ASRock Announces Smart Home IoT Router

[Julio Urquidi]

The ASRock X10 is an AC1300 wireless router with an integrated Zigbee controller. Designed for smart home environments, customers can use the X10 to control lights, utilities and security products, and all else that would fall under the “smart” device type, as well as set up related functions like geofencing and scenes.

Aside from its smart home capabilities, the X10 wireless router capabilities include maximum link rates of 400 Mbps at 2.4 GHz and 867 Mbps at 5 GHz, MU-MIMO, beamforming, parental controls, VPN service, and remote access to USB attached storage.

Physical interfaces for the X10 include five Ethernet ports (1xWAN and 4 LAN) and two USB ports (1xUSB 3.0 and 1 USB 2.0.

The X10 can be managed onsite and remotely using ASRock’s Router app, giving access to files on an attached USB drive, controlling devices while away from home, or manage other X10 and G10 routers. The app can convert a mobile device to work like an IR remote control. ASRock has a cloud-database that can give your phone the capability to control IR-based devices, like TVs and media players.

The ASRock X10 has an MSRP of $139, and is available at Newegg and Amazon.

 

[pete y testing]

wonder what security features it have to control those connected IoT devices apart from just controlling them

 

[RMerlin]

wonder what security features it have to control those connected IoT devices apart from just controlling them

I was thinking about that earlier. You know what might be interesting? Some kind of autolearn mode for firewall configuration. You'd take a new IoT device, set it in autolearn mode, and use it for a few days. After that, you'd review a list of remote server and ports accessed by the device, decide which of these you want to allow, and apply these auto-generated firewall rules. That would be a nice way for people to tighten security around IoT devices.

Time to start hunting for GPL, then we'll see what's the "secret sauce" in their case...

 

[RMerlin]

Interesting. No GPL on their website, but the firmware was a simple squashfs so I was able to easily unpack it. It seems to be OpenWRT-based, which is nice.

merlin@ubuntu-dev:~/fmk/trunk/fmk/rootfs$ more etc/openwrt_release 
DISTRIB_ID="OpenWrt"
DISTRIB_RELEASE="Bleeding Edge"
DISTRIB_REVISION="unknown"
DISTRIB_CODENAME="barrier_breaker"
DISTRIB_TARGET="ipq806x/generic"
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="OpenWrt Barrier Breaker unknown"
DISTRIB_TAINTS="no-all busybox override"

 

[Threska49]

Interesting although I wonder how this compares to a zigbee hub?

 

[thiggins]

Don't get suckered by the marketing. Throwing a Zigbee/Zwave/Thread radio into a router is all vendor needs to proclaim it an IoT router. Having that radio DO something is another thing entirely.

The doing is going to be done by Alexa, Siri and other cloud AI. Routers, IoT hubs, etc. just provide connectivity and hopefully first line of security by watching outbound connections.