OpenWrt will celebrate its 20th anniversary in 2024. For this reason, the project team decided to celebrate by launching the first fully upstream supported hardware. This hardware is OpenWrtOne. As early as 2017 and 2018, OpenWrt had the idea to launch its own brand of routers. After all, the official upstream support can give users the best experience. At first, the project team planned to launch an all-round high-end OpenWrt router, but after discussion, the project team still believed that it would be better to launch an affordable version of the router.

Therefore, the target price of the upcoming OpenWrtOne router is less than 100 US dollars. Compared with various high-end routers provided by ASUS and others, the price is indeed much cheaper, but this price is not actually too affordable.

OpenWrtOne hardware specifications:

Chipset: MTKMT7981B

WiFi: MTK7976C(2x22.4GHz+3x3/2x2+zero-waitDFS5Ghz)

Memory: 1GBDDR4

Flash memory: 128MBSPINAND+4MBSPINOR

Network port: 2.5GbE+1GbE (after all, it is impossible to get a 10GbE electrical port at this price)

USB: USB-A+USB-C (chip problem does not support USB3.0)

Storage: M.22042NVMeSSD interface protocol is PCIe2.0x1

Hardware watchdog: EM6324 (GPIO)

Power supply: USB-PD-12V, supports PoE

Extension: mikroBUS

Price: Under $100

Although it is OpenWrt's own router, OpenWrt develops software after all, not hardware, so to solve problems related to hardware, sales, and finance, OpenWrt cooperates with Banana Pi. Banana Pi distributes equipment through established channels, and every time a device is sold, it will donate to the fund established by OpenWrt, and the money is used to pay for hosting fees or the OpenWrt Summit.

Since the manufacturer and seller are both Banana Pie (note: OpenWrt does not clearly state that the router is also manufactured by Banana Pie, but it is highly likely), then domestic users can definitely buy it. After all, Banana Pie is a company in Dongguan, Guangdong.

Note: If domestic companies produce and sell to domestic users, there may be distinctions such as the National Bank version. If users really want to buy, they can pay attention to it. I hope that the idea of ​​​​Blue Dot Network is redundant.

A router that cannot be brushed to death:

Why does OpenWrtOne have two different flash chips? Because the goal of the project team is to make the router immortal, the NAND flash memory can save U-Boot and Linux images and is also started by default.

The 4MB NOR will be write-protected by default (but can be removed by disassembling the jumper), and saves the recovery bootloader and other important data. There is a hardware button on the router to switch between the two flash memories, so the final effect is that it cannot be killed by flashing, and it can be restored anyway by flashing it casually.

What can the M.2 slot be used for:

This reserved slot can be used to install an SSD, and later the Linux distribution can be started directly from the SSD, which means that the router can also be transformed into a Linux server.