Lessons from the OpenWrt One and a sneak peek at the OpenWrt Two
Denver G
The Teardown 2025 schedule is not yet finalized.
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The OpenWrt One and OpenWrt Two are recent entrants to the wireless router market, part of an industry that is becoming more closed and locked down over time. The OpenWrt One was the first ever router designed specifically to run and ship with stock OpenWrt, and the OpenWrt Two continues that tradition, adding more ports, features, and speed. These routers give back control to the device owners, letting them fix and modify their hardware and software to their heart’s content.
For a long time the OpenWrt project has wanted to create its own hardware, to showcase the best of what OpenWrt has to offer, and to provide a shining example of how to do both router hardware and software right. We’ll talk about how we got there with the OpenWrt One, and what we learned along the way, from design and testing, to fulfillment, to all the necessary certifications.
We will dive in to the FCC certifications in particular, which we spent a lot of extra time and effort on, both to ensure the device was completely compliant and safe for sale in the USA, but also to show router manufacturers that the FCC has no problem with certifying devices that let the user change and modify their software. The One has dispelled significant myths in this area, which had previously been used by other router manufacturers to claim that they cannot let you reinstall and modify software on your router, which is both incorrect, and a violation of the GPL and other software right to repair agreements of Linux and other software they’ve chosen to use.
Lastly, we will update you on the state of the OpenWrt Two, the next generation built-for-OpenWrt router. We’ll give you a rundown of all the different components, how we sourced them, and which chips are brand new and how we adapted them for the OpenWrt use case. We’ll also discuss the software that we wrote to make it all work together.
Join us for an exciting look at these routers of the future, which give you all the rights and freedoms to modify and fix your router’s hardware and software as you see fit!