We're building a high-end router. Here's the update for June 2024. 

"If you're new to embedded, fuck you, figure it out" is just so true. There is so much institutional knowledge that you need to have to work in this space, it's kind of frustrating.

"Let me explain it to you like I'm 5" _Proceeds with a college freshman level of an explanation_

My Slovenian friend, please don't keep us in the dark. Those difficulties you find on your way are EXTREMELY relatable. Any tips/walkthroughs you have for us are extremely helpful. Love you, brat

I used to work for a switch/router company. It was pretty interesting. In the past, the company would buy a special switch (from broadcom, for example) and a license for the SDK. In general, the SDK would come with an old linux kernel, some command lines and a 90's web interface. Then, we would add features (almost from scratch) to the product. The hardware part of the company was pretty good for a reasonable small company (500 engineers). Later the company started building it own OS that could be used with almost any device that support linux. They started with their GPON (fiber) line of products. I think the company is not doing very well, many engineers moved to the Netherlands and US for better jobs, and the government stopped heavly invest on public fiber infrastructure. I think it is very hard to compete with chinese routers, but, at the same time, if you can provide a reliable and quality product, their is still a market for it. Are you starting from an existing framework (like openwrt), SDK from the chip that you chose or are you building something from scratch?

An indepth look into the development process and iteration on the kernel loading from the dev PC and stuff would be super interesting and cool!

oooooh ya! tutorial videos about boot stuff would be awesome!

the "FU, figure it out" is very common in embedded development. I've been an embedded HW EE for decades, and the era when we could get good support from everyone is long gone. ST is pretty good. NXP is definitely not.

I feel you on the documentation issues. usually stuff written by a third party is wayyyyyy better written.

Awesome!! I think I can speak for most everyone here - anytime you think should I or should I not make a video about this - haha make it. I'm not even into development or hardware like this, but super interesting to learn about. I know the videos really take time and effort to do and appreciate your willingness to continue to update us and make additional videos. Really looking forward to the Kernel compiling machine that you had built and especially what sort of hardware makes a machine better or worse at compiling kernels.

10:33 that actually makes sense, uboot is opensource bootloader with big community behind and they should make good job of documenting their tool for different boards, not the other way around.

Great video thanks. I’m interested in a hands on tutorial video.

Hey Tomaž, I find it fascinating and commendable how detailed you are in sharing your development process on RU-vid - there's a lot I can learn from it. I do have one question: some of your steps are technically detailed to the point where I wonder (from an investor's or customer's perspective) if you're sometimes "reinventing the wheel" where it might not be necessary. Is this primarily to optimize costs, or is it driven by specific community/user needs? Wishing you continued success and best regards.

ALL the BEST to you guys succeeding this project! great work, nice insight in the process and well produced videos! cheers and good luck from your neighbour, carinthia/austria

Thanks for keeping us posted. Excited for project!

Im working on a similar problem at work right now, im excited to see how you end up solving this!

Nice work man! I am so happy to see the progress I love this project!

Your borderline breathless enthusiasm and urge to share as much information as possible as fast as possible is deeply endearing. Good luck with the project! 🌞😉

amazing project! cant wait to see July! amazing work

this is awesome!! super interesting seeing the beginnings of an embedded device

fascinating video, I'm enjoying your journey of development for this router!

I think the idea of including an m.2 sata ssd for boot is actually probably a good one, there are some quite cheap devices and it will let power users upgrade if they want.

Gosh, this is so interesting and educative, I doesn't even know the price point yet, but these videos make me absolutely certain, I'll buy one when the time comes and promote it within my peers. Keep up the good work and let that Kickstarter roll!

I'm enjoying this series a lot, I love the amount of information you share about the entire process. Looking as much forward to the journey as to be able to order my router 😀 By the way, I'm in favour of the tutorials. I will never develop something like this myself, but I agree working with people in the integrated systems sphere, that the institutional knowledge is a hurdle. If you could share some of yours, that would certainly make it easier for others to enter the space and we'd all end up with more variety of devices that suit our needs. And i would watch them too.

Interesting, I work on the OS for a datacenter switch / router vendor. When I saw "making a high end router" I didn't have a WiFi access AP in mind, but this is an incredibly fascinating video nonetheless. Thank you for doing this in the open! I guess "high end router" really can mean vastly different things. Edit to add: ohh, the wifi chip is just for dev iteration! Ok, I need to watch more of your stuff, this is fascinating!

The rant just won you a like and subscription from me.

fast SSD/nvme storage is good if you want to offer packet capture in you feature set, one would love to see that feature in high-end router. eMMC has limited wear and tear (TBW), Tesla had a recall because of this, specially if you are going to use it for logs

Very interesting. Good luck!

Užival sem v tem upjdetu. Hvala! :)

Hurry up with that router ;-). I'm starting to look for a new router now, mainly considering protectli or building something. I'm slow enough that maybe yours will hit the market by the time I actually do acquire something.

by ditching the pmic wont you lose the ability to monitor the voltage that each psu is outputting?

this is really cool to see. makes me wonder if getting that fritzbox made you so angry that you had to make your own, better router haha :3 jokes aside, i really love to see this kind of insight and transparency in the making of devices millions rely on daily, especially all the embedded linux stuff :3 im personally pretty nerdy about that kinda stuff so its really cool to learn more about it (yes i would like the more hands on/in-depth video ^^) (also woah, i didn't know u-boot lets u load stuff from the network into ram and boot that, thats really cool)

Feels exactly like during my studies. We had also embedded systems as a lecture for two semesters. It was exactly like this. RTFM, Git gud. Reading through a 3000 pages manual of a developer board without any clue really is a bit..."demoralizing" :D

Keep up the good work. Staying subscribed to see this to life

Thanks for sharing. You can go ahead and make the detailed tutorials mate. That would be very cool. We'll done in unleashing in regards to the documentation. Consolidering The price they charge for the dev board , it should come with a perfect documentation.

What networking stuff is going to be supported on the router? Any dynamic routing protocols? Any advanced switching protocols? I hope you guys also focus on ease of monitoring. Something ive missed from medium enterprise routers and network devices is Somethings more than snmp etc.

Looking forward to the build video on the Anni system

I like your „Rant Time“ ;)

So... based on experience (ISP/Network provider/MSP)... do not do eMMC .... Multiple reasons: 90% of our failed devices are using onboard storage - we toss them when they fail. If you use an SD card then it can be upgraded/changed ... but higher failure rate. Lower/worse read/write performance - although it may not be required to have a high performance storage for a router ... it actually does make a difference. Bootup/startup time, navigating UI for management (eg loading files from disk to render/send), logging, general data storage. Overall ... rather just go SATA and use a 2.5" SSD - it's cheap, fast enough - and upgradable if someone wants to use more storage. Also, the components will be less and ofc, less failure conditions - not requiring a mux etc...

I WILL fund the operation if building a new router, as long as you can ensure to me that it WILL be open source for its entirety. even if the company grows, I want that everything is well documented, at least the hardware!

Why not you use logical voltage converter between 1.8v and 1.2v

"Fuck you, figure it out." -- this was my exact experience getting into embedded "The Wrong Way", granted when I started we didn't have no Arduinos! haha

12:32 What's about Secure Boot ? how ROM validates if BL2, BL31 firmware are legit?

What you should keep in mind before moving to the production version of the firmware is to remove the device tree from BL3 of the U-Boot for security reasons. Can be activated later to perform "over-the-air" online Firmware Upgrade but it would not be as secure against attacks from the network, there are workarounds but what I said first is essential 😅

I know this comes a bit to late now, but would it make sense to use the MediaTek MT7988A (Filogic 880)? Because it seems to have much more connectivity than the NXP-LS1046A, for example the Banana Pi BPI-R4 has two mini pcie, and one m.2 slot.

Check the NAND's Vil vs. the CPU's Vol and the NAND's Voh vs. the CPU's Vih. You may just get away with 1.2v NAND w/ 1.8v IO.

Super cool project! I hate bad documentation!

Oh man, needing to figure everything out for yourself because of terrible documentation is such a frustrating thing to experience regardless of what it is related to. But at least you seem to know what you're doing (or at least getting there) which is good :)

Your rant is but one of the reasons why about any vendor of large scale networking gear has been shifting to x86_64 arch. The others being cost - yes, an embedded x86 is very competitive with ARM, thanks for the price gauge ARM vendors have been playing - and availability of both hardware - thank you Intel and AMD - and updated documentation. I work on a medical industry and our RnD group has gone thru a lot of what you’ve been and their workload took a new fresh direction when the base hardware changed.

We're using the same SoC for a Network product. I'm interested to know If you decided to go with Buildroot or Yocto for your own Linux distribution, also are you considering enabling OP-TEE?

Is your power supply low noise for streaming audio?

Out of curiosity is there anything (other than cost) that really prevents you from using a bunch of high speed transistors to do the logic level translation so you can use high capacity nands? I don’t know the exact conditions you have for that but I don’t think there’s anything obvious preventing it.

Did you guys use a BSP kernel or something like upstream LTS 6.6?

Absolutely more about u-boot and kernel how to!

Are you planning on launching a pre-order offer for the router?

Hi Tomaz. I understand you perfect when you had to build the U-boot. I'm playing right now with a Banana Pi BPI-R4 board and I was able to build U-boot + AT-F to be able to get NVME working. I worked about 1 week until I found a patch for U-boot that activates PCI-e 3.0 for the chip to be able to see NVME SSD and now I'm in the phase of building the Kernel and Root FS on NVME. My ideea is to use U-boot entirely with bootmenu using an u-boot-env on NVME wich is generated by OS each time a new kernel is installed (similar with Grub for x86). I want to use SPI flash just for the firmware. I'm wanting for you device to be available for sale to play with it and "reflash" it with my own U-boot. 😁

@tomaz regarding the FLASH interface: Why not use a level snifter IC ? There are some good one i know that are bidirectional and when it come o unidirectional ones there are some that can do RMII they are like 0.5$ You can also play with Vio from the FLASH and MPU and make it close enough to not make problems

Turris Omnia Enterprise is based on same family of NXP SOC. Could talk with then about their experience.

I would like to see the/a video/series on how to navigate embedded system, I may never use it, but I do want the knowledge.

Thanks for the update, love the amount of details you provide! However I didn't understand exactly how you can remove the PMIC from the system. How does the P-GOOD pin replace the PMIC? As far as I know, powering a CPU is mostly an issue of sequencing the different voltages in the correct order, and fast enough to be ready for each next stage. Can you please elaborate? Oh and, one last thing: remote file systems FTW!!

I would like to build some simple x86 intel SBC but there is no documentation or schematics available unless you work for some big company and you signed NDA. There is also no info from them on how do you even get started with things like BIOS, do I need to code bios myself? are there some examples ready to go I could use? Just another thing you're expected to know already.

Isn't this something like the r86s but arm? Is there any advantages with the cusom hardware? You can always use custom OS/kernel with UEFI

Is really SDIO that common in m.2 WiFI cards? I only heard of a single M.2 SDIO WiFI module used in rather obscure thin client that in fact the opposite issue - no PCI Express at m.2 wifi port at all (Dell Wyse 3040). Every card I know uses PCIe for signalling. SDIO is common in embedded, soldered in modules used in cheap devices. I don't think losing SDIO from WiFI port is really an issue.

I'd love to see a tutorial style video!

Wouldn’t level shifters to NAND flash be better than an SDII mux?

Maybe put u-boot on NAND and then let it boot from nvme? Or put kernel into NAND. Or entire base system. Either way 8GB is huge space.

Great Video. As a potential customer, I was wondering if you are planning to make your custom Linux kernel open-source or not?

I know this is hard enough as it is but can you clarify if this product will have multi-WAN support and fast VPN support like WireGuard? Will you try to compete with products like the TP-Link ER605 or the TP-Link ER8411, or are you trying to make a "gamer router"?

Would love some tutorials!

what specifically makes the router "high-end" ?

please keep that remote root as a recovery

Tutorials would be great

I will buy a Router from you I'd be more than happy to get one

One thing i still dont get and returning to the video and relistening didnt help why would you want to in any case use this as wifi ap(because if you are thinking of buying such a router you likely are already owner of proper APs or are planning to buy proper APs) and imo storage is kinda importsnt for logging and similar

Zakaj nemrete mesto Linux kernela modificirati illumos kernel???

Wee bit of info - a high end router is not made in software on a SoC style chip with network ports.

How about using network storage to connect the flash to the IC?

Going back to your storage issue, I'm not sure I understand what you are having trouble to source... 1.8v NAND chips are common in the 8GB range... 1.2v is usually the voltage for RAM chips, not NAND flash...

great to hear about the progress also when it comes to m.2 mechanism What is wrong with standoff and screw also good conversation on twitter/x about booting linux(the one with kernel panic and me saying i do things with rootfs)(would have put a link but rather not for visibility reasons) also i hope this will have its last bootloader unlocked unlike phones Also this inspired my to build a rootFS for this device when i get my hands on it im not a embedded guy but i do like RootFSs also also also also ewwww device trees, ACPI for the win

How are you guys navigating patent issues around everything? Even something as simple as that M.2 latch can be covered under horrible US patent laws and result in a big electronics player like Asus coming around demanding payment.

Why not pfsense?

This is a cool project but I don’t understand the use of the word “high end”, modern high performance routers are now commonly 800G per port, with tens of Tbps and billions of packets per second. 🤔

I don't understand the need for two wireless network interfaces. I doubt the target audience for this router will put a Wi-Fi card and use it as an all in one solution ala cheap tp-link. My point is one slow slot for "some radio" should be enough.

Zakaj k vragu nisu mogli napraviti čip z više interne ROM i vse te uklopiti v jeden bootloader? Tri bootloadera - ampak je te fakat bedastoča...

An american mind in the body of a slovenian.

By the time you come out with a full on working prototype the wifi standards will have changed lol. Wifi 8 will be out probably in the next 2 years .Then you'll need something that can support speeds up to 200Gbs.

I know your new to this, but everyone's documentation sucks. No one puts time into docs. Several times, I've had to go look at the verilogic code to know how my idiot coworkers changed things. (and yes, 90% of that code is the power sequencing to get everything to boot correctly. I can't see your plan of chaining one rail off another not being a nightmare.)

Fun project but i only see a future when there is a proven past. Any router marketed as a bit high end must have a track record of non stop software updates and bugfixes. Recompiles with all parts renewed on a regular base. And no just providing sources to do compile yourself is only for a very small public. Just making the product even if it is very good is just half of the marathon. The support in the years following has the same weight in importance. I don't say it is not possible. I have a functioning pfSense setup so i can wait and watch the progress. I am interested but not convinced yet. The reason i go for pfSense over OpnSense has to do that every minor fix can be installed and uninstalled at will without any knowledge of managing firmware or sources. Just as organised updates in the web interface. Mayor builds contain the feature enhancements and mandatory fixes over a period so a version update is more permanent and the chain of fixes strats to grow again from scratch. I am not bashing on OpnSense, pfSense just has my preference.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but why do you need to manufacture your own hardware, when you can turn literally any existing PC running Linux into a router?

Zaman se trudiš 😢

This is starting to sound like a lost cause. I supported this at first, but cost and time is starting to take it toll when such a board already exists. So I think I'm just going to go with the youyeetoo router board.

hands on video plz.