Plans

Building our OpenWrt firewall on a Raspberry Pi 5

Dave Warnock

Dave Warnock

— 2 min read
Building our OpenWrt firewall on a Raspberry Pi 5

Starting the Pi build. The case is going to need a small extra cutout for the 52Pi 2.5gb extra ethernet (plus m.2 nvme board).

Some in progress building photos

Pi 5 with full set of thermal pads added. Also the 4 legs for the 52pi hat which will add extra ethernet and m.2 nvme
Waveshare cooling fan added
Gpio extension pins added
52pi hat added and test fit into the case
The case needs the top left hole hole extending as the ethernet port is larger than the usb port it was designed for.
All the boxes needed plus the assembled firewall. Just the m.2 nvme drive to add and then software installation can start.

On the boat one ethernet port (the one I designate as WAN) will connect to our Digital Yacht WL510 WiFi booster which is connected to the big WiFi antenna halfway up our mizzen mast.

The other ethernet port will connect to a standard WiFi hub. That will provide a wired ethernet connection to our Pi5 running Home Assistant and WiFi for everything else.

If/when we add a 4g extender (to pickup mobile phone signals from further away) then the WL510 will be either connected to the 4g extender or the antenna will be directly connected.

If we ever get starlink then that would also connect to the 4g extender and it's web interface would allow us to control which (WiFi, 4g or Starlink) is used to connect to the Internet at any time.

Digital Yacht assume you won't have a separate firewall but they don't give much control or information about what is inside their boxes and I'd rather have extra control.

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