So far I have seen little incentive to “upgrade” my current BPI-R2/R64s to the BPI-R3. Here are some changes I would suggest for future versions in order to increase usage:
First the no-brainers (changes that are doable with low part counts and would benefit everyone)
Should only be 4 IPEX antenna connectors. Board should have on-board mixer for 2.4 + 5GHz. This opens up for future expansion into other bands without having a dozen antennae on a device.
Does the board really need emmc + NOR + NAND + microSD? Even for a development board this is excessive. Drop NOR+NAND and reduce costs.
This is a little more trouble:
USB2.0-only mPCIe is useful to almost no-one. Wasting space on a 4G only slot is not forward looking. Agree with @dangowrt on switching a PCIe lane from M.2 to mPCIe slot.
I agree with most of your suggestions when it comes to direct use of this board as-in – also the ‘Pi’ name kinda suggests that this board is targeted towards advanced users and tinkerers.
However, as a development and evaluation platform it is very useful to also have SPI-NAND and SPI-NOR flash which are often desirable instead of a (rather huge and expensive) eMMC for new designs of networking products, as they are more reliable and cheaper than even the smallest eMMC.
Which ones to drop also depends on your personal taste: if you’d ask me which of them I’d drop, then I’d drop eMMC and NOR, keeping SDMMC and SPI-NAND which can be used at the same time – having only microSD and eMMC without the option to access both of them at the same time will make installation to eMMC cumbersome…
Regarding the USB2.0-only mPCIe slot: I don’t see a problem with it being USB-only. Back then I was wrongly assuming that the SoC supports either two PCIe x1 or one PCIe x2. That’s not true. It only supports one PCIe slot with two lanes. So having more than one PCIe slot would require the addition of some kind of PCIe switch IC.
A better, more useful and cheaper option would be to replace the mPCIe slot with a NGFF/M.2 Key-B which can offer USB 2.0, USB 3.0 and UIM/SIM. That would be future-proof for a while and allow hosting 5G modems. And as a premium feature, Audio/PCM and I2C of the M.2 slot could even also be connected to corresponding SoC pins now exposed only on the GPIO header.
Imho nor is not needed and makes setup harder. Nand is larger and only needed as kind of rescue-storage to access emmc.I like having os on emmc and have ability to boot alternate os from sdcard (test before upgrade).but yes this can be archived also without emmc by replacing sdcards.
As daniel said,pcie lanes cannot be splitted and now i only found m2 modems available needed a adapter i think m2 instead of pcie slot will be better. Maybe switching the 2 slots to make it easier to access m2-pcie-2-sata ports if using an adapter.
I like to have usb3 external port and maybe here a usb-would make more sense than for usb2 (but of course on board connector will be larger) and you can have.usb3 on pcie-slot (which is then a m2) allowing 5g modems.
Still waiting for my v1.2 to test reset-switch,but based on schematic it seems no hard-reset interrupting power to soc like on r2/r64 afair. This requires removing powerjack in case of a hang.
But all in one r3 will be a good replacement for my current r2
I agree that NOR is not needed if using this board as a ready-made product. That, however, is only part of the story of this board which also serves as the go-to reference board for the MT7986A SoC.
And when looking at it from that angle it is very useful when designing e.g. tri-band Wi-Fi access point based on the R3 board, removing many components to reduce cost.
32 MiB or 64 MiB of SPI-NOR is enough even for dual-boot and very advanced access point router firmware, and it can be cheaper and at the same time more reliable than any of the other storage options.
However, I agree that there is maybe no need to populate the SPI-NOR chip, as people using this as a reference platform shouldn’t be turned away should they have the solder the SPI-NOR chip of choice themselves…
I want to ask for help!
I wanted to update the OpenWrt system, but something went wrong.
Now my Banana Pi R3 won’t charge.
SF: Detected w25q256 with page size 256 Bytes, erase size 4 KiB, total 32 MiB
Reading from 0x180000 to 0x46000000, size 0x100 … OK
Reading from 0x180000 to 0x46000000, size 0x1b98080 … OK
Loading kernel from FIT Image at 46000000 …
Using ‘config-1’ configuration
Trying ‘kernel-1’ kernel subimage
Description: ARM64 OpenWrt Linux-5.4.171
Type: Kernel Image
Compression: lzma compressed
Data Start: 0x460000e8
Data Size: 28910373 Bytes = 27.6 MiB
Architecture: AArch64
OS: Linux
Load Address: 0x48080000
Entry Point: 0x48080000
Hash algo: crc32
Hash value: 04231e6a
Hash algo: sha1
Hash value: c1b633d7ba137a6b22cbe0dee22b68bb086bf3e5
Verifying Hash Integrity … crc32 error!
Bad hash value for ‘hash-1’ hash node in ‘kernel-1’ image node
Bad Data Hash
ERROR: can’t get kernel image!
MT7986>
Please try building from my staging tree. There I imported many recent Ethernet fixes as well as RX WED for MT7986 from Lorenzo’s tree on github. After some more testing, these patches will also hit mainline OpenWrt.
I tried your repository, it finally boots and WED is supposedly ON! Although I’m not sure if it’s actually working. Where can I see the binds? Is it ppe0/ppe1?
Can someone tell me - is BPI-R3 power adapter noisy (Coil Whine)?
I want to buy 3A power adapter (there will be ssd and sfp module on router, so I want 3A adapter). What size of DC output do I need? DC 2,1x5,5 mm? 2,5х5,5 mm? Can someone post photo of default power source? What power adapter polarity do I need?
And one more question - is “reset button bug” severe? I’m planning to use router with ssd drive as NAS, DLNA server. Can I buy 1.1 version safely or is it better to wait until 1.2?
I don’t use the RESET button. You simply don’t need it, it does not hang either. Plug the DC if needed.
You don’t need 36W also.
I use a phone PD capable charger whatsoever. Don’t bother myself with AC adapters. Just order a type C to DC 12V cable with correct IC and it works. It should be more efficient too as those are usually well built. 2A should be enough.
As for NAS usage. Well don’t goof around and assemble a proper NAS running openmediavault.
Yes! I got the one from sinovoip shop from aliexpress and it has absolute horrible coilwhine!
If you’re curious about power draw i can to some tests. (wanted to do those anyway, just been to lazy).
I have a WD Black SN850 1tb SSD mounted in the NVME slot. and a SFP adapter for 2.5gbit LAN.
