At just 4.95 x 4.95 x 2.4 cm (1.9 x 1.9 x 0.9 in) in its CNC-milled aluminum enclosure, FriendlyELEC's NanoPi R28S may be one of the smallest dual-Gigabit Ethernet routers you can buy. The board runs a Rockchip RK3528A with four Cortex-A53 cores at 1.8 GHz and 1 GB of LPDDR4, paired with Realtek RTL8211F and RTL8111H Ethernet controllers, onboard WiFi 6, and Bluetooth 5.3 via an IPEX antenna connector. Storage comes from a microSD slot or an optional eMMC module. There are no USB data ports, no GPIO header, and no video output, so this is a purpose-built networking appliance rather than a general-purpose SBC.
The R28S is only the second FriendlyELEC board to include a dedicated USB-C serial console port, following the NanoPi R2S Plus in 2024. That means headless debugging no longer requires soldering to UART pads or hunting for a TTL adapter, a practical improvement for anyone running a soft router tucked behind a shelf. A second USB-C port handles 5V/2A power and eMMC firmware flashing, but neither carries data.
FriendlyELEC ships images for FriendlyWrt 25.12 (its OpenWrt fork), Alpine Linux 3.23, Debian 13 Core, Proxmox VE 8.2.7, Ubuntu 24.04 Core, and OpenMediaVault 8.0.6, all built on the Linux 6.1 LTS BSP kernel. FriendlyELEC publishes its FriendlyWrt build pipeline as Actions-FriendlyWrt on GitHub, a GitHub Actions workflow covering most NanoPi and NanoPC boards that receives ongoing automated releases, making it straightforward to compile customized firmware builds. Upstream OpenWrt does not yet carry official RK3528 support, though community efforts on the OpenWrt forum and third-party projects like ophub's Rockchip OpenWrt builds have produced working images for the SoC family. A community-maintained tracker documents where the RK3528 SoC stands in the mainline Linux kernel, separate from the vendor BSP the R28S currently ships on. The R28S competes with a growing roster of RK3528A networking boards, including the dual-port Radxa ROCK E20C and the quad-port Radxa E24C.
The NanoPi R28S is available now from FriendlyELEC's store at $20 (€18) for the bare board or $29 (€27) with the metal enclosure.
