When Banana Pi started selling the low-cost Banana Pi BPI-WiFi 6 router board with the Triductor TR6560 dual-core SoC and TR5220 WiFi 6 chipset, I thought that to make this more effective, perhaps an enclosure and said that a complete system with an antenna must be provided. The Popular.
It took a while, about 9 months to be exact, but the Banana Pi BPI-WiFi 6 router is now available with a plastic housing, 4 external antennas, an Ethernet cable, and a power supply. Ta. $30.90 plus Aliexpress shipping.
Banana Pi BPI-WiFi 6 router specifications:
- SoC – Triductor TR6560 dual-core Arm Cortex-A9 processor @ 1.2 GHz with LSW (line card switching) and hardware NAT up to 5 Gbps
- WiFi Chipset – Triductor TR5220 WiFi 6 Chipset
- System memory – 512 MB DDR3
- Storage – 128MB SPI NAND Flash
- networking
- 1 Gigabit Ethernet WAN port with optional PoE support
- 3x Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports
- 2.4 GHz WiFi 6 (802.11ax) 2×2 MIMO up to 573.5 Mbps
- 5 GHz WiFi 6 (802.11ax) 2×2 MIMO up to 2401.9 Mbps
- 4x external antennas
- WiFi supports AP and STA modules, WPA, WPA2, WPA3 security
- Debug – 6-pin debug UART header
- Others – Power button, Reset button, WPS button, 9x LED
- Power supply – 12V DC via power barrel jack
- Dimensions – SBC: 137 x 107 mm; Router: TBA
Although the hardware is almost the same, the company decided to remove one of the LAN ports, so the Banana Pi BPI-WiFi 6 router has three LAN ports instead of four. The router is running a fork of OpenWrt on Linux 5.10, released the OpenWrt source code about six months ago, and updated it to the latest “RC8 SDK” two months ago. This must be the internal version of the Triductor SoC. The code and instructions for building on an Ubuntu 22.04 machine can be found on GitHub. The Wiki has some details about the hardware and binary images.
You can also see the issue in a single thread asking for upstream support. Unless I missed it, I haven’t seen any code for the Triductor SoC in mainline, so that’s unlikely to happen. The second issue deals with the router’s limitation of not supporting WDS mode and monitor mode.
Excluding software support, $30 for the WiFi 6 AX3000 router is a great deal, but you can get it even cheaper, like the Xiaomi Router AX1500, which sells for $25 at half the maximum link speed.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software as a part-time job in 2010, then quit his job as a software engineering manager and began writing daily news and reviews full-time in late 2011.
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