A new hardware design for home and industrial use

by Michael Tremer, December 4, 2015

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It is starting to get cold in Europe as the year is coming to an end. That gives us time to go back into the lab and design new hardware that I would like to present to you in this post.

Lightning Wire Labs and TX-Team mainly supply IPFire hardware appliances for businesses. Our bigger units are able to run networks with thousands and users and are doing that of course in companies, universities and authorities all over the world. However, sometimes something smaller is needed.

There is a need to connect smaller offers to the corporate VPN, there are mobile machines or trucks that need to be able to communicate with the headquarters to submit their location or download details for the next job. A small sized device with not much power consumption is required for this task which also has to be reliable and cheap. Recently we designed the IPFire Prime Box for this purpose, but we thought that there are still many things that we could make even better.

The IPFire Duo Box

The result will be called the “IPFire Duo Box” and currently only exists in a prototype state. And it is awesome. Like the IPFire Prime Box it comes with a power-efficient ultra-low voltage dual core processor, 2GB memory and a built-in SSD for storage which’s size was increased from 8GB to 32GB.


A prototype of the IPFire Duo Box


Into the box we put two Gigabit Ethernet controllers and a 2x MIMO WiFi controller with up to 300 MBit/s. On top of that we can optionally add a LTE/3G/GSM modem that will connect this little box to the Internet no matter where it is. A wide voltage power input makes it installable in many machines, on trucks and so on and we are also able to deliver it in a water-proof case and much more… Overall it is pretty extensible so that we are able to customise it for many environments.

In its standard edition it is not only interesting for our business customers to integrate it into their setups. It is also small and efficient in a home or small office and comes with all the interfaces and features you need.

Therefore we will offer a very competitively priced consumer version because we hear very often from the frustration of many people with the products that are out on the market and want to make a good alternative available for those who care about good quality and want to replace their ISP’s router with a tiny IPFire Box.

The wait for this won’t be long. We are planning to have this product ready in January and are looking for people who want to give this a good test. Stay tuned!