BananaPi

After being subjected to numerous mean glares from the wife and accusations of "breaking the internet", I think I've got it all configured now...

Ironically, the more "exotic" configuration, like the multiple VPN and VLAN interfaces were pretty simple to set up and worked without much fuss. The part that had me pulling my hair and banging my head against the desk was just trying to get the wifi working on 2.4GHz and 5GHz at the same time... Something wireless routers have been doing flawlessly for over a decade. After enough troubleshooting, googling, and experimenting, though, I had a working router.

Part 1 is here.

Now that the router is assembled, the next step is to decide where to flash the firmware. As I mentioned in the last post, this device offers a handful of options. Firmware can be flashed to the NOR, NAND, eMMC, or simply run from the SD card. From what I've read, it's not possible to boot from an m.2 card, though. That option is only for mass storage.

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!