This is great news! With a 1Gb NAND, that allows plenty of OpenWrt packages. Will it come factory-flashed with OpenWrt or at least BPi’s version? That would help get more users set up out-of-the-box.
Lastly, since the PWM fan can be controlled - what temperature sensors are provided/exposed for monitoring?
I think USB booting hasn’t been addressed. And I assume if there is a booting problem that there is some form of recovery? USB booting could make this a lot easier.
Hi,
When all devices are plugged in and run at maximum power, the maximum power consumption can reach about 18W. The new version of the case adds a fan and some ventilation holes
All cases are aluminum.
In general, you only need to use spi nand, and the system on emmc is only used for recovery after bricking.
A USB-UART chip is added to the TypeC, you can use it for debugging, but pay attention to the power supply of the TypeC port of the computer must be enough
Yes, both nand and emmc will be pre-installed with bpi version when leaving the factory,
You can use the temperature sensor of the CPU to monitor the temperature, and then control the fan speed through PWM,
The MTK chip does not support USB boot, so there is no way
Excellent news! An aluminum case with temp-congrolled fan and appropriate vents will be much appreciated! UART over USB C is also much appreciated. Low power shouldn’t be much issue, but fully loaded might be more difficult to find a solution for power.
About the USB boot, I am assuming that the uboot inside the MTK chip does not include this functionality, but could be added into a uboot on the SPI? Has MTK provided any response on the request for USB booting?
There is a PD chip on the USBC, and a power adapter above 20W can be used.
Because USB booting is rarely used, and the workload of software modification is very large, there is no plan to do it for the time being.
Hi! Will it support Quectel RM500Q-GL? And I noticed that the case does not have the holes for the 5G module antennas. Will you provide additional case designs that can contian PCB antennas for users who use 5G ?
The default setting is RM500U-CN, because the drivers of RM500Q-GL and RM500U-CN are very different and cannot be compatible, so the only way to use RM500Q-GL is to rebuild the image with the right driver.
Sorry，No 5G-capable case for now.
Hello, is there a specific release date?
It is understandable and I hope that the USB boot feature can be enabled in a future uboot version update, especially with having emmc instead of uSD.
While the case may not include holes to support everything, thankfully it is made of aluminum so it should be easy to drill out holes. The benefit is then you can drill the holes wherever you would like to place them.
It’s already on sale without the case, but not in large quantities
We have no plan to do usb boot for the time being, and there is a high probability that we will not do it in the future, Because now not only can SPI NAND boot, but also eMMC.
But there will be an SDK released, you can try to modify it yourself
beside drill out holes , you can also have 3D print the upper cover yourself, and put the 5G antenna inside
You can already just replace the U-Boot stored on the SPI-NAND and make sure it has all drivers and commands to boot from USB. Imho for this device you could even build U-Boot to follow a standardized boot protocol, ie. UEFI, ARM SystemReady, … And that can easily also work from USB.
Compared with the full-size BPi-R3 board, the only significant difference should be the Airoha 2500Base-T PHYs, which will need a driver (and firmware, in the vendor driver this firmware is just a huge array in a C header file) to be present in U-Boot and Linux. As both are available and licensed under GPL, it’s not hard for anyone with a little bit of experience in C programming and working with U-Boot or the Linux kernel to achieve this.
Any ETA on when the cases will be available?
How to order from germany? When will the board be available on joom?
BPI-R3 Mini out stock now , will ready soon .
Hi: I’m an old ‘newbie’ and have just got my R3 working with Openwrt. Great job guys! When I say ‘old’, the phrase “I love Luci” might remind some here. Alternatively, if I mention my first program ever was punched onto paper tape, that might be a better clue.
Just to say ‘thank you’ to all the people commenting on these forums and elsewhere. Some very good advice. Thanks also to the people who develop the software and make this device so much more useable.
A couple of things I noticed
As we cannot know the size of the actual micro SD the user is going to write the image one this is a hard one to fix, because the backup GPT is at the end of the disk… Probably something that will have to be addressed in Balena Etcher or the like (if at all).
Regarding the protective MBR: This is just to not have the uSD appear as “I’m empty, please format me” on systems not supporteing GPT.
Regarding resizing partitions: you can resize the fit partition which will result in larger rootfs_data overlay. Or use the autopart package of OpenWrt to automagically allocate all remaining space on the boot disk to LVM2.
Intel WiFi cards can only act in the station/client role, they are (deliberately, probably for legal reasons or to make certification cheaper) not able to perform the access point role. Hence Intel Wi-Fi hardware is not suitable for building a wireless bridge. Use MediaTek or Qualcomm radios instead.