I have recently been following a trend of pocket-size travel routers, and I was looking forward to very much to get one myself. These tiny, usb powered routers are very capable and can be very useful when traveling so that I avoid connecting my devices to bad hotel WiFi.
When traveling, I can’t use the hotel’s wired connection to connect my phone or laptop, as these devices don’t have an ethernet port. Even so, I would only be able to connect one at a time, that is if I don’t carry a network switch and a bunch of ethernet cables with me, which sounds silly to me as a type this.
The problem with these travel routers is that they are quite expensive, costing maybe more than an actual good router. Here are some options that I was aiming for on AliExpress:
The Beryl AX is much faster than the Opal, but costs almost double.
In the software side of things, these run a proprietary firmware, which is not bad since they even provide OpenVPN, WireGuard and Tailscale support out of the box, which are features that I would appreciate very much on a travel router as I would be able to have my VPN already setup everywhere I go.
After many frustrating months of waiting for a sale, I decided that I would be better off making my own travel router, and for that I used the good old Raspberry Pi.
I found a piece software called OpenWRT , which is an open source Linux based firmware for routers in general, with support for thousands of devices, including Raspberry Pi support. It does support setting up VPNs as well.
The Raspberry Pi 4 has a Gigabit port, 5GHz wi-fi, 2x USB 3.0 ports, 2x USB 2.0 ports and is powered via USB-C. It is the perfect fit for my travel router project. It costs similar to an equivalent on AliExpress but it has the advantage of being a whole computer and has a much more computing power.
All I needed to do was to flash OpenWRT to the microSD card and it was already working out of the box.
The raw Raspberry Pi looks aren’t as appealing as te GL.iNet travel routers, but thanks to 3D printing I can print a good looking case. Here’s the case model that I printed for this project:
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