Seeed Studio has introduced a new router board featuring two Gigabit Ethernet ports, HDMI and USB ports, a microSD card reader, a 40 pin GPIO header, and a tiny OLED display.
The Raspberry Pi Router Board for CM4 module isn’t a standalone device though. As the name suggests, it’s designed to use a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 as its brains, which lets you select a model with as much (or as little) memory and storage as you’d like. The board should be available for $55 soon soon from Seeed Studio and Mouser Electronics, but it already appears to be available from Amazon for $40.
The board measures 146 x 80mm (5.7″ x 3.1″) and features a connector for a Raspberry Pi CM4, as well as full-sized ports and a GPIO header that allows the board to work with standard Raspberry Pi HAT add-ons, which allows you to add functionality like Power over Ethernet.
The Ethernet controller features an RTL811E chip. The display is a 0.91 inch OLED screen that can be used for status information or other functions. And there’s a USB Type-C port for power, a 5V DC fan interface, and two USB 2.0 Type-A ports.
It’s compatible with open source software including Raspberry Pi OS and Ubuntu Server, as well as OpenWrt.
Raspberry Pi’s Compute Module 4 is sold separately, and features a Broadcom BCM2711 processor, which is a 1.5 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A72 processor. The CM4 is available with 1GB, 2GB, 4GB or 8GB of RAM and three storage options: 16GB or 32GB of eMMC flash storage or a “Lite” model with no built-in storage at all.
Update: As noted by Jeff Geerling and CNX Software, the board made by a company called 52pi and you can find more information at the company’s wiki.Â
via NotebookCheck
LAN ports much? A proper router would have proper ethernet, consisting of at least one WAN port and 4 LAN ports. The RPi4CM could handle such with ease. Whatever this is, it isn’t a router..
Is the performance much better than using a USB3 gigabit adapter? Adapters are $15 and you don’t need a RPi CM4 (just a “normal” one). Benchmarks needed.