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Comment by steve19 | Hacker News Reader

The price to performance is crazy. If this had an extra ethernet port it would be the go-to router.

What is really lacks is a easy power supply option. No barrel jack and it needs up to 20w so more than regular usb can supply. The breakout board, which I assume as a barrel jack, is not for sale on amazon yet.

I don't think antennas are included, and I don't know if they are absolutely required.

Edit: I don't see any sata or pci interfaces which is disappointing. Also the power breakout board has screw terminals not a barrel jack.

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Ordered four of these last week and planning on running them as a K8s cluster. You are correct about the power interface not being ideal. My current plan is to hook my cluster up to an old computer power supply. For those who are curious these things can draw around 4A at 5V.

Wouldn't it be cheaper in the long run to run it from one PSU's 12v line and buy two (or four) 12/5v step down converters? 10A versions aren't even that expensive and the loss of running the PSU on only 20W will be huge (below 50% efficiency for sure).

Meanwell makes a relatively inexpensive, but nice, 5V 16A power supply that could run all four. $22 plus shipping. https://www.trcelectronics.com/View/Mean-Well/RS-100-5.shtml

It's an attractive offer. The Pine64 RockPro64 (RK3399 based) may offer even more bang for the buck if you're ok with spending $60.

Keep in mind that all the Pine64 hardware has a 3 month warranty [1] that requires shipping the faulty device back. This made me very hesitant to buy any of their stuff.

[1] https://www.pine64.org/?page_id=443

Not sure if this applies as the country it's purchased from or purchased in. I thought if they take a payment from a european and ship to europe then this law applies https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...

"All single board and accessories sold on the Pine Microsystems Inc. (PINE64) store are entitled to a 30 days Limited Warranty against defects in materials and workmanship."

I searched the linked page for "90" (days) and "3" (months) with no results, other than the "30 days" mentioned above. Where do you see 90-day warranty?

Yeah these boards are a pain to get certain apps working, for example retro games. GPU support also may not exist depending on the board.

Yep. Their software support is terrible too.

There's also the new-ish Odroid-N2 which offers similar (supposedly better) performance for a similar $ premium. It's based on an Amlogic S922X rather than Rockchip.

Less than half the price of an Asus Tinker board. Similar specs. 2 GB RAM isn't much though. If you want to run something like Splunk it won't work. My GPD Pocket 2 has 8 GB RAM. What kind of antennas are you referring to? Raspberry Pi with WLAN doesn't have any either. As for ethernet port you could probably use one via USB.

Anything wireless will require an antenna. The Raspberry Pi has an antenna that's integrated in the PCB. It's rather interesting really.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/pi-zero-w-wireless-antenna...

The Atomic Pi Amazon page spec list says antennas not included. That could well mean external antennas are not included (I can see there are connections for them) but there might be PCB antennas (copper tracks on the board itself that act as an antenna, like on a rpi or ESP8266).

Does a router need that much compute? I've just moved and the walls here attenuate wifi signals dramatically. Was thinking about building my own router and bumping up the signal power. That or some sort of repeater.

Routing gigabit with a stateful firewall does require a fair bit of computing power. But that is not going to solve your wifi signal problem. Use a mesh wifi setup to solve that one.

Thanks mate, been weighing up the options. Was not prepared for how bad it can be with thick rebar concrete walls. Only a few meters away from router and yet terrible signal. Far outside through a glass door has perfect signal. Ethernet over power and a mesh of AP's seems to be the best way.

You might consider checking out r/homelab if you're considering something big- the community is really large and supportive.

It depends on the functionality. A VPN router (although it's likely not your case) has a ceiling of 2 MBit/s on an RPi 3b (with a standard, single-threaded, OpenVPN configuration), which is relatively little.

This can't be right.

Granted, I've not been running OpenVPN lately, but with WireGuard I'm saturating the internal USB-ethernet adapter of the pi long before I'm running out of CPU power.

You're correct. I confused MBit with MByte - the correct number is 20 MBit/s.

Important correction: 20 MBit/s, not 2.

No, routers do not require much CPU power. Typical consumer routers often have really limited CPUs. The biggest issue is getting enough bandwidth out of the Ethernet ports. For example, a Pi 3B+ can only handle 200Mbit or so. Whether that is enough for you will depend upon your WAN speed.

Having said that, I'm less sure about your use case. You might could load OpenWRT on it and set it up to relay a wireless signal, but I doubt the performance would be great.

I'm not sure why you would need anywhere near this level of CPU for a "go-to" router. Many of the ARM-based systems with gigabit and USB3 are perfectly suitable as routers.

Because you maybe want something like pfsense to run with some filter rules, or you may want a long term VPN connection, which even with AES-NI Instructions still requires substantial CPU power for high speed connections.

VPN is a good point. I don't think that I could get anywhere near 100Mbit with my Pi on OpenVPN, though in practice it is enough for what I need it for (access to home automation and maybe a couple of cameras).

Many routers are hardware accelerated. So they don't need as much cpu

I guess that is possible, but I think it is just as likely that people just overestimate the requirement. My Pi is practically idling while pushing ~100Mbit between the builtin Ethernet and an external dongle. Routing really doesn't take as much CPU as people think, even with a few rules for things like bandwidth monitoring on a per IP basis.

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