OpenWrt One - celebrating 20 years of OpenWrt

[Bjørn Mork]

John Crispin <john at phrozen.org> writes:

> At the beginning we focused on the most powerful (and
> expensive) configurations possible but finally ended up with something
> rather simple and above all,feasible.

That's a very wise choice. And most of the compromises make sense to
me. Except the

> * Storage: M.2 2042 for NVMe SSD (PCIe gen 2 x1)

This seems like a strange priority for an OpenWrt device.  It's not
useful to most OpenWrt users or applications.  Having two different boot
devices is more than enough.

> * What will the M.2 slot be used for?
> - we will use M.2 with M-key for NVMe storage. There is a
>   work-in-progress patch to make PCIe work inside the U-Boot
>   bootloader. This will allow booting other Linux distributions such
>   as Debian and Alpine directly from NVMe

And you even make a point of it being more suitable for other Linux
distros. That should not be an OpenWrt priority.

> * Why is there no USB 3.x host port on the device?
> - the USB 3.x and PCIe buses are shared in the selected SoC silicon,
>   hence only a single High-Speed USB port is available

And here's the biggest problem with that choice.  USB3 would have
allowed storage expansion as well as more OpenWrt applicable use cases
like additional ethernet adapters or modems.  And with a limited
connector and board space cost compared to an m.2 slot.  The USB A
port is already there.

> * What is the purpose of the console USB-C port?
> - Holtek UART to USB bridge with CDC-ACM support on USB-C makes the
>   device ultra easy to communicate with. No extra hardware or drivers
>   will be required. Android for example has CDC-ACM support enabled by
>  default

This is nice. But how about making it a real advantage over the
traditional 4 pin header?  You could have used a UART bridge with some
additional GPIO pins, and connected them to useful SoC IOs.  Possibly
via some mux.  I'd love to see reset and bootsel controlled by the USB
UART bridge.

Ideally we would have a more advanced USB bridge with open source
firmware and more than one USB function.  But I guess that adds a lot of
complexity to the project. Reusing/abusing RS232 control signals is an
alternative.

Finally, I'd prefer a much more compact board than the BPi-R4 size.

Along with a well designed minimalistic case with sufficient passive
cooling and optional integrated antennas.  Thinking something along the
Flirc RPi4 cases, using the case itself as a cooler. With half the case
radio transparent and a choice between antenna pigtails and integrated
antennas.  I realize that such a case will be relatively expensive. But
without it all you have is yet another midrange dev board.  This is your
chance to make a device which shouts "OpenWrt!!!" whenever someone sees
it. Just like the original WRT did.  Not that that design was something
to brag about beauty wise :-)


Bjørn