OpenWrt Celebrates 20th Anniversary with Launch of New Open Hardware Design for Router

Autor: OpenWrt

The OpenWrt project will celebrate its twentieth anniversary this year, and on that occasion John Crispin revived the old idea of ​​creating first own hardware design fully supported by upstream. It should be a router built on the popular Banana PI platform, which will be completely open. The only closed part should be the firmware of the network cards, but it runs in a separate processor.

The developers created several different designs and finally modified the most powerful and expensive variant to a simpler and more feasible design. The goal is to create an OpenWrt One/AP-24.XY platform that will have features that the developers believe every OpenWrt-enabled device should have: software indestructibility with multiple recovery options, a hassle-free system console, built-in battery-backed RTC, and more.

At the moment, the following parameters are calculated:

• SOC: MediaTek MT7981B
• Wi-Fi: MediaTek MT7976C (2×2 2.4 GHz + 3×3/2×2 + zero-wait DFS 5Ghz)
• DRAM: 1 GiB DDR4
• Flash: 128 MiB SPI NAND+ 4 MiB SPI NOR
• Ethernet: 2× RJ45 (2.5 GbE + 1 GbE)
• USB (Host): USB 2.0 (Type-A port)
• USB (device, console): Holtek HT42B534–2 UART to USB (USB-C port)
• Storage: M.2 2042 for NVMe SSD (PCIe gen 2 ×1)
• Buttons: 2× (reset + user-usable)
• Mechanical switch: 1× for boot chip selection (regular, backup)
• LED: 2x (PWM controlled), 2x ETH LED (GPIO controlled)
• External watchdog: EM Microelectronic EM6324 (GPIO controlled)
• RTC: NXP PCF8563TS (I2C) with battery (CR1220)
• Power supply: USB-PD-12V on USB-C port (optional 802.3at/afPoE via RT5040 module)
• Expansion slots: mikroBUS
• Certification: FCC/EC/RoHS compliance
• Box: sizes compatible with BPi-R4
• JTAG for main SOC: 10-pin 1.27mm (ARM JTAG/SWD)
• Antenna connectors: 3x MMCX for ease of use and durability
• Schematics: freely available under a free license
• Compliant with the GNU GPL
• The price is heading under $100

2024-01-10 07:37:05
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