Hi,
I just want to mention the gl.inet devices. I used them sometimes and they are really cool. The vendor is producing different models and the base principle of all is:
- relatively small devices(product range growing) with very low power consumption and cheap
- vendor adapted openwrt preinstalled
- open system design(multiple firmware images available, custom firmware image buildchain available for own experiments)
OpenWRT is no new thing. But one hassle, you always have, when you deal with OpenWRT, is to find hardware, which is 100% supported. Device vendors can suddenly shift the hardware and when a v1 of a router model is supported, a v2 may suddenly come out with completely different chipset and is not supported at all. You possibly even won't notice when that is happening. So if you end up with a not (yet) supported device, you have to wait for the openwrt hackers to support it or jump into the troubleshooting of the problem yourself to get the device up and running. This can be very time consuming.
That's the benefit of the gl.inet devices: They come with OpenWRT preinstalled. It comes out of the packaging with a working OpenWRT.
The vendor does not deliver a pure OpenWRT OS - they have an additional webinterface for max. ease of use. If you don't like that: That's no problem. You can just skip to Advanced Mode, which provides the OpenWRT - LuCi Webinterface and maybe enable ssh from there to get a CLI.
Here are some use cases, where I decided to use these devices:
- VPN-Router to avoid firewall restrictions in special places
- Wireless Accesspoint quickly set up
- Device for Reverse SSH Access to NAT-Hidden networks
- Device for access in data center to access routers serial console via different network path in emergency situations.
- VPN-Router for travelling for use with my laptop.
As OpenWRT is linux it's very flexible and you have lots of packages to install. I also like the Easy Fire-and-Forget Firmware Upgrade Option within the vendor webinterface.
The particular properties of that environment is that the resources are very scarce. But nevertheless there are currently ~3500 packages available for installation.
In comparison to a raspberry pi it has quite lower resources and computing power but it's also a lot cheaper.
For more information have a look at lot's of videos about the device on youtube or check out the vendor homepage(gl-inet.com).
Note
I myself worked mainly with the AR150(very small) and one AR750S(medium size). Looking at the webpage there are now lots of different models. Some cost a lot more money.