I received two brand new BPI-R3 Mini units in May 2026. Both units fail to initialize WiFi on first boot. Here is the full situation.
Hardware: Banana Pi BPI-R3 Mini (two units, same batch) OS: OpenWrt 24.10.0 (mediatek/filogic) SoC: MediaTek MT7986A confirmed via dmesg (CPU detected, DRAM 2048MB, memory test passed)
Symptom: No wireless interfaces appear after boot. Both iw dev and iwinfo return no results. The mt76 driver crashes during probe.
dmesg shows: mt76: EEPROM load failed mt76: probe failed
Both units produce identical output. The processor and all other components are healthy — Ethernet works, SSH works, the system is fully operational except for WiFi.
Diagnosis: The mt76 driver cannot load calibration data from the EEPROM. Based on our analysis, the EEPROM appears to have been shipped without factory calibration data written, or the calibration partition is empty/corrupted. This affects both units identically, which rules out a single defective board.
Question: Is there a procedure to restore or re-flash the EEPROM calibration data on the BPI-R3 Mini? Do you provide a calibration file, a recovery image, or a factory restore procedure for this specific issue?
Any help appreciated. Thank you.