K3CAN

I've been using a consumer router from from 2016 (with OpenWRT hacked onto it) all the way here in 2024, and felt that it might finally be time for an upgrade. I settled on a BananaPi R3 because it was a reasonable price and seemed like it would be a fun project.

Here's the bare board as received:

You can see most of the physical features in this photo, including a USB3 port, two SFP ports, 5 RJ45 ports, an m.2 slot for a cellular modem, and a 26-pin GPIO header. On the bottom, there's also a m.2 slot intended for nvme storage, as well as slots for a micro SD and a micro SIM.  The CPU is a quad-core ARM chip paired with 2gb of RAM, and there's a handful of flash chips, providing NAND, NOR and eMMC.   Quite a lot of options!

My plan is to install OpenWRT to the NAND storage. I suspect the nvme might be useful if I wanted to run a small file server or something, but that's not in the plan for now.

The first step I took in assembly was to apply some thermal pads to the chips and then attach a cooler and fan.

The thermal pads are "OwlTree" brand, but I don't have any specific preference to them, I just happen to already have them on-hand from a previous project. The CPU is a 0.5mm pad applied, and I applied 1.5mm pads to the remaining chips.

After applying  pads to all of the chips, I attached the cooler and plugged in the fan.

The next step was to install the board into the case. I went with the official BPI-R3 case. The quality is surprisingly nice and looks great once assembled. After installing the board I then installed the pigtails for the eight (yes, eight) antennas and applied some basic cable management.

Now, I can't finish putting the case together quite yet, since I'll need access to the UART pins to install Openwrt to the NAND flash. The  UART header can be seen on the right side of this photo, but there is no way to access it once the case is assembled.

But, that's enough for today. I'll post an update once I make some progress towards getting OpenWRT flashed.