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

[John Nielsen]

On Oct 22, 2015, at 12:19 PM, Jim Thompson <jim at netgate.com> wrote:

>> 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.

I don’t mind being questioned. :) I haven’t yet had to worry much about intermod; can you educate me? One or two of the radios would be in the 5GHz band at any given time. One scenario (out of several) where I envisioned having 3 radios is taking a wireless uplink (STA in either 2.4 or 5 GHz band) and repeating it (HOSTAP) on both 2.4 and 5 GHz. Totally crazy?

>> - 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).

Good to know.

> We do have the RCC-VE and RCC-DFF units available.
> 
> http://store.netgate.com/Desktop-Systems-C83.aspx

Thanks for the link!