Does anyone actually have their R4 with the BE1400 running properly as their main router?

@meehien Honestly that sounds incredibly easy, and I know Apline should have support for the R4.

On a side note, does the AUR possibly have anything of use for the R4 or BE14? If so I might try Arch if Alpine doesn’t work out.

That actually sounds incredibly easy. But in this specific case, I’m lost at step one lol.

How do I do that on the R4? I have no other ARM based systems I could run an installer on.

I do have a small NVME drive in the R4 that I intend to run the OS from, so that part is covered.

Then I need to install U-Boot from @Frank-W onto the eMMC to enable booting the OS from the NVMe drive, which I was never able to figure out how to do correctly. That was actually my first post here on the forums lol. That thread got put on the back burner when I started noticing all the other issues.

I know the main issue is simply the fact that I have never done this type of setup before. So I have no understanding of what files go where and why or what they do. Plus im probably way over complicating things. I know the moment it finally clicks im probably going to feel really stupid lol. :sweat_smile:

Amen, you said it all properly.

i should have dig a bit more about this product before buying it (i was misled by my previous raspberry experience). Fortunately, i don’t plan to use it for wifi but i found it a bit triggering to see variant release of the R4 when the original product is not even fully working as expected and properly supported by the vendor.

I have the very same setup - the two NPDs + a custom aluminium case are getting actively cooled by an 120mm fan. That way I have 2x2 6GHz WIFI in two rooms (the 2,4GHz disabled) + a central 4x4 2,4GHz (all serving one floor). The setup is completely stable that far.

Good to hear that!

How are the TX and RX values of AW7916-NPD ?

:slightly_smiling_face:

I can reach 1,2Gbit with iperf2 on a laptop with intel be-card (antennas installed in the ceiling, so from a distance of roughly 3 - 4 meters) on 5 GHz AX, didn’t test it on 6 GHz so far. I had a very similar setup with 2×7916-NPD + 1×7915-NP1 installed on Turris Omnias with similar speeds. I am currently changing the antennas (before: 2,4/5GHz only with low antenna gains that don’t outperform the attenuation losses because of long cabling, after: omniband antennas with higher gain) so I’ll need some days to post the evidence.

I’m running a BPi-R4 (BE1400 Wi-Fi) as my primary home router on OpenWrt 24.10.0-rc5 (r28304-6dacba30a7). Haven’t upgraded to the stable 24.10.1 release yet, but plan to soon.

Uptime & stability:

  • 65 days uptime (aside from a power outage two months ago):
    16:39:34 up 65 days,  5:08,  load average: 0.07, 0.11, 0.04
    
  • No unexpected reboots—system’s been fairly stable overall.

Wi-Fi:

  • Wi-Fi 7: doesn’t work at all.
  • Wi-Fi 6: works, but several devices won’t connect—my Blink cameras, an iPad (3rd gen), and my TCL TV (though it’s usually on Ethernet).
  • WED (Wireless Ethernet Dispatch) is not enabled.
  • Speed: close to the router I see 700+ Mbps; about 10–15 m away it can drop to ~20 Mbps.
  • Even after moving the network printer within ~5 m, it still hiccups occasionally.

Wired & services

  • NVMe SSD installed; running four Podman containers with MacVLAN networking—zero issues.
  • Wired gigabit routing and throughput are solid.
  • Gaming: I stream PC games to my tv over LAN using Moonlight + Sunshine for family game nights - no latency issues at all.
  • DNS & PXE: running BIND9 as my main home DNS server (for external-dns) and using it to network-boot my k8s cluster—works flawlessly.

Disk & memory snapshot

# free (memory)
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:        4025012      565096      199680        2924     3260236     3369740
Swap:             0           0           0

# lsblk (block devices)
NAME        MODEL                 SIZE
mmcblk0                       29.8G
└─…
nvme0n1     Samsung SSD 990 EVO 1TB  931.5G
└─nvme0n1p3                915.5G

Overall: fine as a wired router, but Wi-Fi coverage and stability remain the weak link.

Looking ahead I’m on the hunt for hardware with proper Wi-Fi 7 and OpenWrt support—and at least 2 GB of RAM (harder to find than it sounds). The Banana Pi seemed the best option, but its Wi-Fi performance was a letdown.

What Wifi 6 card do you use?

I don’t know. Comes in bundle on Nov 2024. Anyhow I can find this out without disassembly the whole device?

This is what lspci shows besides SSD:

0000:00:00.0 PCI bridge [0604]: MEDIATEK Corp. Device [14c3:7988] (rev 01)
0000:01:00.0 Network controller [0280]: MEDIATEK Corp. Device [14c3:7990]
0001:00:00.0 PCI bridge [0604]: MEDIATEK Corp. Device [14c3:7988] (rev 01)
0001:01:00.0 Network controller [0280]: MEDIATEK Corp. Device [14c3:7991]
0002:00:00.0 PCI bridge [0604]: MEDIATEK Corp. Device [14c3:7988] (rev 01)

And just did an iperf3:

[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bitrate         Retr  Cwnd
[  5]   0.00-1.00   sec   114 MBytes   952 Mbits/sec    0   4.12 MBytes
[  5]   1.00-2.00   sec   122 MBytes  1.03 Gbits/sec    0   4.12 MBytes
[  5]   2.00-3.00   sec   117 MBytes   985 Mbits/sec    0   4.12 MBytes
[  5]   3.00-4.01   sec   116 MBytes   965 Mbits/sec    0   4.12 MBytes
[  5]   4.01-5.00   sec   111 MBytes   941 Mbits/sec    0   4.12 MBytes
[  5]   5.00-6.00   sec   118 MBytes   987 Mbits/sec   60   4.12 MBytes
[  5]   6.00-7.00   sec  98.9 MBytes   829 Mbits/sec    0   4.12 MBytes
[  5]   7.00-8.00   sec   107 MBytes   900 Mbits/sec    0   4.12 MBytes
[  5]   8.00-9.00   sec   114 MBytes   961 Mbits/sec    0   4.12 MBytes
[  5]   9.00-10.01  sec   111 MBytes   922 Mbits/sec    0   4.12 MBytes
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bitrate         Retr
[  5]   0.00-10.01  sec  1.10 GBytes   947 Mbits/sec   60             sender
[  5]   0.00-10.06  sec  1.10 GBytes   942 Mbits/sec                  receiver

Have never seen this big numbers before, but I’m 5m away right now, and in direct sight.

  1. Tried a few things I found here and other places. Nothing works. Two of the three radios only put out 6 and 7 dbm.
  2. Still waiting on a new OpenWRT 24.10.x version to fix it properly.
  3. Besides the radio troubles it’s crazy unstable and hot. By far the biggest waste of a good chunk of money in a long time. So still laying on my desk instead of running as main router. Would have been far better off putting the money in a proper wifi7 accesspoint and keeping my current router.

Thats awesome to hear. Hopefully I’ll have mine soon, they were apparently out of stock so it was a two week delay.

I hear that a-lot, that this thing runs hot. I either haven’t stressed it enough, which is very likely right now, or I did a decent job prepping. I swapped out all the thermal pads with higher quality ones and figured I’d spend the time waiting on my new WiFi cards working on the cooling. Had a little too much fun with it.

  • Added NVMe heatsinks directly below the WiFi card day one.

  • Heat sink from an old motherboards north bridge for the SFP cage. Oddly satisfying fit.

  • Then came the 3D printing. Custom designed top cover with three 40mm fans. The 12v Winsinn fans from Amazon actually move a decent amount of air, used a small buck converter to keep the fan noise down. Intentionally choked a majority of the airflow on the top, to force air to come in the side vents by the WiFi card.

  • For good measure I added some steel mesh to the bottom of the cover and ensured it comes in contact with the sides of the aluminum casing.

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Your top cover looks great - any chance to have it published for download anywhere?

Already replaced thermal pads immediately and added a heatsink on top of the sfp ports.

In the process of adding 2 fans in the cover and will power those from gpio.

Those nvme heatsinks are a great idea!

Sure thing, I just put it up on thingiverse in both stl and step

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I don’t know enough about the current capabilities of the gpio pins, but the header by the power input may be a better choice. The 4-pin header provides both 12v and 5v, thats what I powered my fans from.

I have 2 fans that can run on 5V or 3.3V.

Enough pins to choose from: