Question about the board

Hello, I’m about to buy a routerboard and was thinking of the W2 or the R2 but I don’t know which is better. I was thinking of using it with OpenWRT, as a router, NAS and probably the GPIOs to control some basic electronics. I am willing to hear some opinions. Thanks.

I don’t think w2 is available for sale as per their online store on aliexpress so its better you go for R2. As there are more I/O and updated kernel support by frank.

I am not sure about your intel m2 card as you need to check if there is a working driver for linux for that.
There is updated OpenWRT for R2.

For a router build I am with @spikerguy that I would choose the R2. I find the additional LAN ports and WLAN are probably more important then additional HDMI in/out anyway. Not to mention two USB-3 connectors.

Last but not least it seems the R2 already exist in board revision 1.2 and as such has majored over the 1.0 of the W2.

Another question, I was reading in the Wiki that Bananian is for Router and NAS applications. What kind of Router functions does it have?

Bananian is dead,but you can use debian here (bananian was debian modified for bananapi).

you can configure debian as router (much more any web-ui will support),but imho there is no graphical interface for it (also not basic settings). Here you can take a look in my wiki

You will find my debian buster here in forum,kernel is available up to 5.4-rc1 on my github-repo,uboot is up-to date too.

internal wifi is usable with some workarounds but if you need good performance you’ll be better using an pcie-card

Any PCIE card you recommend? I saw that an official WiFi card was launched but was thinking in getting a cheaper one. I saw an Atheros QCA9880 that I was thinking in buying. Thanks.

mt7615 does not fit in bpi-r2 because of its width

The atheros card should work…ath driver is well supported in linux

An alternative would be mt7612e,but this is not dual channel (bgn or ac mode)

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