OpenWrt developers have started the process to develop the “OpenWrt One/AP-24.XY” router board based on MediaTek MT7981B (Filogic 820) SoC and MediaTek MT7976C dual-band WiFi 6 chipset, and designed in collaboration with Banana Pi that will also handle manufacturing and distribution of the router board.
As of the OpenWrt 23.05 release, close to 1,800 routers and other devices are officially supported by the lightweight embedded Linux operating system, and many more claim to be running OpenWrt through a fork of the OS. But none of those are made by OpenWrt developers who have now decided to create their own router board in collaboration with Banana Pi since they’ve done such boards including the BPI-R4 WiFi 7 router SBC.
4 MB SPI NOR flash for write-protected (by default) recovery bootloader (reflashing can be enabled with a jumper)
Two types of flash devices are used to make the board almost unbrickable
M.2 2042 socket for NVMe SSD (PCIe gen 2 x1) – Note: work-in-progress patch to make PCIe work inside the U-Boot bootloader to allow booting Linux distributions such as Debian and Alpine from the SSD.
First I was very confused about the concept! I have still mixed feelings!
But it is admirable, if you create something which you can use to go your own way. I can not say something against it!
The debug over USB-C and MMCX antenna connection I miss in BPI-R4.
If I’m not wrong (please tell me if I’m) this makes it possible to have the board in a closed case and you can make the debugging at the same time! Without doubt, this concept will find many friends!
And may be some people will look at it and say: This we will introduce in the BPI-R5?
Please do it, I beg you!
