looking for suggestions for a small router/appliance board/SoC

[John Nielsen]

Hi-

I’m working on a proof-of-concept for a kind of networking swiss army knife. Can anyone suggest a board that meets the following requirements? CPU arch doesn’t matter as long as it will run FreeBSD (Atom, ARM, MIPS, etc).

  - Small form factor (SoC, probably)
  - Can support at least 2 802.11a/b/g/n adapters, prefer 3 (any combination of chip-integrated and mini PCI-e slots. Prefer to avoid USB if possible)
  - Has or supports at least 2 1GbE ports. Prefer 3-5 ports with switching functionality
  - Storage not super constrained. Built-in storage (if any) can be small (which I’m arbitrarily defining as less than 128MB) if there is also an SD card slot or similar. USB storage will do in a pinch.
  - Has at least 2 free USB ports after meeting previous requirements
  - Serial port or header (or GPIO pins that can be used as one? Not too familiar with that)
  - Low power consumption (within reason taking the above into account)
  - Low cost (again, within reason)

I may just start with a PC Engines apu1d, but if there are boards that are smaller, cheaper, have lower power requirements and/or have integrated wifi or switch capabilities I’d like to look in to them as well.

I know that might be asking a lot, so I’m also open to any suggestions that are most of the way there. Thanks!

JN