Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 392 Comments on Giveaway Week 2025 – Banana Pi BPI-R4 Lite

Giveaway Week 2025 – Banana Pi BPI-R4 Lite

The third prize of CNX Software Giveaway Week 2025 is the Banana Pi BPI-R4 Lite router board, which will be shipped directly to a randomly selected winner by the company.

It’s powered by a MediaTek Filogic 850 (MT7987AV) quad-core Cortex-A53 network processor, coupled with 2GB DDR4 and 8GB eMMC flash, and equipped with four gigabit Ethernet ports, a 2.5GbE RJ45 WAN port, and a 2.5GbE SFP cage.

Mediatek Filogic 850 2.5GbE WiFi 7 5G router board

It can also be extended with WiFi 7 and 5G cellular modules thanks to two mini PCIe sockets and an M.2 Key-B slot with USB 3.0 interface. The board also features a 16-pin MikroBus GPIO header with UART, I2C, SPI, PWM, and other signals to connect one of the over 1000 Mikroe Click modules available. As its name implies, the BPI-R4 Lite is a cost-down version of the Banana Pi BPI-R4 introduced a few years ago.

The documentation has improved since the last time (August 2025) I covered the board, and now the source code for the OpenWrt 24.04, although the image is not yet available on the OpenWrt website like it is for the BPI-R4. It’s probably scheduled for the next OpenWrt release, and for now, you’d have to download it from the documentation website.

Banana Pi BPI-R4 Lite router board Banana Pi BPI-R4 Lite bottom 3x nanoSIM slots

To enter the draw, simply leave a comment with your country and whatever else you’d like to say (no links in the body of the comment). If the country is missing, I’ll consider the entry void. Other rules are as follows:

  • Only one entry per contest. I will filter out entries with the same IP and/or email address.
  • Contests are open for 48 hours starting at 10 am (Bangkok time) every day.
  • Comments will be closed after 48 hours. If comments are open, the contest is still going on.
  • Winners will be selected with random.org, and announced in the comments section of each giveaway.
  • I’ll contact the winner by email, and I’ll expect an answer within 24 hours, or I’ll pick another winner. Note that I may not be able to contact people who log in with Facebook, Twitter, or Google, so it’s better to use an email address to enter the draw.
  • Shipping
    • Banana Pi will handle shipping, so the winner does not have anything to pay, except for potential customs duties.
    • The giveaway is global and open to all, except for readers based in Thailand, since we are offering a second Banana Pi BPI-R4 Lite board on CNX Software Thailand, and you should apply there if you’d like to have the kit shipped to Thailand.
  • I’ll make sure we have 7 different winners, so if you have already won a device during this giveaway week, I’ll draw another person.

Good luck to all!

If you don’t end up winning this time around, the Banana Pi BPI-R4 board can be purchased for $73.79 on AliExpress plus shipping (and taxes) or about $90 and up on Amazon.

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392 Replies to “Giveaway Week 2025 – Banana Pi BPI-R4 Lite”

    1. India
      Im a enthusiast who loves working with projects using raspberry Pi and Arduinos

  10. India

    I’m in the process of upgrading my modest infrastructure at home and I’d love to have a better router/switch/AP that I can add to my setup.

  18. USA
    Would be a worthy port for Tomato64. I’ve already ported the bpi-r3 and bpi-r3 mini.
    tomato64.org

  24. Bulgaria. TBF this is one of the boards with best price to performance when it comes to networking

  27. Czech republic
    I’m looking for new router board for OpenWRT with multiple ports and this would be nice.

  57. Sweden. Where I’d add it to the list supported boards in our little Infix OS 🙂 We just added support for the BPi-R3, which is still an awesome little board, so this would be a fantastic addition to that.

  118. Nice thing to experimenet with.
    And 3d print ready stl’s are available on several web sites.

    Belgium calling.

  148. Brazil!
    I would love to have that router board, I really want to run openWRT on it.

  159. I’ve been meaning to setup a home router witn something like this. It’d be great to learn how.
    USA

  206. Country: USA
    I have the BPI-R3 mini and Nanopi R5C, i’d love to get a full size developer router, these tiny ones don’t have enough ports.

  212. Germany,
    would be a great reason to upgrade my fiberONE internet connection to 2.5G.

  217. There is not yet official OpenWrt firmware for this device. What you’ve linked to is a SinoVoip fork of OpenWrt. Based on their prevous forks it likely won’t conform to OpenWrt standards.

  300. USA I am looking for a new arm64 board to replace my aging home router. This should do it!

  318. United Kingdom

    I’ve honestly never looked into a DIY router setup so this would be a fantastic opportunity to give this a try.

  337. India
    Im a enthusiast who loves working with projects using raspberry Pi and Arduinos

  357. From Russia with love

    Your CDN has geo-blocking so my IP address is VPN-service address..

  359. Germany, Berlin-Wedding — basically the Bronx with better kebab and worse cable management. I built my entire 19-inch rack myself: soldering, 3D-printing, swearing, re-wiring, more swearing… My homelab looks like a tiny ISP that accidentally spawned in an apartment.

    Only problem: my fiber line is bored. My current router handles traffic like a sleepy pigeon.

    The BPI-R4 Lite would finally let me run this fiber at full speed: MT7988, 2.5GbE, SFP+, OpenWrt — exactly the upgrade that turns “Wedding latency” into “why is this so fast?”

    If I win it, I’ll benchmark the hell out of it, document everything, and 3D-print the board a throne so majestic it might demand DNS sacrifices.

    Promise: this thing will be working harder than anyone else in Wedding.

  365. Hello from India. Looking forward to receive this SBC For building next generation router firewall UTM device with available opensource tools.
    Thank you for opportunity.

  375. Poland. I love bananas, oranges and raspberries:) looking to replace my orange R1 lts (2*Eth) and 5-ports switch with a board that has more eth ports so I can replace 2 devices with one and hopefully stop running board restart from Cron every day 🙂

  381. Argentina

    As a home lab and self hosting enthusiast I would love to have one of these to play with and learn.

  386. United States of America
    I absolutely love banana pi cards, and I’m thrilled to have participated in that draw. I reside in the United States.

Comments are closed.

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