NanoPi R4S as Soft Router
NanoPi R4S as Soft Router by Flashing OpenWRT. It comes with two reall Gigabit Ethernet ports: one as WAN; another as LAN. also with ultra small size: 72x72x29mm (including case), bigger than NanoPi R2S: 61x60x26mm (including case).
Highlight comparing with NanoPi R2S:
- CPU: RK3399, more powerful
- Two real Gigabit network port
- 4GB LPDDR4 optional
- USB-C Power supply
| SoC | Rockchip RK3399 |
| CPU: | big.LITTLE，Dual-Core Cortex-A72(up to 2.0GHz) + Quad-Core Cortex-A53(up to 1.5GHz) |
| GPU: | Mali-T864 GPU，supports OpenGL ES1.1/2.0/3.0/3.1, OpenCL, DX11, and AFBC |
| VPU | 4K VP9 and 4K 10bits H265/H264 60fps decoding, Dual VOP, etc |
| DDR3 RAM: | 1GB DDR3/4GB LPDDR4 |
| Storage: | no Onboard eMMC |
| Network: | one Native Gigabit Ethernet, and one PCIe Gigabit Ethernet |
| PMU Power Management: | RK808-D PMIC, cooperated with independent DC/DC, enabling DVFS, software power-down, RTC wake-up, system sleep mode |
| USB Host: | two USB 3.0 Type-A ports |
| Debug Serial Port/UART0: | one Debug UART, 3 Pin 2.54mm header, 3V level, 1500000bps |
| microSD Slot: | 1 |
| GPIO: | 2×5-pin header: SPI x 1, I2C x 1 4-pin header: USB 2.0 |
| LED: | 1 x power LED and 3 x GPIO Controlled LED (SYS, LAN, WAN) |
| PCB Dimension: | 8 Layer, 66 mm x 66 mm |
| Power: | DC 5V/3A, via USB-C connector or Pin header |
| Working temperature: | -20℃ to 70℃ |
| OS Support | FriendlyCore 20.04 (64-bit) (Linux-4.19.111 + U-boot-2017.09) FriendlyWrt 19.07.5 (64-bit) (Linux-5.10 + U-boot-2017.09) |
OpenWRT image for NanoPi R4S
The official image of OpenWRT has not been released by the manufacturer.
Peformance of NanoPi R4S
Disadvantage:
- Bigger than NanoPi R2S
- More expensive than NanoPi RS2
- USB-C power adapter more expensive
- Openwrt is not supported officially yet.
Conclusion
Overall , Naopi R4S is mch powerful as soft router. Its performance exceeds some low-end x86 CPU, but do believe the multi-task ability still weaker than x86 software. 4G RAM seems little waste to be a soft router, but potential to do more things in future.
Hence, it’s good device as soft router, much powerful, but not cost value one. NaoPi R2S with good value although its CPU is weaker than R4S.
