OpenWRT is amazing. Other than the usual security stuff one of the most overlooked use cases was scheduling other devices. Router is always on and with eatherwake it can orchestrate turning on other networked devices. I also run rtl sdr to capture local weather reports.
OpenWRT is used as base for a surprising amount of edge devices.
OpenWrt One – Open Hardware Router
321–330 of 338 posts
Re: OpenWrt One – Open Hardware Router
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, there is a lot of spam on the internet. But pihole asks for a pi with 512gb ram. Add openwrt’s 100mb, now your ram budget for running something else (file server, pairdrop, irc, tailscale, etc) is <400mb. One nodejs app could use all of that.
I mean: On one hand, 400MB is still a ton of RAM to do useful work with -- and unused RAM is wasted RAM. On the other hand: How many non-routing tasks do you really expect or require a ~$100 home-router-device to perform? :)
I'm old, "Unused RAM is wasted RAM" goes against my philosophy. Back in my days, a professor said in class: you want your OS as light as possible, so the more free resources you have, the faster Quake will run (by the time, Quake was software rendered). Saving resources for a rainy day today is better than saying "umbrellas are too expensive" tomorrow.
Re: OpenWrt One – Open Hardware Router
#323> Note that recent (2025-10) batches of the OpenWrt One have an M.2 slot with a detached post at the 2230 position and the shipped product contains no way to attach the post. The implications of this are going over my head (and TFA should explain it better). I gather that 2230 is a form factor 22x30mm and there's also a 2280 M.2 SSD form factor. Is this just saying that there's a missing mounting post? So it wobbles?…
Sounds like you might need to screw your own mounting post in at the 30mm mark.
Re: OpenWrt One – Open Hardware Router
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
The planned specs are here, they say it will be made by GL.iNet: https://openwrt.org/voting/2025-02-12-openwrt-two Otherwise this router from GL.iNet has OpenWRT preinstalled, Wifi 7, 5x2.5G: http://www.gl-inet.com/en-gb/products/gl-be9300
Why do they always have to look like some unholy blend of a cybernetic spider and a Knight Rider? What happened to a plain unassuming looking piece of industrial hardware...
It's a pretty functional design if you accept that the extruded antennae are necessary. They're really small, like half the footprint of my old Asus 6 antenna beast, and the fixed antennae are so much less fiddly. Finally, fast and one-click adguard home, what's not to like.
Re: OpenWrt One – Open Hardware Router
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
The planned specs are here, they say it will be made by GL.iNet: https://openwrt.org/voting/2025-02-12-openwrt-two Otherwise this router from GL.iNet has OpenWRT preinstalled, Wifi 7, 5x2.5G: http://www.gl-inet.com/en-gb/products/gl-be9300
Why do they always have to look like some unholy blend of a cybernetic spider and a Knight Rider? What happened to a plain unassuming looking piece of industrial hardware...
Because otherwise the Punx don't recognize their Cyber.
Re: OpenWrt One – Open Hardware Router
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could be crazy, but don't all the external antennas allow for more flexibility with regard to directionality of signal? I have a U7 Lite and it is very directional compared to other routers I have used (spider style, trash can style, etc.)
The U7 Lite only does 2x2 MIMO. Compared to 4x4 MIMO in the U6 LR, the U7 Lite therefore does a much poorer job at beamforming (directing the energy of the signal towards the device). Personally, I find it better to have multiple low end access points (like the TP-Link Archer C80 which has 3x3 MIMO on 5 GHz) deployed to achieve excellent coverage in a house. Sadly, the U7 line is a bit too expensive for that. Plus, I…
I went from Unifi to Ruckus APs and never looked back.
You can find older generations on eBay very inexpensively for what they are, install Ruckus Unleashed firmware on them, and operate them completely locally.
They have the best beamforming antennas in the industry and their firmware is rock solid. I'm on some very old models (2.4ghz and 5ghz only) but they work fantastically well. I'll probably upgrade to some wifi 6 models soon.
But for my uses 500-600mbps rock solid throughout my house is plenty. Anything where I want max throughput/low latency/low jitter (mainly gaming) is hardwired. For wifi I care much more about complete and consistent coverage.
Re: OpenWrt One – Open Hardware Router
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't look at those; do they support running some controller thing in one of the APs to allow central management of all the nodes? Cisco's mobility express just runs on one of the APs and can fail over to another of the APs; it's a slick piece of software. And yes, it isn't open source, which is a real shame since cisco's killed it (as far as I can tell) and it probably represents an enormous and sophisticated inv…
I don't know if the one you're talking about is one of these, but in the many years I worked at Cisco they seemed to buy a company every few weeks. Many of them had decent products which Cisco then meticulously destroyed. Luckily there was always kit to preserve for future generations, which I dutifully stacked in my attic.
I'm overall not a fan of Cisco; quite the opposite. There are lots of companies ahead of Cisco in the "pretty not so cool" these days so my ire is not as strong as it was when I was a young idealist.
As far as I can tell, in this one case (with mobility express) it seems like Cisco accidentally did something overall (IMO) "good" for the world by making it possible for their kit to be reused by some part of the world where someone will get utility out of the still very nice equipment and somehow cisco won't see a dime from that "someone is using cisco equipment" event.
Mobility express isn't perfect, but considering the cost of the gear and the cost of the license, it is pretty darned good. I suspect some product manager at cisco got fired for accidentally making the world not quite as bad a place as it could be if cisco extracted license fees on all the 2802, 3802, and 4800 access points or otherwise sent them to the e-waste bin 4 years early.
Re: OpenWrt One – Open Hardware Router
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately you need to use the cisco software / firmware. The access points run linux but they're locked down like crazy with signed firmware blobs and such. That said, the cisco firmware for this specific generation of access points is actually free and trivial to get -- create yourself a cisco account and go to downloads and download the 3802 "mobility express" firmware. The last ME firmware came out in 2024 and…
I don't know why I've never tried just doing it the Cisco way. Thank you for the walk-through.
Cisco has trained a generation of home-lab would-be cisco engineers to dig through shady russian forums to download sketchball binaries. I think they even hide the checksums of their gated binaries, just to make sure you're never sure how sketchy their code might be.
But in the one specific case of mobility express, you can ... just download it. Unexpected but actually pretty cool.
You still have to figure out installing and configuring it, which is mildly tedious, and you'll probably need one of those cisco serial cables, but it is an exciting side-quest instead of a dirty forum crawl.
To bring it back to "openwrt" -- this nonsense by cisco, broadcom, HP, IBM, etc is why generation after generation the "enterprise" market is dying -- they're excluding 90% of the would-be engineers from the job market protecting their e-waste from secondary or later reuse, likely just on the off-chance they might make a tiny amount of money downstream. But I guess that's not a line-item that shows up in the quarterly reports (what's the value of "community goodwill" ?)
Re: OpenWrt One – Open Hardware Router
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://mono.si/
Does it have WiFi 7? If so, list the details please. Why choose this over the https://openelab.io/a/s/products/banana-pi-bpi-r4-pro-1 ?
Is there a version of the Banana Pi kit that comes with all of the dozen carefully positioned antennas desirable for a tri-band or quad-band wifi 7 setup?
Re: OpenWrt One – Open Hardware Router
#330If someone is interested in open hardware running openwrt, also check out Turris. https://www.turris.com/en/ I have been using them for years and I'm really happy. I recently bought the WiFi 6 upgrade kit for both of my turris. They "recently" released their latest version which is expensive but comes with WiFi 7 and 2.5 Gbps RJ45 and 10 Gbps SPF.
Are you certain this is running OpenWRT? As in, can I get a OpenWRT build and flash it to the router and have it work?
The Turis Omnia runs a derivative of OpenWrt. They provide a custom UI with an option to switch to LuCI. It's easy to flash it to upstream OpenWRT, which is what I do.