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 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
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.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
