1GbE then it's even cheaper. Outside of home-labs, it's rare for me to see any devices connected to the LAN side of a wireless router these days, and more than 1 (i.e. the non-portable device that is closest to the router) is exceedingly rare.
- PcChip 3mo ago>Outside of home-labs, it's rare for me to see any devices connected to the LAN side of a wireless router these days I would assume every gaming desktop computer would be? I actually assumed every desktop would be...
- aidenn0 3mo agoNeither my parents nor my wife's parents have their desktop connected to their router. The cable modem isn't even in the same room as the desktop. [edit] If it matters, my mom no longer has a desktop (she uses a docked laptop now), but it is true of the docking station and was true of her previous desktop.
- kennywinker 3mo ago$106usd or $84usd without a case and antennas. That’s a solid price. Wish it had more than 1gb ram - goddamn datacenters.
- ssl-3 3mo agoWithout performing any work at all to optimize RAM usage: My all-singing, all-dancing OpenWRT router projects have always used less than 100MB of RAM. These days, they usually occupy less than 64MB. 1GB is a ton of RAM for this kind of application. :) What do you anticipate needing more for?
- kennywinker 3mo agoBlocky/pihole type stuff is what comes to front of mind, which probably fits but add anything else and now you’re hitting the limit.
- ssl-3 3mo agoHow many blocklists does one need to have in order for them to use >900 megabytes of RAM?
- kennywinker 3mo agoI mean, there is a lot of spam on the internet. But pihole asks for a pi with 512gb ram. Add openwrt’s 100mb, now your ram budget for running something else (file server, pairdrop, irc, tailscale, etc) is <400mb. One nodejs app could use all of that.
- ssl-3 3mo agoI mean: On one hand, 400MB is still a ton of RAM to do useful work with -- and unused RAM is wasted RAM. On the other hand: How many non-routing tasks do you really expect or require a ~$100 home-router-device to perform? :)
- baggachipz 3mo agoOff topic, but what amuses me about the "Wrt" name is that it was originally alternate firmware for the Linksys WRT54G router from 25 years ago. The name has stuck for whatever reason; I guess since only geeks use it and know what it is.
- voltaireodactyl 3mo agoSimilar to XBMC at least for a long time.
- boobsbr 3mo agoI still have a WRT54GL sitting in a box somewhere.
- EvanAnderson 3mo agoThe best model of the WRT54G line. I would snag them at thrift stores for cheap to use for silly utility functions. I always referred to that particular model as "The highly-coveted WRT54GL." I used a pair to provide Internet access at a Customer's construction site back in 2010. Cell phone hotspot wasn't a thing for me yet. We took a pair of WRT54Gs, configured one as a WiFi client, the other as a bog-standard router/AP, connected the LAN from the client to the WAN on the router/AP, pur a directional antenna onto the "client", and pointed it down the road toward a big business who offered free WiFi for Customers. We leeched off that until the real Internet service got installed. (It was a restaurant and we ate there at least once so we were Customers, right? >smile<)
- jandrese 3mo agoIt seems crazy to me that Linksys didn't look at the success of the WRT54GL and the higher prices they commanded and decide to just keep doing that. Why every company feels the need to roll their own firmware that is buggy, slow, crashy, and doesn't implement half of the promised functionality properly is still baffling to me.
- 3mo ago
- ChrisArchitect 3mo agoSome previous discussion around the launch in 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42285689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42285689
- PaulKeeble 3mo agoThey are working on an OpenWRT Two at the moment which will be Wifi 7. OpenWRT runs on a lot of hardware and its a great way to extend the life of a router past the manufacturers patches as well as gain a lot of capabilities. I wouldn't buy a commercial router that wasn't supported by OpenWRT now.
- routelastresort 3mo agoHopefully, dual 2.5gbe too?
- JoshTriplett 3mo agoI'm hoping for one with at least two 10Gbps ethernet ports (one for upstream, one for downstream). Ideally more, but two would be great.
- jburgess777 3mo agoYou might be interested in the Turris Omnia NG which has two 10g SFP+ ports: https://www.turris.com/en/products/omnia-NG-wired/ https://www.turris.com/en/products/omnia-NG-wired/
- embedding-shape 3mo agoI've been hunting for a good switch with at least two 10Gbps ports too, surprisingly hard to find today still. I've ended up with a XGS1250-12 (3 10Gbps ports) for now, but OpenWrt support isn't great, the ports end up 1Gbps (or some other similar problem, not sure I remember the details 100%), so still running Zyxel firmware which, well, isn't OpenWrt... Other people here might have recommendations for suitable switches with good OpenWrt support?
- tw04 3mo agohttps://mono.si/ https://mono.si/
- mbana 3mo ago
- mindslight 3mo agoThere is definitely beauty in having a separate router device that chugs on just fine regardless what happens to the rest of your network. But I got bored with the constantly-churning embedded culture, bespoke OS's (sorry, OpenWRT), and VPNs generally want more CPU than what purpose-built "routers" have. So I just went back to the old way of using a plain Linux machine as the gateway (now virtualized, with NixOS and nftables) and couldn't be happier. WiFi AP is done by that same physical machine (not virtualized) and by two other amd64 machines that double as Kodi boxes. When you learn netfilter/iproute2, that experience carries to anything else you might switch to.
- aborsy 3mo agoHow about OPNSense on open hardware of your choice, and passing messy wireless to separate AP? OpenWRT is very good, but the installation and upgrades are not easy. There is a zoo of images for different hardware, installation options and tools. It has to run on small devices, so there are limitations. The documentation on Wiki is scattered and could be improved. I had to search forums for weeks for a custom package installation for my router. Right now I have been trying to upgrade to the latest version via LUCI for a while, and it stucks. Probably have to wait for few weeks, go through CLI and maybe search forums again. I just thought I am paying a hefty time price for a bit more expensive x86 mini pc and AP.
- magicalhippo 3mo agoI agree on the upgrade story, though supposedly the recent move to apk will help in that regard. I moved from pfSense to OpenWRT due to the really poor IPv6 support in pfSense. I don't use the AP capability either. How are things in OPNSense these days? Particular pain points from pfSense was that it published global IP as DNS address to LAN clients and no way around it, so connectivity broke every time prefix changed, and no real support for specifying prefix-less firewall rules or similar, so couldn't really expose anything via IPv6 without pain.
- frugalmail 3mo agoYou're right, it's interesting that this device isn't the most technically superior in hardware or software, and isn't the most casual user friendly. It seems to be targeting a segment I can't bucket other than loyalists. Maybe good hardware & software for the cost?
- letmetweakit 3mo agoUpgrades are “owut upgrade” these days. Pretty straightforward.
- ssl-3 3mo agoMaybe so. The documentation seems to be all over the map, and the GUI suggests using "attended sysupgrade" for upgrades. ...which I tried doing, a week or so ago, for a minor point release update within the 25.12.x series. And then the router went out to lunch and didn't come back. Getting it going again wasn't so bad as such things go. My router has a huge advantage here in that it's a Raspberry Pi 4, so it's easy to remove/replace/re-do the flash device and start over. (Except: I get all out of sorts when I need to do Internet stuff to fix my Internet connection while that Internet connection is absent.)
- ryandrake 3mo agoAs someone who knows very little about WiFi, I always thought it sucked that if you wanted to go from 802.11this to 802.11that, it always requires brand new hardware with a different WiFi chip that implemented the new standard. Is there a good reason that software-defined 802.11 doesn't exist and that every new standard requires a different radio+SoC?
- smallnix 3mo agoOne example is the introduction of MIMO, a technique to send multiple data streams in the same frequency band in parallel. This requires multiple antennas, i.e. hardware which wasn't there in the previous wifi version. Note this was 2009.
- pid-1 3mo agoRadio modulation / coding (at least for 802.11) benefits greatly from paralelism (lots of matrix multiplication etc). I imagine that using an ASIC is way more cost efficient vs using a CPU.
- t1234s 3mo agoAre these for sale in the US?
- pseudosavant 3mo agoI have and love my OpenWrt One for my main router. I have two, so that I have a backup one I can switch to if the first one ever dies. It is the best device to run OpenWrt on as it is fully supported hardware that has great images/packages for it. Routing speeds/buffer/latency are great, everything just works, price is very reasonable. I don't use it for my APs, but that is mostly because I already had 3 TP-Link routers setup as dumb APs using OpenWrt that have been working great. If I did it again, I'd buy OpenWrt Ones though. Although Deco mesh kits I've used have worked exceptionally well, and have become my recommendation for friends/family that don't want to do things like run arbitrary packages on their router/APs.
- woodrowbarlow 3mo agoanother happy user here too. having openwrt with all features working and no tinkering out of the box (since it's their reference target) is a dream. this, plus the warm fuzzies of buying open-source, makes it worth it to me even with the 1GBps limitation and outdated WiFi (i use a separate AP anyway, like you). i swapped my ports in software to have 1GB WAN and 2.5GB LAN (which also lets me power the router with PoE, which i have coming in on the LAN port).
- pmontra 3mo agoIt's got only one LAN ethernet port. Do you use only wifi or did you add a switch between the router and your devices?
- pseudosavant 3mo agoI have it going into a 16-port gigabit switch, which my OpenWrt-based APs and wired devices are hooked into.
- nh2 3mo agoI have 4 OpenWRT Ones and they are good. If you just want a good WiFi router or access point, unless you need something cannot do (e.g. WiFi 7 or 10 Gbit/s Ethernet), and if want to spend minimal time messing around with routers today and in the future, just get this one. After getting this, I see no reason to ever buy any closed-source router again. No need to learn/remember any other Router config either. It's just all OpenWRT, always looks the same, always works the same. Setting up a new one takes me 2 minutes max. The recent OpenWRT update also brought the one feature the project was most sorely missing: A simple "Download and install latest firmware" button in the device UI. Now they just need to add an unattended-upgrades option and I never have to log in again after initial setup.
- tcdent 3mo agoGigabit / 2.5 Gbit connectivity is already obsolete. Any modern product must have 10gbe WAN with the hardware to back up NAT at that throughput.
- drnick1 3mo agoIt's not obsolete, it's basically the contemporary baseline. Remember, this is a cheap device. And unlike most Chinese garbage, you can be reasonably certain that it isn't backdoored.
- ThrowawayTestr 3mo agoFor a home network 2.5 is plenty.
- tcdent 3mo agohttps://frontier.com/shop/internet/fiber-internet/7-gig https://frontier.com/shop/internet/fiber-internet/7-gig 7gig WAN is widely available residentially at a reasonable cost.
- jtokoph 3mo ago200 horsepower vehicles are also obsolete. Any modern car should have 500 horsepower with the braking and safety systems to back it up.
- dylan604 3mo agoThat's such an assumption of needs. For someone to be using a 10g capable NAT would be some sort of super nerd with such a small portion of the population. More and more households have no compute device other than their devices. With WiFi routers now being sold with OpenWRT installed, it no longer means you're in the nerd category for installing it.
- hylaride 3mo agoDoes it have hardware PPPoE offloading? Because it's a huge issue for those of us stuck with old-school telecoms for our fibre connections. Doing PPPoE at gigabit speeds needs something that can handle it.
- sourweasel 3mo agoHave you looked at the BPI-R4? It's a pricier option than the OpenWRT One, but it has excellent hw acceleration for networking tasks. I am 90% sure I recall someone reporting using it for a 2.5Gbps PPPoE connection and it handled it. It's also supported by the OpenMPTCProuter project if you need network aggregation support.
- Namidairo 3mo agoWhile they're okay on paper, they managed to burn a lot of customers in regards to the add-on wifi 7 module. Quite a few of the modules went out without their eeprom programmed correctly, and all of them appear to be plagued by quite mediocre performance from (alleged) inadequate RF shielding on the card. It looks like they've revised the design, but it's peeved off quite a few of the Banana Pi/Sinovoip customers who have bought them with the intention of using it as a router/ap with their R4. (It's dual-PCIe fingers with unique spacing and requires out of spec PCIe voltages, so it's only practically usable with a BPi R4.) At the very least, the customers using them as wired-only routers are likely to be having a slightly better experience.
- merbanan 3mo agoYes. Mediatek SoCs have hardware acceleration support for that. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/net/ethernet/mediatek/mtk_ppe_offload.c#L385 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/net/et...
- itsrobreally 3mo agoI have one of these and love it, especially after I once bricked it during a manual software update and got to use the dip switch reset to reflash it using the ROM. I wish it had more ethernet ports but I've managed to live with that. I'd be up for buying an OpenWrt Two as a backup or to replace this if it has even one more LAN jack.
- timedude 3mo agoI have one of these for a few months now. Works like a champ. Firmware updates are very easy now through the web interface.
- henryoman 3mo agowhere to buy?
- random__duck 3mo agoNext step: open source hardware ASIC for the open router ?
- ZenoArrow 3mo agoAn open hardware network-focused ASIC would be cool, but cost and long development times would likely be limiting factors. If you wanted to explore this further, starting with FPGA-based router components would be a good starting point. For example: https://github.com/open-sdr/openwifi https://github.com/open-sdr/openwifi
- random__duck 3mo agoThanks :) Yeah, the router is defiantly further in the future to, as it additionally requires CPU integration for run the software stack, switches are the first order of business.
- random__duck 3mo agoCan I do a "hold my beer" moment ? https://github.com/Essenceia/ethernet_switch_asic https://github.com/Essenceia/ethernet_switch_asic
- ZenoArrow 3mo agoThat's cool, it's obviously not meant to compete with modern router ASICs but it's an impressive achievement for a hobbyist.
- buredoranna 3mo agoSince we're talking WiFi, I'll mention https://www.wiisfi.com/ https://www.wiisfi.com/ The single best wifi reference I've found to date.
- evulhotdog 3mo agoThis is awesome, thank you for sharing. This answers so many questions that I had but never had the true desire to research every niche WiFi term.
- arwhatever 3mo agoI became interested in OpenWrt when I noticed that the cloud portal for my ISP reported to me the names and types of devices that were associated to my home access point/router. Suddenly I want to put every IPS device into dumb bridge mode, and run my own damn router.
- pizlonator 3mo agoWhat a coincidence to see this on the front page! I just received my OpenWrt One because I’m tired of dealing with the questionable quality of most routers. And I don’t feel like resurrecting my old PC that I used as a router for a while. I stopped doing that because it’s loud. Pretty sure the power supply fan is about to fly off. But Qualcomm WiFi pci card with giant antenna in a dirt cheap PC running ancient Ubuntu and a simple hostapd setup is so far the most reliable WiFi router I’ve ever had. I hope openwrt one is even better :-)
- IgorPartola 3mo agoIn case it is not, an old PC with a dual port Intel NIC running OPNSense is so far the best router I have ever used. I mean rock solid performance with near zero maintenance beyond adjusting VLANs and setting up a 6in4 tunnel over the past 5 years solid. My home network is larger, more diverse, and more complex than what I suspect most people have, with several hundred devices and yet I log into the OPNSense UI maybe twice a year and usually just out of curiosity. The learning curve is a little steeper than more consumer stuff but it is by no means beyond a person who is capable of using OpenWRT and the docs and forum support are better than 99.9% of open source projects I have seen over the past 25 years.
- guywithahat 3mo agoI don't disagree, however using an old PC as a router almost certainly wastes an enormous among of power. An old non-gaming PC could use 70kWh of power a month if running continuously (as a router would), which is around 11 a month and almost 140 a year. At that price you could just buy a nice router, or an OpenWrt One which will possibly also have newer, faster WiFi standards (WiFi 6)
- tehlike 3mo agoI use an m920q as my router and it idles around 5W.
- IgorPartola 3mo agoI currently use an old boring HP tower. Nothing fancy, I think it’s a quad core AMD APU. But if building it from scratch I would get a $35 thin client off eBay and stick a NIC in it. The CPU load is minimal as the network card does all the processing. I do have 8 TP-Link access points and a hardware controller as well as three unmanaged PoE switches for the Wi-Fi but that would be the case regardless of what my router is.
- bradley_taunt 3mo agoI started down my “custom” home network journey with OpenWrt and some aftermarket hardware routers. Enjoyed my time using / playing with it. After some time though, I eventually moved over to using OpenBSD directly. My small brain has a much better understanding of all the moving parts compared to that of OpenWrt :P
- dominick-cc 3mo agoI use opnsense with an aliexpress n100 router. It works very well and I enjoy it. But upgrades scare the crap out of me. I've only had 1 upgrade where things went bad. I have zfs snapshots and everything, but just because its a headless unit, I get super anxiety upgrading the system waiting for the beeps for it to come back online.
- gonzalohm 3mo agoHow much did you pay for it?
- dominick-cc 3mo ago$200.93 shipped in April 2024 with a wall bracket. No storage or ram though, but it was cheap at the time.
- papascrubs 3mo agoI virtualize mine with proxmox and pass the necessary NICs through to the VM. Snapshots make rollbacks a breeze. You can also run HA pairs if you want to do updates without downtime.
- rgovostes 3mo agoI've recently been test driving SPR[1] which is a security-oriented distro for Wi-Fi routers. The team behind it are serious about Wi-Fi security and have a research lab[2] that has been credited with several CVEs in the likes of Apple's network stack. The headline feature is strong device isolation for semi-trusted guest and home automation devices, and the software stack is based around containerized and audited Go daemons. It ran pretty well for me as a travel router I cobbled together from a Raspberry Pi and Netgear A7500 USB dongle for a stay in a short-term rental where the infrastructure network was shared with other units. More recently I have been trialing their CM5-based model with Wi-Fi 7 and 2.5GbE PoE for use as primary home Wi-Fi. 1: https://www.supernetworks.org https://www.supernetworks.org 2: https://www.supernetworks.org/security-labs.html https://www.supernetworks.org/security-labs.html
- patchtopic 3mo agoI purchased one of these for a family member and it has been great.
- wwilson 3mo agoI’ve been running one for a while and love it. Have also built a Nix -> OpenWRT config language transpiler so that I can keep my router state in Nix files and have nice deterministic rollbacks etc. It’s been great!
- CrimsonCape 3mo agoI'd be interested in any more info you can provide. Do you have your router configs in flakes? I'm currently testing Nix in a proxmox VM. I just finished writing a shell script to dump all the UCI config files to one text file using curly braces to bracket/separate each file with the intent of committing this to a repo. Then will be writing a little parser to chunk up the text file to the appropriate /etc/config structure that OpenWRT expects. So at any point I can then just checkout different git branches, run the parser, and bam the entire config has been written to the router over ssh. Still trying to figure out if OpenWRT has some other state outside of the /etc/config directory.
- ww520 3mo agoWhat does it take to add support for a router? Support for tp-link ax5400 seems missing for a long time.
- throwawayk7h 3mo agogl·iNet also runs openWRT. You can even ssh into these routers.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Damogran6 3mo agoI'd like something bigger than 1gb for the LAN port...yeah, most of my stuff is quick from a wifi standpoint, but I don't want the hardwired stuff to be second class citizens. Looking at one of these when TP-link stops patching my Wifi. https://www.toptonpc.com/product/2x10g-sfp-solid-firewall-mini-pc-3x2-5g-i226-v-lans-intel-i3-n305-n150-n100-ddr5-nvme-proxmox-pfsense-opnsense-home-server-host/?attribute_pa_color=16gb-ddr5-128gb-nvme&attribute_pa_bundle=intel-n100&attribute_pa_plugs-type=us&_gl=1*o2ljl3*_up*MQ..*_ga*NTM5MTMxNTEyLjE3ODE3MzQwOTg.*_ga_5D4NM9G62C*czE3ODE3MzQwOTgkbzEkZzAkdDE3ODE3MzQwOTgkajYwJGwwJGgw*_ga_F8C2ET9T2F*czE3ODE3MzQwOTgkbzEkZzAkdDE3ODE3MzQwOTgkajYwJGwwJGg4MTkxOTUxODk https://www.toptonpc.com/product/2x10g-sfp-solid-firewall-mi....
- lofaszvanitt 3mo agoDid anyone, ever do a security evaluation of the most common network chips on the market? How much would it cost, are there even companies doing this?
- blobbers 3mo agomadwifi lives on...
- alaudet 3mo agoBeen using Openwrt for years, router and access points. Any new AP I buy has to has to be supported by Openwrt. I have probably bought 7 or 8 old AP's at yard sales over the years for $5/$10 and turned them into decent wifi access points back to an Openwrt router running vlans, bandwidth monitoring, QoS, tcpdump for ssh dump with wireshark. Just excellent, some pretty smart people in the Openwrt forum as well if you have problems.
- denkmoon 3mo agoIf you're remotely interested in this stuff you should go ahead and set all this up yourself on a debian or such. Great learning experience.
- zkmon 3mo agoFlashed my TP-LINK router last week with openwrt bin file, to get wifi to ethernet bridge. Working awesome. There are too many settings. Feels like Gimp (vs paintbrush). But once figured out, it works well.
- CrimsonCape 3mo agoAsk AI to generate you a UCI config for "<your use case here>". Reading the raw config files in /etc/config is the opposite of the web UI. The config files are the bare minimum data. Very easy to read. I have no idea of the wider scope of possibilities that could be written into the config files, but that's where the AI helps.
- mintflow 3mo agoBpi does a nice job on open source hardware and openwrt integration, but only 2 ports in this model is really good? Just update my bpi-r3 purchased years ago from 24.x to 25.12, it need a bit of extra work because the sfp interface is renamed(though I never used that), and i finally just do plain sysupgrade only and add some required packages because i run a customized fd.io vpp build on the bpi-r3, connected via vhost-net backed tuntap, it works well, I never regret bought this machine, with current agent stuffs, i think bpi r3 model may be more fun to play with
- h4kunamata 3mo agoI have an ASUS RT-AX53U running OpenWRT for a few years now. I bought it, turned it on and flashed it out of the box lmao I like the idea of having their own hardware but it is not easy to get, so buying normal ones and flashing them still the best option.
- drewfax 3mo agoI too use ASUS RT-AX53U. Decent hardware. But stock firmware was terribly slow. IPv6 didn't even work. I heard OpenWrt when I searched how to fix the stock firmware. Flashed it and never turned back. Now, OpenWrt is a critical infra in my house for adblocking, DoH, Firewall, Network Segmentation etc. None of these are possible with the stock firmware.
- gnyman 3mo agoIf someone is interested in open hardware running openwrt, also check out Turris. https://www.turris.com/en/ https://www.turris.com/en/ I have been using them for years and I'm really happy. I recently bought the WiFi 6 upgrade kit for both of my turris. They "recently" released their latest version which is expensive but comes with WiFi 7 and 2.5 Gbps RJ45 and 10 Gbps SPF.
- bana-io 3mo agoAre you certain this is running OpenWRT? As in, can I get a OpenWRT build and flash it to the router and have it work?
- palata 3mo agoThey maintain their own fork and they say that they contribute stuff upstream (not sure how much, though). Last time I checked (a couple years ago), it seemed that I could use OpenWRT but I would lose some functionality (was it the FTT maybe?).
- cbarrick 3mo agoThe Turis Omnia runs a derivative of OpenWrt. They provide a custom UI with an option to switch to LuCI. It's easy to flash it to upstream OpenWRT, which is what I do.
- _giorgio_ 3mo agoWhere do you buy the open wrt one? EU
- ButlerianJihad 3mo agoI once tried to flash OpenWRT onto a very old router that was EOL, and apparently wherever I had downloaded the firmware it was pre-pwned. There was literally an interface numbered “eth666” and the CLI was playing crazy mind games with me as I tried to configure it. So I thoroughly destroyed the router and e-wasted it. I honestly never want an open-source router OS ever again.
- clear-octopus 3mo ago[dead]
- cik 3mo agoWhat I want is a cheap, brainless wifi 6 or 7 device, that's easy to mesh and extend. I currently have Orbis that are Wifi-5, and I'm sick of the general untrustworthiness. The thing is, like my WRT54G from back in the day, they just work in all situations. It's amazing how stable this kit has been for 7 years. I'm not in the US. I can't Amazon. I don't want to spend the equivalent of 1k USD just to get 3 devices in a brainless mesh that covers my ~125sqm place made of insane amounts of radio blocking concrete. I no longer want to maintain my network, to have network. I want things that just work. The Orbi did that for me - but the costing makes me think abut the future, and not finding a painless solution. I guess that's the tradeoff. To wit, I also want the mesh comms on another channel (i.e 6Ghz, rather then the 2.4/5.0) and the computers/IOTs/etc isolated from that. Perhaps cheap tri-band is insanely wishful thinking. It sure seems that way.
- shdh 3mo agoWRT54G was so good
- 11mariom 3mo agoI have similar board, from same producer - BananaPi BPI-R3 Mini. Got cheaper version without case - designed simple box with cutouts and 3d printed it out. I can say it works flawlessly. I'm very happy about it. Previously I was using openwrt on different consumer-grade routers and I always had some issues, even when selecting supported devices.
- superzero11 3mo ago[flagged]
- Oxodao 3mo agoi don't understand the use case for 1x2.5gbs + 1x1gbs for a router. Why not both 2.5gbs it's not like you'll be running lots of stuff on the router itself so it would be more useful to have a wan AND a lan at 2.5 (outside of load balancing for a lot of wifi devices of course)
- dhlavaty 3mo agoIt is any better than other open-source and well established Turris Omnia NG ?
- BLKNSLVR 3mo agoIt costs about a fifth as much as I just found out. Turris also specifies 'based on' OpenWRT, rather than straight OpenWRT. In reality there may not be much of a difference, until if/when Turris no longer exists.
- lonelyrock42 3mo agohttps://wrtnova.com/builder/ https://wrtnova.com/builder/ this builder is cool too!
- naruhodo 3mo ago> Note that recent (2025-10) batches of the OpenWrt One have an M.2 slot with a detached post at the 2230 position and the shipped product contains no way to attach the post. The implications of this are going over my head (and TFA should explain it better). I gather that 2230 is a form factor 22x30mm and there's also a 2280 M.2 SSD form factor. Is this just saying that there's a missing mounting post? So it wobbles? You can't use a certain form factor?
- zoobab 3mo agoHow open are the wifi drivers? (it was an issue with Broadcom and WRT54G)
- sigio 3mo agoI'd love to see more OpenWRT hardware that was capable of 2x2.5, 2x5 or 2x10gbit without any wifi, preferably in a case that can be rackmounted without too much trouble (so keeping it under 1U height). I'm currently running a stack of Zyxel T5600's, which are quite capable arm64 openwrt boxes. Those in a rackmount but with sodimm support or in 8+GB ram versions (and some sata/nvme storage, USB3) would be amazing.
- mbana 3mo agoFrankly I just want https://openelab.io/a/s/products/banana-pi-bpi-r4-pro-1 https://openelab.io/a/s/products/banana-pi-bpi-r4-pro-1 to work with OpenWRT. The board linked to in the post doesn't have 10 G LAN, only 10 G WAN unlink. So what do people who have a 10 G internet connection do?
- walrus01 3mo agoI'm sorry but lack of 802.11be tri band is a non starter in mid 2026 for this price. Someone else commenting in this thread has linked the glinet 802.11be unit which looks like a better option. I would also highly encourage people to buy a wired only router, and something like a ubiquiti u7 lite or u7 pro AP, and separate the functions of router and AP. The ubiquiti unifi controller package is really straightforward to install for basic SOHO use on a base Debian stable system.
- BLKNSLVR 3mo agoMy home setup is pretty much as per your description, but for someone like my parents, this does it all in a single device that uses far less power. I've recently been setting up a GL.iNet Marble for my folks, with Adguard and some other filtering / security add-ons. This is a bit more expensive, but also more future proof.
- walrus01 3mo agoA U7-Lite uses less than 14W so even in a month it's not much power, cost wise, even if your power is $0.40 a kWh...
- mast6footer 3mo agonice
- _joel 3mo ago"It's not a router, it's a very naughty board"
- husky8 3mo ago1x 2.5g WAN
- mehdix 3mo agoI have a Cisco MR18 router that bridges my LAN to my remote NAS. It would have become e-waste if not for OpenWrt. When I was visiting my mom a few years back in my hometown, I converted her cheap plastic Xiaomi Mi router into an ordinary router using the OpenWRTInvasion exploit. That router then bridged a remote SIP phone to the main LAN, which was connected to the internet through another plastic router that had also been turned into an ordinary router, again thanks to OpenWrt. That project is fantastic, and the people behind it are doing great work. Can't recommend them highly enough.
- distantsounds 3mo agothe single 2.5gb port kills me. you may as well just have 2 gigabit ports at that point. and don't tell me the wifi is the selling point either, you won't get much more than a gig off 6e.
- snapplebobapple 3mo agois there any decent management software for a whole network of these yet? That's what keeps me going back to unifi with opnsense as the router. Last I checked it was basically openwisp, which was hugely painful/complicated to get working when I last looked a few years ago. I would love nothing more than to have a viable option to start replacing the unifi stuff (even better if there is also 10gb switching but that feels like an absolute pipedream still without a large budget for datacenter gear)
- santiagohzszmex 3mo agoIncreíble
- codymisc 3mo ago[dead]
- PovilasID 3mo agoOpenWRT is amazing. Other than the usual security stuff one of the most overlooked use cases was scheduling other devices. Router is always on and with eatherwake it can orchestrate turning on other networked devices. I also run rtl sdr to capture local weather reports. OpenWRT is used as base for a surprising amount of edge devices.
- deknos 3mo agoonce i put my on linux on there, will the NICS still operate at maximum speed?
- mstaoru 3mo agoDidn't they position it as a "development board" that happens to be a router? Personally I find vanilla Sinovoip (aka "BananaPi") products to be more interesting. OpenWRT One adds strange connectors but for some reason removes R2/3/4's cellular-focused PCIe-but-actually-USB slot, M.2 slot, and leaves just one LAN port.