UPDATE3: I am not affiliate in anyway with GlobalScaleTrchnologies, Marvell, or any competitors company.
My ideas are only personal and try to stay as neutral as possible, with technical experiences and knowledge sharing in mind...
Mochabin powered by Sartura. As a vital software partner behind the ESPRESSObin, Sartura will provide critical deliveries to strengthen the Mochabin software ecosystem. The Mochabin platform will leverage mainline Linux, OpenWRT, and Replica.one support out of the box.
Thanks to Sartura, the MochaBin will be full mainline !
Robert Marko from Sartura already PR the support in Mainline Linux and also (already merged) into OpenWrt :
At first glance it looks pretty sexy to a networking nerd like me. Seems to be prices between $159 and $225 depending on options like a 2x2 wiFi6 etc. Personally I don't need 10Gb ports but everything else looks interesting on the surface. Does anyone think it could do SQM @ 1Gb+ speeds and handle wifi6 and media server duties for a typical home all at the same time though? How about an extra step of adding a 250MBit wire-guard connection for security would it be too much for that cpu? I wish they would show it in a finished case with a few high gain antennas sticking out for good measure but thats just my aesthetic side talking.
I looked up their older previous model expressobin that was started in 2017 discontinued in 2020 and it is indeed supported here on OpenWRT so that makes me happy. That and they appear to be still actively supporting the older expressobin. That makes me feel relieved that this is NOT some fly by night outfit. https://openwrt.org/toh/hwdata/globalscale/globalscale_espressobin_v5_0_1
I think depending on what you guys say to my questions I am really tempted to fund this. But I don't do anything half cocked. I need days to do proper research on the company and people behind it before I would give them money. Thats just how I roll. LoL the bad part is that I dont even need one! I am stuck on a 50mbit internet connection and could use any old junky off the shelf all-in-one for that! I just have networking hobby and like elegant things and have been passively keeping an eye out for a compact all-in-one device like this.
They also have been mainlined in u-Boot bootloader, Linux kernel, and OpenWrt, as other main GNU/Linux distributions.
This was already the case of their past products like SheevaPlug, GuruPlug, and others...
A little out of topic from the MochaBin.
More powerfull.
Same CPU performance as the RPi 4.
With a mainline it may be a good board.
Hope so, I have crowdfunded one of the Early Bird !
EDIT :
You may also find criticism about their devices, but it is more a problem from Marvell SOC Support !
EDIT(2) :
About performances, WireGuard and others, I actually use EspressoBinv7 as router with permanent WireGuard tunnel.
I have two ULTRA in 24x24 for my dockerized : LogitechMediaServer and NginxProxyManager+NextCloud.
NextCloud is a little slow, because of the CPU, will be better on the MochaBin !
Advice
EDIT (3) :
Okay, I have to admit that I am a big fan of these boards from the beginning...
As far I read the schematics, this board only has a single mini-PCIe slot with a PCIe x1 lane (the other two are mSATA-only and USB-only), allowing to connect only a single WLAN card (so you'd have to decide for either 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz, let alone 6 GHz). Making this an interesting and capable device for wired routing, but not really an option for covering wireless capabilities.
Not only that, but USB 2.0 only according to the block schematics. This is a bit disappointing for anyone looking for a 5G-router capable of moving more than 1 Gbps between an ethernet port and the cellular network. This is obviousl not the board for that...
I can understand that we have to accept a few compromises. But there is a USB 3 hub here, serving two USB A connectors. IMHO, that's a pretty stupid priority. They could have added USB 3 to the m.2 slot for free. If the number of hub ports is this limited (I haven't checked), then it would still be better to remove one of the external A connectors. You can always add an external hub if you need more ports. There is no way to fix the m.2 slot. It's forever locked to a bandwidth you easily can move with much cheaper hardware.
Good thing is that that WLAN card is an optional extra, I would just get a decent ath10k/ath11k card instead.
That thing is not supported by upstream in any manner, its just the NXP SDK that supports it and good luck getting that working on newer kernels.
Hi bmork and erdoukki, thanks for bringing this to our attention. I agree we should be pulling the USB3.0 interface from our hub chip to the M.2 interface reserved for 5G. the hub chip supports it and I think this was an oversight from the previous 7k design which was just to support LTE radios. well implement in the next revision and for all of the board backers of the campaign. you can see the change has been made on the campaign now.
