Building a router with Banana Pi R1 — part 1

Introduction

Banana Pi R1 in a case and WiFi antennas

WiFi (also known as the IEEE 802.11 pro­to­col stack) has become triv­ial after the boom of the Inter­net in the ear­ly years of the 21st cen­tu­ry. Most res­i­den­tial Inter­net con­nec­tion offer­ings in the mar­ket has turned the WiFi router an essen­tial piece of hard­ward, main­ly due to the pletho­ra of devices with­out any form of phys­i­cal (cabled) con­nec­tion, like smart­phones, tablets, dig­i­tal music read­ers, etc.

There are dozens (if not hun­dreds) of dif­fer­ent devices, with dif­fer­ent fun­cional­i­ties and con­nec­tion speeds, but in essence, they all do the same. They allow simul­ta­ne­ous con­nec­tions of sev­er­al devices in you home or office to con­nect to the Inter­net via Eth­er­net cables or WiFi.

Banana Pi R1

A few months ago I dis­cov­ered the Banana Pi R1. This is a WiFi router unlike most.

Its hard­ware fea­tures make it a very pow­er­ful router, even capa­ble os play­ing mul­ti­me­dia files (HD movies, most­ly), main­ly due to its HDMI connectivity.

Main fea­tures:

Com­par­ing these fea­tures with a main­stream router of the same price range, we can clear­ly see the advan­tages. Below are the hard­ware fea­tures of the ASUS RT-AC66U:

The price tag is sim­i­lar but, as you can see, the Banana Pi R1 is more expand­able and also has a graph­ics proces­sor, HDMI out­put and SATA port, which makes for a ter­rif­ic media player.

In the sec­ond part, I’ll be talk­ing about the avail­able oper­at­ing sys­tems and how to install them.