What's your favourite cheap LEDE/OpenWrt device?

Nexx WT3020 is my favorite cheap aliexpress router !

Despite is 8MB flash (mods exist to upgrade to 16MB), this little guy is able to:

  • NAT+ Firewall for all the family behind my internet box (8Mbit internet) and with a classical tp-link switch.
  • Hourly RSYNC/SSH my downloads from a seedbox
  • Serve the downloads as a little NFS USB NAS to my LibreElec mediaplayer

Next step is now to add a secondary 64G usb flash key using mdamd with raid0 (but It seems that I have problem with CONFIG_KERNEL_DIRECT_IO missing from my kernel).

Next2 step is to add a LORA receiver+Arduino Nano to centralize data from my DIY IOT toys.

Next3 step could be to upgrade the flash to 16M because 8M is not enough for all the things this miracle could handle :wink:

At least in the UK they are available already modified by folk on ebay for around 20-25 £

I have a suggestion for this topic here. Would it not be better if all of the mentioned devices here were listed in a single thread for easy finding? I mean for a noob like me and some other people who might wanna find a good device, reading a lot of posts wouldn't exactly be an interesting thing. I understand that knowledge of the device will be a better thing but finding devices that someone might be interested in should be in a single post for better comparing and search. It can also save a lot of time for others.
I know the Openwrt's TOH is a good place to start but some of the devices are old and discontinued and there is no price comparison there. The discussion can go as long as it gets but there should be one post that is pinned to top and should be modified/updated regularly by someone to add/remove any devices or update info about them.

Maybe a page at openwrt.org website would be a better idea. As it can be updated/edited by anyone.

After all it's just a suggestion. Thanks

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I was thinking the very same. Wading through 160 postings and searching for the "golden nuggets" hidden inside is no fun at all.

Having a summary of the discussion either at the top of the thread or on a wiki page would make it much easier to find the user-favoured devices.

I was also thinking about creating one topic like this per year, because new hardware appears on the horizon, and old hardware disappears.

Options we have

  1. Create new topic, making post#1 the place where to find the essence of the topic, i.e. post#1 is continuously updated by a) the author of that posting or b) by everyone taking part in that discussion (we can make a posting "wiki" so everyone can contribute to it). List favoured devices in a table, or
  2. We can create "polls" in forum postings (see e.g. [OpenWrt/LEDE merge] Which forum software do users want for the future?). Not sure though if those can be dynamically expanded (in December there will be more devices to vote for than in January -> devices need to be added to the poll during the year).
  3. Create wiki page where user-favoured devices are listed in a table.
  4. Create wiki page with a poll included. Polls are somewhat possible IIRC, but I would have to dig deeper into this again to judge if polls are really feasible in the wiki.
    .... a rating system like on amazon comes to my mind, with stars and comments and such...

To make this summary or essence of the "favourite device" topic useful, we need to agree on what information is needed.

Example for a listing in post#1 of a new "favourite device" topic:

Model is my favourite because... Price
DIR-505 small formfactor, directly pluggable into wall outlet, no cables; sufficient flash/ram (8/64) for my usecase 999,-€
TL-MR3020 small formfactor, low power consumption 888,-$
$yourmodel $your_reason_for_favouring_this_device 777,-¥

Is that all we need? Anything to add?

Sidenote: Anything more than the above in a table would probably make it more a candidate for the wiki, since in the forum we are quite width restricted.

Any other proposals on how to condense the information of a long topic into a nice list?

I think this 3 column table suggested by @tmomas would be fine because most of us will always be looking for brief information about devices on the go and if someone needs more info they can always find the device in the wiki or we can just link the wiki page within the list with the device info.

Test posting with table and wiki:

Please check it out and report back if that would be a way to go.

The description within the table is meaningless if people dont provide some hardware info like flash/ram etc. I think that should be a must in this case. Because someone just posted there with "It's the one I have right now" description. Maybe put some rules there @tmomas.

Knowing the CPU or something about how powerful the device is would be very helpful. This could be a slippery slope of asking for more and more features, then you're just back to the TOH. Maybe likes or votes connected to the TOH somehow? Reset it yearly?

It would also be interesting to see some stats on which firmwares are being downloaded, which would also suggest which routers are currently popular, but wouldn't address what's currently available, price, features, etc.

Just add a price range to the current TOH. need to normalise currency to ease comparision

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Maybe a rolling download count for each of, past month, past 6 months, past year

https://distrowatch.com/ does something similar for most popular linux distros in the sidebar.

I don't think currency is beneficial.

maybe just a 3 or 4 level price rating from Bronze for economical devices to Gold for Expensive

How does exchanging euro/dollar/shekels for colours help? My bronze is going to be different from someone earning mega pounds/roubles.
Defining a currency to colour exchange rate is just going to start another 100+ reply forum argument.

I'd really like to see some kind of user ratings.
To address the lack of room in the forum topic "wiki" format perhaps we could do both 1 and 4? Not everyone will add their "favorite device" to the wiki page but I think anything particularly good will get added. With a pure wiki page only we would miss discussion posts which can be really helpful.

Does the price really matter, if it is Bronze then you know straightaway that is the least expensive of the lot. If when you go shopping you discover that your budget allows for more you can go back and search higher price rating.

It is all relative in the end, it also helps when your buying used devices, as a device that was expensive new is likely to still be more expensive than it peers when used.

Can an enhanced Amazon banner be used? I'd love to know the current price of the router. Even if nobody buys from Amazon it would give people a rough idea what to expect to pay, at least relative to the other routers. And if anybody bus with an affiliate link a few pennies could make it back to the project to pay for hosting, etc.

Not much help when a router is discontinued, and you will get targeted ads everywhere you go afterwards.

I'd love recommendations for a router with roughly similar price ($15 used on eBay) and specs (1Ghz, 128M/128M, dual band N, USB) as the Linksys Cisco EA4500, but without that router's overheating and wifi instability problems

Netgear r6100 comes up on ebay cheap from time to time. It has Ethernet 100M. Depending on your internet speed it may not be a problem.

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Recently I setup router with Luci, IPsec (Strongswan) and some other services basing on RouterBoard RB941-2nD. It is cheap (about 20$) device with 16MB flash storage and 32MB RAM build on solid ar71xx platform. It works very well for me, I can recommend this device.

32MB RAM is borderline and can not really be recommended for future use.
https://openwrt.org/supported_devices/432_warning

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