The Banana Pi BPI-R3 Mini router board is a low-profile, compact device that packs in some impressive features, making it suitable for a range of applications. Powered by the MediaTek MT7986 (Filogic 830) quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor, this router board comes with 2GB DDR4 RAM, an 8GB eMMC flash, two low-profile 2.5GbE ports, and WiFi 6 support.
One of the key advantages of the BPI-R3 Mini is its size. With a more compact design, this board can be used as a 2.5GbE firewall, wireless router or repeater, home security gateway, home automation gateway, NAS device, and more. It also features hardware acceleration engines for Wi-Fi offloading and networking, which helps to improve the overall performance of the device.
In terms of connectivity, the BPI-R3 Mini features two 2.5GbE RJ45 ports via Airoha controllers and WiFi 6 support via the MediaTek MT7976C (2.4GHz: 574Mbps + 5GHz: 2402Mbps), along with 4x u.FL antenna connectors. It also has a USB 2.0 Type-A port for additional connectivity and M.2 Key-B and M.2 Key-M sockets for expansion.
The BPI-R3 Mini comes with OpenWrt 21.02, Ubuntu 22.04, and Debian 10/11 images, which should make it easy to get up and running quickly. However, it's worth noting that Banana Pi has a reputation for providing incorrect specifications and subpart OS images. Therefore, proper software support may have to come from the community, and the BPI-R3 Mini hardware may require some tweaking.
In terms of pricing, the BPI-R3 Mini is expected to be significantly cheaper than the larger BPI-R3 router board, with an estimated cost of around $70 to $80. This puts it in direct competition with other Rockchip-powered NanoPi router boards, provided that proper software support is available. Overall, the Banana Pi BPI-R3 Mini router board is an impressive device that packs in a lot of features in a small form factor.