The latest member of the Banana Pi line of single-board computers is a tiny model designed for networking applications. The Banana Pi BPI-R3 Mini has two 2.5 GbE Ethernet ports and support for WiFi 6, but there’s no video output.
So you could use the board as a router, wireless repeater, gateway, or firewall, but it’s probably not your best choice for general-purpose computing.
Pricing and availability haven’t been announced yet, but details posted in the Banana Pi forum indicate that the upcoming “router board” features:
- MediaTek MT7986 (Filogic 830) processor
- 4 x ARM Cortex-A53 CPU cores @ 2 GHz
- 2GB DDR4 memory
- 8GB eMMC flash
- 1 x USB 2.0 Type-C port
- 2 x 2.5 GbE Ethernet ports
- MT7976C chip with support for WiFi 6
- M.2 B-Key socket
- M.2 M-Key socket
- DC power input
- UART pins for debugging
- Antenna connection points
- Nano SIM card slot
You’ll likely need to bring your own cellular modem to make use of that SIM card slot, but its inclusion adds a little versatility to this tiny computer.
The company has also posted a short video demonstrating OpenWrt booting on the board.
via CNX Software
If it’s intended as a router, there needs to be some performance metric for the function. Typically for routers, this is the number of 64-byte (minimum length TCP/IP) packets that can be routed per second. For example, the Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite 3 can route 1 million 64-byte pps.
Correction: The new board is the “Banana Pi BPI-R3 Mini”, the non-mini Banana Pi BPI-R3 is the previously existing larger version.
Thanks, I’ve updated the article to reflect that!