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

[Jim Thompson]

> On Oct 22, 2015, at 12:57 PM, John Nielsen <lists at jnielsen.net> wrote:
> 
> 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)

I openly question your need or the desirability for 3 802.11 adapters.  It can be made to work, but you’re going to have some intermod.

>  - 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.

you can probably get APU in low-volume, but quantity is very constrained these days (it’s been true all year).

We do have the RCC-VE and RCC-DFF units available.

http://store.netgate.com/Desktop-Systems-C83.aspx

Jim