Hardkernel adds 4x 2.5Gbps to H2
This is becoming a super sweet routing platform! $120 board + $50 add-on card is a little on the pricey side, but ok. I wondered how they did it, but ahh, it&#x27;s an x86 celeron chip, so of course there&#x27;s PCIe. I really hope we start seeing more System-on-Chip from ARM &amp;c with PCIe soon. RPi3&#x27;s ethernet is powered by a single lane, which is more than most competitors do! Time to raise the stakes a little all!!<p>But all this.. it just makes me so so so so sad how little wifi gear is available to DIY with. If you want to DIY wifi you basically have to rely on OpenWRT, which is all hacked routers. Support for modern chipsets has been woefully scary bad. We&#x27;re seeing some hopes, some code drops of some semi-modern Qualcomm chipsets, but as has been the case for most of the decade, Broadcom is totally 100% no-go useless, has no support, no drivers, I don&#x27;t even know if we have a way to any of these boards any more.<p>But relying on prepackaged consumer equipment- it&#x27;s un-ideal. I&#x27;d way rather be able to, like this add-on, build something myself. The cryptocurrency craze has shown that, in fact, PCIe works fairly well over a decent length of USB cable, and Thunderbolt mirrors that idea at 10x the price point&#x2F;sophistication&#x2F;complexity. The idea of having a m.2 card with some wifi hardware on it should not be that out there.<p>Yet there&#x27;s near to no marketplace for good wifi gear. Compex is one of the few&#x2F;only companies making anything what-so-ever, and it&#x27;s quite expensive.<p>I&#x27;ve been meaning to try to run a Debian install on my Netgear X4S (R7800) router for a long time now. It&#x27;ll mean, likely, trying to compile an OpenWRT &amp; borrowing it&#x27;s kernel &amp; probably some modules. And kind of slap-dash throwing them in-to a Debian distro, and either uboot or perhaps having to kexec from OpenWRT into Debian. I&#x27;d really like to have a less exotic system to build wifi with. For now, my increasingly aged router continues to be one of the best options available for wifi that gives me any power or control. It&#x27;s scary having such radically increasingly consumerized options dominate. It&#x27;s scary to me how many techs around me in the world are happy to just buy more expensive fancy gear, go get Ubiquiti, rather than invest themselves in such a core critical foundational social technology. I want very much there to be some kind of call to action, some way to rally, but hardware keeps getting further &amp; further away. This is the actual story of Big Tech that scares me, because it restricts what is possible. What big social networks do? Just go do something else online. But wifi? That is the last &amp; most important mile of connectivity, to us &amp; those around us. I know it doesn&#x27;t entirely make sense, but it&#x27;s something I think geeks ought to feel is important &amp; ought to invest themselves, not just their money in. I&#x27;m tired of being well served by enterprise gear in the home, but not serving ourselves.