How about designing a router board?

Networking Networking Hardware
1

Hi Everyone!

In the past few days I was tinkering with my Raspberry Pi thinking of ways I could turn it into a firewall/NAS without USB network adapters and preferably with SATA connectors. Obviously there is no way on the original model, but the idea of creating a router board came to mind. I searched aliexpress for some cheap SoC-s as a base for the project, and found that many Allwinner chips are very cheap. Like $5 cheap. I am somewhat skilled in electronics and wanted to ask you guys about the idea of building a (first) small (with maybe pfSense?) router board. Is anyone interested? What suggestions would you have?

Later on I would like to add 2 SATA and 2 RJ45 connectors as some of these chips support SATA and Ethernet, some SO-DIMM RAM and an SD card slot to boot from.

Please allow yourself a few minutes of thinking before you state that this project is insane.

A good starting point https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/open-source-hardware

Thank you for reading this :)

2

This sounds way too complicated for most of the people at this forum, and seems more appropriate at the EEVBlog forum.

3

Doesn't pfSense kinda sorta already sell those?

https://pfsense.org/products/

4

Maybe take a look at the Element14 community. The people there will be able to help you out.

5

If you want something a bit more open source than the pfsense hardware, the pc engines APU boards might fit the bill.

https://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

The schematics are available, you could hack them as required.

6

Thank you all for your suggestions!

pfSense does sell hardware, but the starting price is $149 which might be expensive for many people, including me, hence the idea. Same thing with the APU2, also, they are capable of much more than what I want.

I will check the EEVBlog and Element14 forums, thanks for the suggestions.

Lets say for a second the hardware is designed. How would one go about porting Linux to a micro controller/SoC?