WiTi Board - Open & Extensible Router & NAS Platform

A very nice router/switch/NAS/miniserver hackable & extensible board powered by MT7621A.

PROJECT OWNER
benn huang
Shenzhen, China
$28,656 USD total funds raised
241% funded on September 11, 2015

Features

The board uses MT7621 high performance router SoC, supports open source OpenWRT OS. The board’s dimension is relatively small 16cm x 10cm, about three credit card in a row.

The key features are:

MT7621A Dual-Core 880Mhz (4 threads)
256MB Memory (up to 512MB)
2.4G WiFi (supports IEEE 802.11b/g/n, up to 300Mbps)
5G WiFi (supports IEEE 802.11a/n/ac, up to 867Mbps)
WAN port x2, LAN port x4(both are 1000Mbps)
SATA 3.0 x2(supports 3.5 inch HDD)
USB3.0 x1
microSD x1
RTC battery for storage application
30 Expansion Ports(Including USB, I2S, JTAG, UART, GPIO)
16MB SPI NOR Flash(Optional for bigger size Nand Flash)
4-pins serial debug port
RF Antenna Connector x4
WPS/GPIO Key x1, Reset Key x1
Power LED x1, SATA LED x 1, WiFi LED x 2, LAN LED x4

Why did we decide to develop the WiTi board?

I hope to be able to deploy a reliable and low-power storage server, which is used to host the company’s CMS and git code repositories instead of the heavy, high energy consumption PC server. Similarly, I also hope that families have their own storage server to share their beautiful music and wonderful pictures and videos anywhere at any time. I have used some of the other storage products before. Although some of them are very good, but none of them can meet my needs. I need a product which can meet my needs and at the same time I can freely modify it . When I saw the specification of MT7621,I felt very excited. I believe I can build a team to develop such an open platform. So people with similar ideas can concentrate on developing the real final products without wasting too much time!

What’s the status of the board?

We have manufactured the WiTi board twice 10pcs for each before the campaign begin.

Now, We use our WiTi board as router in office everyday(I’m so proud!).

We need some funds to do a massive production, design our own cases, software, etc. The hardware and firmware are all ready and carefully tested. We create our official forum discussing our products. We will open source our software and schematics, some of them already published at our own ftp server. You can even make your firmware right now! We will keep improving our docs & Wikis.

What can be done on the WiTi platform?

Of course, this board can be used as a good performance router. With the two SATA3 ports on board, we can easily create Soft-Raid1 by mdadm tools. After installing Samba service and NFS service, the board turns into a reliable storage server. We can also install CMS or git code repositories on the board. Wow! This board can provide all functions I need, and the consumption of electricity is very low.

What’s more, WiTi has 30 expansion ports(including USB, JTAG, UART, I2S, GPIO..). We can connect to Arduino by USB extension, so that WiTi can connect to thousands of sensors; we can make WiTi as a nice wireless HiFi with the I2S extension; we can also use the GPIO extension to control electric light, Motor, and so on.