What exactly do you mean by “thingies”? Pigtail cables? They should come with the modem, as they need to match the modem’s connectors (MHF.4, u.FL, …)
Sadly there is only a mPCIe slot, so any modem faster than ~ 200MBit/s (speed of USB 2.0 + overhead) is useless anyway as mPCIe does not provide USB 3.0 connectivity needed for faster modems.
I’m using Sierra Wireless EM7455 in an NGFF-to-mPCIe adapter and it works well, but for the above reasons speed is capped at around 200MBit/s even though the modem is capable of 300MBit/s with carrier aggregation.
If you want fast WWAN connectivity, you will need an additional external USB 3 -> M.2/NGFF adapter, use that to host a modern 4G/5G modem and connect it to the USB 3 port of the R3.
Loaded banana with two 2.5gbe gbics, one 2tb nvme drive and one EC25-e 4g module.
Also the first attempt at a case for the thing. It still needs a lot of tweaking until it fits ok.
if you do not make a metal case, you have walls ~3mm thick which may prevent sfp and rj45 to be pluggin in. in my old case i made a smaller thickness there for ~2mm around these jacks
note that the holes for sd/sim and the bootswitches must be larger than the slot itself to get on it with fingers
I’m curious what is expected performance of BPI-R3 vs my current Turris Omnia.
This is not super scientific method, but does give a rough estimate of what to expect. Could some one run Geekbench 5 for ARM64 and share results? For ex. Turris Omnia gets ~100 SC, ~180 MC (on arm32).
wget https://cdn.geekbench.com/Geekbench-5.4.4-LinuxARMPreview.tar.gz
tar zxf Geekbench-5.4.4-LinuxARMPreview.tar.gz
cd Geekbench-5.4.4-LinuxARMPreview/
./geekbench_aarch64
