Banana Pi BPI-R3 Mini – A low-profile 2.5GbE router board powered by MediaTek Filogic 830 SoC

Banana Pi BPI-R3 Mini router board is powered by MediaTek MT7986 (Filogic 830) quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor with 2GB DDR4, an 8GB eMMC flash, two low-profile 2.5GbE ports, and WiFi 6 support.

The BPI-R3 Mini is based on many of the same chips as found on the Banana Pi BPI-R3 board, but with a much more compact design that makes it suitable as a  2.5GbE firewall, wireless router or repeater, home security gateway, home automation gateway, NAS device, and more.

Banana Pi BPI-R3 Mini SBC

Banana Pi BPI-R3 Mini specifications:

  • SoC – MediaTek MT7986A (Filogic 830) quad-core Arm Cortex A53 processor with hardware acceleration engines for Wi-Fi offloading and networking
  • System Memory – 2GB DDR4 RAM
  • Storage – 8GB eMMC flash, NAND flash, support for (a short) M.2 NVMe SSD
  • Networking
    • 2x 2.5GbE RJ45 ports via Airoha controllers
    • WiFi 6 via MediaTek MT7976C (2.4GHz: 574Mbps + 5GHz: 2402Mbps).
    • 4x u.FL antenna connectors
  • USB – 1x USB 2.0 Type-A port
  • Expansion
    • M.2 Key-B socket
    • M.2 Key-M socket (2-lane PCIe 2.0)
  • Debugging – 3-pin Debug UART header for serial console
  • Misc – 6x LEDs, fan header, NAND/eMMC boot switch
  • Power Supply – Via USB-C PD port
  • Dimensions and Weight – TBD

MediaTek Filogic 830 2.5GbE router board

The new board should be software compatible with the larger BPI-R3 router board with Banana Pi providing OpenWrt 21.02, Ubuntu 22.04, and Debian 10/11 images. Banana Pi is famous for providing incorrect specifications and subpart OS images, so proper software support would likely have to come from the community, and the BPI-R3 Mini hardware may warrant that.

The only information we have comes from a forum post, and the BPI-R3 does not seem to be available right now. For reference, the Banana Pi BPI-R3 board sells for around $100 shipped on Aliexpress, and I’d expect the Banana Pi BPI-R3 Mini router to be significantly cheaper, maybe around $70 to $80, which would make it a potential competitor to Rockchip-powered NanoPi router boards, provided software support is there.

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