What's your favourite cheap LEDE/OpenWrt device?

I´am a Fan of SecondHand Routers, so the WNDR3700v2 is a good choice with very good support by @hnyman (Link)

Currently I´am playing with the Original Xiaomi WiFi Router 3G (Link) - a good and modern Device for that money.

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according to this https://lede-project.org/toh/hwdata/netgear/netgear_wndr3700_v2 3700v2 has 16/64 ROM/RAM. wndr3700v4 has much better hardware. That xiaomi is nice but it costs twice as much as wndr3700v4. Looks like i made good choice for my friend too wndr3700v4 is unbeatable in it's second hand price range :slight_smile:

@anon20279570

FYI | 5GHz wireless is not working on the wndr3700v4 with LEDE

The Device itself is not so easy to handle like the WNDR3700v2 or the Xiaomi WiFi Router 3G

It works on LEDE. I used to use 5 GHZ wifi when i was on stock 17.01.1 and it worked on my build of 17.01.1.
Now i do not know i do not have 5 GHZ device, but when i click scan on 5 GHZ wifi it starts scanning, blue led turns on and then off. So i assume it works on 17.01.4 with 4.9 kernel too.

@anon20279570

For me it doesn´t work... Just installed latest dd-rt and 5 GHz is back again. There is also just one radio to select under LEDE. Will do some more Tests.

wndr3700v4

DD WRT  build 33555    Wireless Status

Please discuss problems with 5GHz in a separate topic and keep this thread for hardware recommendations.

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Could you recommend me some tp link rooter that would be great to use with LEDE. A guy can order any tp link for me I want to provide him with 3 choice. Tp link only. Limite 100$.
I will use it as a wifi client/AP and linux box(file sharing, bittorrent,...)
Edit: it must be AC dual band, have usb support, low energy use.

Tplink Archer C25 is a good candidate but no USB

Didn't notice you need BitTorrent n file sharing.
Try look for Xiaomi router 3g if you can skip tplink

Plenty of CPU and memory. Support usb3.0 as well.

Lede snapshot is available

did not play with openwrt / lede for 2 years, I feel like playing again

looked around and these are easily available for me
WR842N v3 or WR1043ND v4?

both are 16/64
Are they fine, or are there better choices?
Something more reliable, better hardware, more widely used around, more opensource drivers or something..
also seen xiaomi router being mentioned around, but seems not really reliable even though hardware seems very nice.

If you already own them, both should be fine (you might need snapshots rather than stable releases). If you're still looking for something to buy, I would suggest concurrent dual-band routers these days, given that the 2.4 GHz band is full and with 5 GHz providing much more bandwidth (but neither of this is LEDE specific, just good to have in general).

In terms of performance (WAN throughput significantly above 100 MBit/s or wishes to run heavier software on the router), ar71xx has pretty much reached its peak performance a while ago and is slowly being replaced by more capable architectures (mt7621, ipq40xx, ipq806x, mvebu) - that would be something for you to evaluate.

It all depends on what you expect from your new router - but LEDE will continue to support both of your examples for quite a while to come.

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I've been going through this thread and various posts on the forum, and I'm leaning towards the TP-LINK Archer C7 (1750). It $80 on Amazon right now.

I have the TL-WDR3600 with Open-WRT (last release) on it, and it works fine for my purposes. I just need Gigabit ethernet, really. Bonus for AC/5GHz.

I tried buying another used TL-WDR3600 from Amazon warehouse, but it didn't even power on, so I'll just pick up something new.

Price limit for this purchase is around $80-$100, but the cheaper the better. I'd like to purchase from somewhere like Amazon or Newegg if possible.

Thanks!

I can't find one better than Linksys ea3500 among all the cheap options.
https://wikidevi.com/wiki/Linksys_EA3500

Curved design, hidden antenna, gigabit Ethernet, dual band WiFi. Only 15 to 30 dollars on eBay or Amazon.

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Raspberry Pi 2B... I have tried lots of cheap devices... If you want to go cheap the best bet is a raspberry Pi. Comparatively speaking the memory is limitless, you can install all you want... It needs a good USB antenna when can be pretty cheap, just make sure the chipset is supported. With a usb flash drive one can run transmission and download torrents without leaving a computer on... The Rpi3 is good too, but one would probably want to use an external antenna anyway, for better coverage... Ah, one problem is that there is only one ethernet port. I used a usb ethernet dongle for a second port, and put it on the WAN ADSL side. It manages to keep up with my ADSL download bandwidth...

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I have a lot of "favorite cheap devices", depending on what I use them for. But if you want to really get your device cheap, my first and foremost recommendation would be:

Get your device second-hand.

Virtually all of the 20-or-so devices I have amassed here over the past years I bought second-hand, sometimes even described as "broken", or as cheap as one or two euros. And I have yet to encounter one that didn't work.

My favorite "cheap device" right now would have to be an Easybox 904 xdsl. LEDE support is just starting out right now, but it's already a really, really nice all-in-one box if you're living in Annex-B land. They can be had as cheap as €10 plus shipping, I bought mine for €1.

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I may end up returning this Archer C7 (practically the same as my existing WDR3600 for my needs) and pick up a refurb EA3500 from Amazon for $25.

Good choice.:+1:

Bought UniElec U7621-06 (256M RAM/16M flash) and attached external microSD card as /overlay :slight_smile:

I’d like to mention the Blueendless BS-U25AWF. It’s basically a hard drive enclosure for a 2.5 inch drive with the MT7620 chip at 580MHz, 16MB of flash, 64MB of RAM (though my variant has 128MB for some reason), a USB port, a battery, and has dual stream (2.4ghz only) WiFi with an 100Mbps Ethernet port. It’s supported by the snapshot versions currently but works great for a little portable file server.

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Used youkuYK-l1. It can be 5 $.
32MROM / 128MRAM / 8GBTF / MT7620a
There is currently openwrt tf card support issues, if solved, comes with 8GB TF card will be very fun. Use overlay it can hold more things.
I now add a U disk used to install octoprint. It can replace raspberry pie as a 3D printing host computer, providing wifi online printing service.

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