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

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  1. 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.

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  2. Correction: The new board is the “Banana Pi BPI-R3 Mini”, the non-mini Banana Pi BPI-R3 is the previously existing larger version.

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