Looking to upgrade my old tplink ac1900. Was quick browsing for openwrt and found the banana pi r3. Does anyone have one? or opinions about it? Just looking for a general consensus that it is effective and reliable. Other suggestions are welcomed but don’t need a debate ;)
You’re best off splitting the routing and WiFi tasks into separate hardware. Buy yourself a used ruckus unleashed r550/650 or r510/610 depending on how much you want to spend for wifi then run routing on whatever hardware is fit for purpose. I usually slap OPNsense on something like a dell/wyse 5070 j5005 mini PC, any mini PC with a PCIe slot will allow you to build a 1/2.5/10GbE router with open software. Chinese N100 router boxes are cheap now too, or you could reuse an old mini PC of some kind.
I don’t like rolling my own router using arm boards anymore, router distro support for them is unreliable and j5005 pulls <10W anyway.