Banana Pi BPI-R4 Low-cost Router SBC
wiki.banana-pi.org
wiki.banana-pi.org
Ralink never really figured out how to make good drivers nor how to sell chips nor make APs. Them getting acquired by MediaTek in 2011 was a sensible change.
And it took a long time of seemingly not much happening, slow buildup. MediaTek trying to be a force in Chromebooks with the high standards for drivers there had helped the company enormously, I'd wager, to get good. What a long struggle that must have been! I wonder how much was MediaTek, versus oems/manufacturers/google, doing the work.
Today MediaTek is executing incredibly well. Great great great board here with numberous generation leaps. Available way before anyone else. With a good driver story.
Qualcomm is still slowly getting mainlined/upstreamed, but still has one foot in their awful boat anchor qsdk model of development that makes actually supporting &using their hardware a nightmare. And they are just so much slower to ship anything. And they have such awful shopping game, such terrible availability. Compex seems to be the only company willing to put up with Qualcomm & actually sale SBC and they're absurdly expensive & not always reliable & the availability is slower & less reliable.
I really wish there was more real competition for wifi in general & wifi AP cards & solutions. MediaTek is at least here doing what others won't: making chips, supporting them with mainline Linux, and shipping those chips to lots of people who want to make boards& devices. I'll take it.