I mistakenly ordered a Banana Pi 4. Not sure what happened there. I just have bot the case, power supply, and a board, which is now assembled. I have not not got a wifi card - No idea where to get this from, yet.
My only method of access is using the SDcard slot. I have got a 4 Gb SDcard.
I looked at this link, but cannot work out which image I need. I would like to boot of something and install an image locally on the internal eMMC ( I think it has one to install onto because there are some jumped on the back of the BananaPi4 box to select whether to boot off the eMMC or an SDcard)
The documentation on openwrt.org refers to a sysupgrade image, but the link below refers to a SDcard image for the first time boot.
and then boot off it. Is this suitable for macos as well?
I see that mine has got 8Gb internal disc, and that I will have to "boot from the NAND" and then flash something to an "eMMC".
I think it will be less confusing to stick with the 4Gb disc space. I do not know the difference between the NAND and eMMC. I thought that these were the same thing. I do not think I will need 8Gb of disc for OpenWrt.
This won't work on Macos. It was too good to be true.
zcat needs a compressed file the old fashioned way. The Openwrt images are compressed with Gzip.
# ls -l openwrt-24.10.1-mediatek-filogic-bananapi_bpi-r4-sdcard.img.gz
-rw-r--r--@ 1 sophie staff 33351582 Apr 14 22:10 openwrt-24.10.1-mediatek-filogic-bananapi_bpi-r4-sdcard.img.gz
#
# zcat openwrt-24.10.1-mediatek-filogic-bananapi_bpi-r4-sdcard.img.gz | dd of=/dev/rdisk2 bs=1M status=progress
zcat: can't stat: openwrt-24.10.1-mediatek-filogic-bananapi_bpi-r4-sdcard.img.gz (openwrt-24.10.1-mediatek-filogic-bananapi_bpi-r4-sdcard.img.gz.Z): No such file or directory
dd: /dev/rdisk2: Resource busy
We need to gzip -d the .gz file, and then flash. And yes, diskutil unmount the disc.
# diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2
Unmount of all volumes on disk2 was successful
#
# dd if=openwrt-24.10.1-mediatek-filogic-bananapi_bpi-r4-sdcard.img of=/dev/rdisk2 bs=1M
dd: /dev/rdisk2: Invalid argument
80+1 records in
80+0 records out
83886080 bytes transferred in 7.863885 secs (10667257 bytes/sec)
#
Usually the image won't mount in Macos, but we can show it was successful by plugging the SDcard back into the computer, and running a diskutil list :
I have just realised that there is a lot more to getting the B pi running than I had expected. After putting it all together, I just read that I have to change a jumper on the bottom - to do this I have to disassemble. Then I have to try and boot, and then if it does not boot, then I have to disassemble and change the jumper and so on. It has not even got wifi on it so I could buy the wifi7 module But it turns out others reported on this forum that the wifi chip for this BP4 is too poor to get the signal around a house. * Significant issue with its Wi-Fi emission power
Quote " In summary, if you need a router with good coverage and signal penetration, especially in multi-story homes or with concrete walls, I do not recommend the Banana Pi R4. The power limitation of the BE14 chip makes it unsuitable for these situations. " Source: https://openwrt.org/inbox/toh/sinovoip/bananapi_bpi-r4#installation
My TP Link Re650 covers all five floors in my house. I do not expect the BP4 to cover more than two.
SinoVoip sent it with a US power supply for 12V when they recommended it used a 30 Watt PSU. I did not expect this, because the order stated EU power supply.
I ran out of time and my shaky hands find it too much to do the screws. Let's move onto something else.
I just need a known working router that I can flash openwrt onto: I just need a 1g WAN, and a 1g LAN, and wifi. Simple stuff. I am not a hardware person. I am allergic to hardware.
I will swap my Banana Pi for something simple and recent I live in Belgium. Send me a DM with something.
My apoligies that this has verved off into a rant.
They also sell a smaller GL-3000 that could also work. All we need is 1 x RJ45 LAN, 1 x RJ45 WAN, and wifi 6. It would have to handle low latency FPS gaming traffic on the RJ45, and the wifi just has to do two iphones, and an Amazon Fire Stick with WireGuard VPN.
