Why wouldn’t you do this

There are plenty of reasons why building your own router is a bad idea. The most important one is that you will not save money. By the time you get the parts it would be cheaper just to buy a mid-range router. The other factor is time. Tweaking builds, reflashing and subsequent debugging can be a real time sink for even the most experienced geek. That also brings up the last reason you wouldn’t want to do this. If you are not comfortable with build tools this process can be a real nightmare.

Why would you do this

If those reasons do not scare you off then there are some great opportunities that await you. The coolest thing about OpenWRT is that it can give an introduction to working with and developing for embedded systems. Once you have a working system you also have a flexible playground for exploring the wonderful world of networking. Lastly like all great engineering challenges we do them because we can!