The Banana Pi open-source community series of router development boards have sparked a craze in the open-source community since their release. Particularly, the BPI-R4, the router with the strongest configuration in history, has been selling well for nearly three years and has received full support from the Openwrt open-source community. Based on this, and in response to various suggestions from community developers, the BPI-R4 Pro was born. The Banana Pi BPI-R4 Pro router board is designed with a MediaTek MT7988A (Filogic 880) quad-core ARM Cortex-A73, featuring 8GB DDR4 RAM, 8GB eMMC, and 128MB SPI-NAND flash memory. It supports four 2.5G Ethernet ports, two 10G optical-electrical ports, and 4G/5G expansion. It also provides a rich array of peripheral interfaces, allowing users to develop a wide range of network applications on it.
The first batch of small-scale products will be available at the end of October. Pre-sales are now open to the community. Please purchase from the official store. Users will receive the development boards at the end of October.
I’m new here but I’m interested in the board. Do the 10GbE WAN and LAN ports auto negotiate to 5G/2.5G/1G? Does this board already include tri-band WiFi7 or do I need to purchase a WiFi7 module? If I purchase 2 units, will it have the ability to create a mesh network for the 2.4G/5G/6G, and guest networks? Is there a case, heatsink, power brick, and antenna set also available for purchase?
As far as I understand, you bought the bare board, and it looks like on the presale photo, right?
→ No offense intended!
If you watched the release of the taller BPI-R4 case, you could imagine how long it will take until everything is available and in a really working condition (software and hardware)!
So “still” is not justified. Maybe it is your first banana pi board … and yes it is an exiting piece of hardware. But I wished you have waited for the first reviews on software and hardware and also for a more compleate package …
Despite from that, did you ever thing about elctromagnetic shielding (front and backsite)?
For me this is not such a big issue. I can just open a drawer and pick up a heat sink that fit. Same with a fan.
And with respect to shielding, chopper foil will do. In the past on some wood, today I just use a 3D Printer to generate a box.
However, all of this is needed even for developers and not everyone has an HW background.
That is right …
I want everyone who expects a router to work “out of the box” to know that this board will only do that in a best-case scenario.
It seems you’re not one of those people.
