Banana Pi BPI-R3
Tomato64 now runs on the Banana Pi BPI-R3!
- Mediatek MT7986(Filogic 830) (Same as the GL-MT6000)
- Quad core ARM Cortex A53
- AX6000 4×4 Wifi (2.4G/5G)
- 2x 2.5G SFP ports
- 5x 1G ports
- 2G RAM
- 8G eMMC flash
- SD Card
- 1x M.2 Key M PCIe interface
- 1x M.2 Key B USB interface
- 1x USB3.0
This is now the 3rd arm64 Wifi router that Tomato64 supports. The BPI-R3 is more akin to the GL-MT6000 in formfactor, but has a few cool extra features. For one it has an M.2 M key PCIe slot for full length 2280 nvme ssds. I think having onboard storage capabilities for a router has a lot of possibilities. It also has 4 different boot methods, nor, nand, eMMC and SD Card. Tomato is still rather big so we only support running on eMMC and from SD Card. The BPI-R3 instead of diplexing/combining the 2.4GHz and 5GHZ into the same antennas instead has 4x dedicated antennas for 2.4GHZ, and 4x dedicated antennas for 5GHz. In theory this should give better performance, isolation and better gain. This device in place of 2x 2.5G RJ45 ethernet ports, instead gives you 2x 2.5G SFP Ports. You do have to mind that you buy compatible modules for this device.
Because of my previous efforts in porting the BPI-R3 Mini, porting the BPI-R3 went pretty smoothly. I do like the Banana Pi lineup of routers because give you easy console access. In particular the BPI-R3 is very brick proof because it’s very easy to flash an SD Card and be back in business very quickly.
To read the forum post announcement check out this link.
https://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php?threads/banana-pi-bpi-r3-tomato64-port.79323/
For installation Instructions check out this Wiki Page.
https://github.com/tomato64/tomato64/wiki/Banana-Pi-BPI%E2%80%90R3
