What's your favourite cheap LEDE/OpenWrt device?

Mikrotik with OpenWRT has switch on 4 LAN ports, and another separate switchless WAN port.

You can install all what you need manually, so router just should support OpenWRT.

I bought a MikroTik HAP AC2(1900 UAH) last week, it feels like a well built router. I've had Archer A2(600 UAH) and GliNET MT-300NV2(600 UAH) they both felt cheap

Just FYI GliNet MT-300NV2 is pretty fragile. Was switching between that router and my landlords, banged it against the wall/floor a few times and broke it.

I though of going on the cheap this time round. I just bought a hp prodesk 400 g1 sff for $105 USD free shipping. It's an i5 4570.

I already got some spare old ram and ssd. I got a couple of quad intel gigabit nics also on the way. Will report back to tell how it performs.. Hope it will be ok???

I'd be interested in the idle power consumption of this desktop.

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Me too. This is my first router build, and it's old pc and second hand. I will report back when I get it in the mail. My expensive XCY is 9 watts idle, hope this cheapie router would be around the same ball park??? Here's hoping.

So I finally got my backup router.

40 Watts on idle, just to compare to my desktop it's 80-90Watts on idle

I already added an extra stick of 4GB ram, and a brand new Cmos battery. I'm just waiting on a couple of quad gigabit nics. I'm thinking of replace the hdd with an SSD. Not sure yet if I should.

I still haven't installed OpenWRT or done any tweaking. Will report back soon

350kWh / year for doing nothing. Something to think about (before buying a device).

Apart from that: Can you please move extensive discussions of your purchase, installation and troubleshooting to a separate thread?

Thanks!

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tmomas it's a back up router. You know what that means right?

My Bad, 20 watts idle with windows 10. May be less with OpenWRT?? Sorry I was really tired last night.

I wont post any more in this thread. :frowning:

Ok so a fresh install of windows 10 with all the updates included. 12.5Watts idle. I'm assuming OpenWRT with Luci will be less???

I'll leave it to that.

Replying to my own post from a year ago, I'm not sure why Xiaomi Mi 4A Gigabit Edition hasn't been posted here sooner. It pretty much ticks all the boxes from my previous post, except the USB port. Probably because it initially required opening the device, but it is now flashable using software-only exploit OpenWRTInvasion.

Dual band WiFi, 802.11ac, 2x2 MiMo, Mediatek MT7621, 128 MB RAM, 16 MB flash, 3 Gigabit ports, quite easily flashable, hardware offload works, negligible power consumption (4-5W) and costs less than 30$ shipped worldwide! I have bought it for an equivalent of 29 USD in a physical store in my country!

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Yes, I think it's the best for the money now, for someone who doesn't need USB.

What about coverage? Can You compare it to some other vendor/device?

What about this (from https://github.com/acecilia/OpenWRTInvasion) "Some users have reported worse WIFI performance in OpenWrt than in the stock firmware."?

What OpenWRT version are You using?

I've been using OpenWRT on a TP-Link WR940Nv6 since 2017. Back then I had to use a tiny snapshot and could not figure out how to install LUCi on a 4/32, so I used it as my main router for years using UCI and other CLI Linux tools. I loved it.

This week I just bought an ArcherA7v5.8 (<$60 on Amazon) and flashed it with 19.07 so I'm using LUCI for the first time. I went back and re-flashed my WR940Nv6 and WR940Nv4 with 18.06.9 so now I have LUCI on those too. I set them up as Dump Wireless APs and everything is working perfectly. Total Home WiFi coverage for under $120 (those WR940's were like $29.99)

Thanks to everyone using and supporting OpenWRT!!

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Cudy WR2100 for less than $30 when on sale on Amazon.

i couldn't find openwrt support for this one

See https://openwrt.org/toh/hwdata/cudy/cudy_wr2100

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https://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/targets/ramips/mt7621/

https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02.0-rc4/targets/ramips/mt7621/

https://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt/openwrt.git;a=commit;h=3501db9b9b4a71ae52c539b46af817783c327866

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Hi! planning to use TP-Link Archer C7 https://openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/archer_c7 (it's what can find out here in Argentina).

What do you think for wifi acces to 10 devices tops, mostly cellphones, in a hangar like space? Router will be in a kitchen like huge room (8m x 4m) and the whole hangar has 50m x 20m

Thanks!