Celebrating 20 years of OpenWrt with Hardware Design
canopic jug writes:
The OpenWRT project is turning 20 years old this year. During that time they have adapted to existing hardware products. Now the team has the idea to produce their own, fully supported hardware to run their software on:
It is not [a] new [idea]. We first spoke about this during the OpenWrt Summits in2017 and also 2018. It became clear start of December 2023 whiletinkering with Banana Pi style devices that they are already prettyclose to what we wanted to achieve in '17/'18. Banana PIs have grown inpopularity within the community. They boot using a self compiled TrustedFirmware-A (TF-A)and upstream U-Boot (thx MTK/Daniel) and some of theboards are already fully supported by the upstream Linux kernel. Theonly nonopen sourcecomponents are the 2.5 GbE PHYandWi-Fi firmwareblobsrunning on separate cores that areindependent of the main SoCrunning Linuxand the DRAM calibration routines which are executed earlyduring boot.
I contacted three project members (pepe2k, dangole, nbd) on December 6thto outline the overall idea. We went over several design proposals, Atthe beginning we focused on the most powerful (and expensive)configurations possible but finally ended up with something rathersimple and above all,feasible. We would like to propose the following asour "first" community driven HW platform called "OpenWrt One/AP-24.XY".
Together with pepe2k (thx a lot) I discussed this for many hours and weworked out the following project proposal. Instead of going insane withspecifications, we decided to include some nice features we believe allOpenWrt supported platforms should have (e.g. being almostunbrickablewith multiple recovery options, hassle-free system consoleaccess, on-board RTC with battery backup etc.).
This is our first design, so let's KiSS!
The preliminary hardware specifications are included in the message and it will contain a pair of flash chips for redundancy with the aim to make the router harder to accidentally brick during an update.
Previously:
(2021) The Accident which Made the WRT54G Legendarily Popular
(2018) Reunited with LEDE, OpenWrt Releases Stable 18.06 Version
(2015) OpenWrt Gets Update in Face of FCC's Anti-Flashing Push
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