OTBR future platform support

[Gideon Kanikevich]

Hi,

I was wondering if there are any plans to extend the platform support of Openthread border router.

My current understanding is that it is only officially supported on mini PCs running Linux (Raspi and Beaglebone).

The reason I ask this is because it would be useful to be able to have a mains powered accessory be a border router if it had both Thread and WiFi capabilities.

Hopefully I'm not missing anything obvious!

- Gideon

[Stefan Schmidt]

Hello Gideon.

On 13.04.21 01:51, Gideon Kanikevich wrote:
> Hi,
> I was wondering if there are any plans to extend the platform support of
> Openthread border router.
> My current understanding is that it is only officially supported on mini
> PCs running Linux (Raspi and Beaglebone).

I would assume the reason these two haven been chosen to show case OTBR
is that they are popular and easily available.

> The reason I ask this is because it would be useful to be able to have a
> mains powered accessory be a border router if it had both Thread and
> WiFi capabilities.

There is nothing that stops you from running OTBR on a different device.
Well, as long as it runs Linux. For MacOS or Windows I can't say much.

The parts that make Raspi and Beaglebone special here is that the
OpenThread team has doen the extra mile to integrate it into the
existing system with scripts, etc for a good ootb experience.

There is no code that binds it to these devices though, I have been
playing around with building OTBR with Yocto/OE and running it on a
different ARM device without problems.

regards
Stefan Schmidt

[Jonathan Hui]

You may take a look at https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf/tree/master/examples/openthread/ot_cli

It's relatively recent, but gives an RTOS-based option using ESP32.

--

Jonathan Hui

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[Stuart Longland]

On 13/4/21 9:51 am, Gideon Kanikevich wrote:
> I was wondering if there are any plans to extend the platform support of
> Openthread border router.
> My current understanding is that it is only officially supported on mini
> PCs running Linux (Raspi and Beaglebone).

We've been using the "Revolution Pi"s for running the OpenThread Border
Router here, largely because it's basically a Raspberry Pi 3 Compute
Module in a DIN-rail mounted case, so it "looks the part" in an
industrial installation.

We've also used Advantech x86-based industrial PCs running Debian as
well. You have to un-pick what the bootstrap scripts are doing a little
bit but once you do that, the same concepts can be applied to other
platforms without much fuss.

OpenThread Border Router runs about the same on both x86 and ARM. I did
try my hand with cramming it into a Teltonika RUT-955 router, and the
problem there was one of toolchains: they use an ancient version of
OpenWRT on those things. I suspect with a more modern OpenWRT platform,
it'd work just fine.

Regards,
--
Stuart Longland (aka Redhatter, VK4MSL)

I haven't lost my mind...
...it's backed up on a tape somewhere.

[Ole Sæther]

I have been running OTBR in Docker for more than a year on a Synology NAS with no issues. I also run it in Linux on a PC. Docker image and instructions here:
https://github.com/osaether/otbr-mqtt-sn

Ole