So now I run as router/everything x86 with a bunch of 10g/sfp ports and a couple of r7800 flashed with openwrt as purely AP
It's also just so so striking to me that it's been most of a decade with Compex as the only company making add-on cards. There are some clones (Wallystech), but there's just like no market here. Qualcomm clearly Does Not Give A Fuck about selling chips to anyone else. No one else cares about add-on cards. The whole access-point market perpetuates on the vastest wave of apathy & disregard.
> With absurd constraints that make them hard to use in a normal system (weird shape, weird power needs).
hahaha. i had one AP built with pcie > minipcie attached to custom bracket to hold extra large card. and 5v stolen from sata port.
when it came time to rebuild it, i just gave up and went the route i described above.
Let's at least probe a little bit here. Is this a "fact" because of good inherent reasons? Or is this a "fact" because of circumstance?
In general, show your thinking. Why do you feel this way? Let's have something to discuss, to see where we might meet or where we can reasonably disagree.
https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-network-wireless
You just put them in a good location and run a wire to your switch.
Or you can get APs that support a mesh configuration and set them up wherever with 1 connected to your switch.
Alas good wifi cards are extremely hard to procure and to fit to boxes. You can maybe get someone to sell you a $200+ AP-class wifi6 board.
Then you need some way to actually put it in a computer. Many are oversized mPCIe. We are starting to see some m.2 but it's rare & again they're likely to be oversized. Some have crazy power requirements, like having teo lugs to provide 5V on.
This is by far the worst served aspect of personal computing & it's such a shame. I with the adding card market existed. And many how great it would be if USB chipsets could be reliable AP. Maybe they have gotten better, but after years of religiously buying everything Alfa made & trying to see how good an AP it'd be before falling over, it feels like a relatively simple ask that would make the world of difference (lots of modest sized APs everywhere) is so unlikely to happen. For no good reason that I can tell.