Some time ago, I set about building my own wireless router.

Why?

Well, I wanted to see if I could put something together that would (theoretically) be upgradeable rather than disposable once standards moved on. I also had an existing setup (Unifi DreamRouter from their defunct early access program) that could not do the latest speeds, was limited to 1Gbit, and would be a good fit for upgrading my parent’s home set up. Finally, I had a collection of spare parts and no real purpose to put them to - this seemed like a good fit. Up front I should say that even with these spare parts, this is not a cost effective way to create a router - you will not be saving money here. In my case, because I am reusing an old mid-tower case it also won’t be particularly compact or power efficient. It was a lot of fun though, so from that perspective it was mission accomplished. I will get into how it performs, how I update it and configure it later, but this post will focus on the hardware, putting it together, what it cost etc.

The router has been operating successfully for over a year now, and is sitting up in my attic, acting as the primary connection for my house to the internet. It runs OpenWrt (more on that in a later post) and is generally rock solid.

Here’s the list of parts:

• Athlon Gold 3150GE (35W) CPU (€60)
• Mellanox ConnectX 2 PCIe Card - 2 x 10Gbps SFP+ (LAN) (€50)
• Generic Intel I225 PCIe Card - 1 x 2.5Gbps (WAN) (€20)
• 2 x WIFI6 AW7915-NP1 from Asia RF - 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz respectively (€60 ea.)
• MSI AM4 mATX Motherboard (€60 - bought 2nd hand)
• 2 x Comfast 4x6dBi Dual Band Antennas (€16 ea.)
• 16GB DDR4 2400 RAM (€0 - from box of spare RAM)
• Intel 180GB SATA SSD (€0 - scavenged)
• 500W Rosewill PSU (€0 - old spare PSU)
• Lian Li PC-A05B Case (€0 - old spare case)

Everything except the CPU and WiFi cards/antennae were parts I already had on-hand, and I did have a spare CPU I could have used instead, but decided to go for a more power efficient option. So, my monetary outlay to complete the project was around €220. Once it all arrived, I started by connecting it all up on a test bench to make sure everything worked:

You can see the antennae happily magnetically stuck to my whiteboard. Once tested, it was time to move everything into the case, and the back of the case with all of its ports and antenna connections looks like this:

I am in the process of repurposing an old Raspberry Pi 4b and adding a PiKVM to the router so I don’t have to climb up in to the attic to service it and upgrade it. Since the initial build I also added a (€25) dual bay 2.5 inch enclosure to the floppy bay of the case so I can change the boot drive out without having to open the case. Once that is complete, I hope to document the full (remote) upgrade procedure, and I will add updated pictures then, including the routing and placement of the antennae.