As someone who knows very little about WiFi, I always thought it sucked that if you wanted to go from 802.11this to 802.11that, it always requires brand new hardware with a different WiFi chip that implemented the new standard. Is there a good reason that software-defined 802.11 doesn't exist and that every new standard requires a different radio+SoC?

I have one of these and love it, especially after I once bricked it during a manual software update and got to use the dip switch reset to reflash it using the ROM.

I wish it had more ethernet ports but I've managed to live with that. I'd be up for buying an OpenWrt Two as a backup or to replace this if it has even one more LAN jack.

I have similar board, from same producer - BananaPi BPI-R3 Mini.

Got cheaper version without case - designed simple box with cutouts and 3d printed it out.

I can say it works flawlessly. I'm very happy about it. Previously I was using openwrt on different consumer-grade routers and I always had some issues, even when selecting supported devices.

I became interested in OpenWrt when I noticed that the cloud portal for my ISP reported to me the names and types of devices that were associated to my home access point/router.

Suddenly I want to put every IPS device into dumb bridge mode, and run my own damn router.

Been using Openwrt for years, router and access points. Any new AP I buy has to has to be supported by Openwrt. I have probably bought 7 or 8 old AP's at yard sales over the years for $5/$10 and turned them into decent wifi access points back to an Openwrt router running vlans, bandwidth monitoring, QoS, tcpdump for ssh dump with wireshark.

Just excellent, some pretty smart people in the Openwrt forum as well if you have problems.

If you're remotely interested in this stuff you should go ahead and set all this up yourself on a debian or such. Great learning experience.

https://wrtnova.com/builder/ this builder is cool too!

I started down my “custom” home network journey with OpenWrt and some aftermarket hardware routers. Enjoyed my time using / playing with it.

After some time though, I eventually moved over to using OpenBSD directly. My small brain has a much better understanding of all the moving parts compared to that of OpenWrt :P

Flashed my TP-LINK router last week with openwrt bin file, to get wifi to ethernet bridge. Working awesome.

There are too many settings. Feels like Gimp (vs paintbrush). But once figured out, it works well.

How open are the wifi drivers? (it was an issue with Broadcom and WRT54G)