The Onion Omega2: The Latest Router Dev Board




42 thoughts on “The Onion Omega2: The Latest Router Dev Board

      1. For what it’s worth the Zero has been fairly available the last couple weeks. I finally was able to pick one up without back ordering. Adafruit has them in stock now.

  1. “and also included USB, 802.11b/g/n, and a handful of GPIOs and a single UART”
    Should read “and also included USB, 802.11b/g/n, a handful of GPIOs and a single UART”

      1. Benchoff, you doofus!
        Won’t you understand that people of this ilk will only be satisfied when you withdraw the article, re-write the article employing all the corrections (note the root word: ‘correct’), and then re-publish the article, giving full credit to the REAL intellectual in this mix?
        Where’s your sense of propriety, man?

      2. Seriously, just take the 30 seconds per article to run this through the spelling/grammar checker built into most Office suites. It’ll make these guys shut up (about this anyway) and will be easier for the rest of us to read (yes, there are others who are bothered by this that don’t usually say anything!)

    1. You missed an opportunity to make a game of it, the “And Go”: Find the extra “and” and replace it with comma to win a permission to buy virtual commas for the next round.

  2. Shipping is undetermined, but they say it will be similar to the amount in their store. It is quoting me $7 to ship a breadboard to the US. So I guess this is a $12 or a $16 board.

      1. You might want to check the datasheet: “The controller contains five 10/100 Mbps Fast Ethernet ports, each containing four levels of Quality of Service, 802.1Q VLANs, port based VLANs and RMON statistic counters.”

  3. What happened to 802.11a. A few years ago loads of wifi offerings gave you that, particularly Atheros with the CM9 but they all seem to have disappeared and it really was excellent to be able to get out of the way of all the free wifi routers that ISPs offer.

    1. Probably too expensive, since that needs a 5GHz radio next to the 2.4GHz radio. Maybe the newer 802.11ac chipsets also support 802.11a (but why use 802.11a if you have 802.11ac?)?

    2. 802.11n and 802.11ac use the same 5GHz band as 802.11a. They use better modulation techniques, wider frequency bandwidth and they support MIMO, all resulting in faster networking. So 802.11a is obsolete.

  4. In the article they state the RFKIll signal of the wifi could be used to disable the radio. This is not bulletproof, in most radios this setting can be configured by software: radio always on, radio on when rfkill low, radio on when rfkill high and radio always off.

    You can try this if you have a linux laptop: switch off the hardware wireless switch
    run this command: rfkill unblock all

    In a few seconds your wifi and bluetooth will likely connect and function normally. Depending on the radio chip and firmware this command may screw up the status of your radio indicator lights, it may be correct, always on, always off or inverted.

    You can use the radio lights as nice status indicators for other things as well (eg. email received). Look in the datasheet of the radio soc on how to configure these output pins. Then you can write to the registers via debugfs on most drivers (eg ath9k).

  5. I would like to see something like this but with just Ethernet and PoE for power. With this kit, it would cost ~$30 to have a wired connection. You can get a Raspberry Pi or other SBC for that price.

  6. My omega device was great! But I found openWRT to be limiting, especially coming from using other SBC such as Beaglebone Black and RPi which relied on the more scalable OS ..Debian. Sure you need more RAM and Flash, but it makes the SBC significantly more flexible. And a Raspberry Pi Zero costs just as much as this ..If Integrated WiFi is a must, the CHIP is a great alternative for only $4 more.

    I’m sure some out there prefer OpenWRT to Debian and that’s cool. I personally like running Debian and on occasion ArchARMLinux on my SBCs.

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