Banana Pi BPI-R4 BPI-BE14 Wi-Fi7 NIC module

Banana Pi Router design BPI-R4(MT7988)
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The official Wifi NIC is not available for sale yet. Frank (and some others) only received one as a developer preview.

You will have to wait with us others, who are eagerly awaiting the public sale of the module.

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It’s getting kind of silly waiting this long. Even if it doesn’t work there should be a way to buy that includes a disclaimer about it not working properly yet. I’d love to help figure the driver issue out. I throughly enjoy working on those types of issues, but can’t help because I can’t yet buy it. I bought my bpi-r4 in January thinking by now the NIC would be out. I’m starting to get worried that it won’t be released. The BPi-R4 is still fun to play with, but maybe I should have waited for the nic before I bought it. Hope we see it for sale soon.

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Or at least if @sinovoip or @simon could be a bit more communicative about this. Like what phase they are in. Are they already mass producing it or do they need to iron out the firmware issues first or even need to design a “v1.1”, so to say, before it goes into mass production and then public sale.

That would be really helpful.

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Agreed. I’m staying hopeful it will all work out though. I have a 7916 in mine for now and it’s working great with 6ghz and my quectel rm520n-gl. Very fast.

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Sorry Frank, I wasn’t trying to derail your thread. Feel free to delete my posts.

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Is there any other NIC available? like is there any example for stick a BE200 or sth on R4 and make it work?

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You can use any mt76xx/mt79xx (e.g. mt7615 or mt7916) on the mpci slots. Just be sure sw4 is off

1 Like
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I have been busy with BE14 calibration, OpenWRT One testing and R4’s case, so don’t have much time, sorry.

We are modifying the layout of BE14 recently, and the V1.0 version will be produced soon, but the quantity will not be too large, just about 30 to 40. After that, it will be hundreds.

5 Likes
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This sounds good!

Please take the time you need for a quality product :+1: .

PS: I have no problem to resolder or replace some resistors. But some people have issues with that! So, my support for a longer development you have :wink: .

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Does code need to be changed compared to the be14 i have? Currently have firmware loading part (233 files) working so far,but cannot start interfaces. If it changes i do not need to put much work into it…

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So,how about BE19, will it be produced?

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Thanks!

The workload of wifi7 NIC is a bit heavy, including test equipment upgrade, calibration, RF matching, factory test program debugging, etc.

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There is no need to change the software, we are just optimizing the hardware.

MT76 and MP3.1 are both OK, but they should be kernel 5.4, not the latest 6.1. Porting to 6.1 is really a lot of work. You can ask steven for help

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BE19 is currently planned, but it will be after BE14 and OpenWRT One, so there is no specific MP time yet.

3 Likes
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Super news, there is new thing to blame - openwrt one nonsense slowing down the main profitable project…

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As far as I know, the OpenWrt One PCB sample has just been received, and it’s taking a lot of time to verify it. BPI has dedicated their efforts to contributing to the community, and I believe we should encourage them for their hard work. :grinning:

1 Like
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I also think that bpi helps openwrt team here…i’m not sure that this slows down anything for r4 or be14 here…be19 yes,but be thankful it gets produced again.

i’m focused on router boards with multiple interfaces and sfp for fibre support. So openwrt one is less interesting for me. But i appreciate the work that is done from bpi and openwrt guys for the community.

Btw. Because of openwrt one we have nvme support for filogic (r3,r3mini,r4). Without johns work we still don’t have this driver…

As said above there some work to do to get r4 and the wifi board(s) working. It will be great if some more people get a wifi board to help getting it running in mainline.

2 Likes
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If I can get one of those early 30-40 boards, I’m happy to help.

When you say mainline you mean Linux kernels 6.1 and 6.6, right? And porting the work from mediatek’s 5.4 kernel?

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Mainline is currently 6.9-rcX :slight_smile:

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I have been helping @frank-w with the wifi work, but I don’t have a wifi card. If I was given a wifi card, I think we would make more progress. If there are any wifi 7 cards going, please put me on the list.