Onion Omega2 Pro

The spec sheet says 512 MB of memory. The board has 128 MB. The other 384 MB is a swap file the firmware keeps on the eMMC flash, a few millimetres from the RAM it stands in for, and OpenWrt reports the sum as if it were all real. It reads like a sleight of hand, and the first instinct is to feel cheated. Sit with it instead. This is a board that costs less than a good dinner, built around a Wi-Fi router chip, and somebody decided that 128 MB of DRAM backed by a generous swap file was the honest way to give you room to work without pushing the price up. Once you see it that way the board makes more sense, not less. What you are buying is MIPS Linux that fits in your palm for tens of dollars, and the memory arithmetic is part of how it stays that cheap.

The chip is a MediaTek MT7688, a MIPS24KEc core running at 580 MHz — the same class of part that sits inside a great many cheap routers. Around it sit the 128 MB of RAM, 8 GB of eMMC, 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n) that can host an access point and act as a client at the same time, a USB 2.0 host port, and a LiPo charging circuit on a JST-PH connector so the board can run from a battery or fall back to one. The whole thing measures 73 by 44 mm.

It was the grown-up member of a Kickstarter lineage. Onion’s first Omega shipped in 2015, the Omega2 followed in 2016, and the Pro came later on Crowd Supply, where the campaign closed on 31 January 2019 at $56,964 against a $10,000 goal — 569 percent, from 546 backers. What is unusual is what happened after. The campaign page still lists the board in stock in 2026, Onion’s own store still sells it for $49, and the firmware repositories on GitHub still collect tagged releases, the most recent I saw cut in mid-2025. The board shipped on an Onion build of OpenWrt 18.06 with a 4.14 kernel; the maintained line has since moved to 23.05.3, though there is no longer a Pro-specific image — the Omega2+/2S+ build carries the Pro now, with extra packages layered on where needed. Much of the hardware in this lab came from vendors that folded. Onion did not, and that is worth saying, because a crowdfunded gadget whose maker is still shipping software seven years on is the exception, not the rule.

MIPS is a first-class target in the release engineering platform, and a board like this — a whole MIPS Linux system for the price of a cable — is the cheapest way to keep one on the bench. It is still sold as of 2026-07-03, which is its own small argument for using it: the target does not disappear the moment you commit to building for it.

It came through Crowd Supply, though whether it arrived as a bare board or in one of the expansion bundles I have not pinned down — nor what it is running now, nor a photo. Onion’s own documents also disagree with themselves on one small detail of the board — that one is on the specifications page, where it belongs.

Sources: Onion’s own Omega2 Pro product and documentation pages, the Crowd Supply campaign page (verified directly for the funding figures), CNX Software’s 2018 review, the OnionIoT firmware repositories on GitHub, and the MediaTek MT7688 datasheet — which is marked MediaTek Confidential on its own cover, so it is linked but not mirrored here. The specifications, and a note on the figures that only one source states, are on the specifications page.