Banana Pi: A $57 Rasperry Pi clone with a faster CPU, more memory

1. Question, forgive me for being ignorant but will this run window? Can I run something RAM intensive like live stock apps (TD ameritrade)? Will this beat Intel PC stick performance wise and price wise? Thanks!

   1. Microsoft announced a version of windows for RP in the last week or so (6/4/15).

2. I just ran an extensive benchmark comparison between the Raspberry and Banana Pi. You can find the results here: https://gleenders.blogspot.be/2014/07/banana-pi-benchmarks-banana-pi-vs.html

3. Test and Becnchmark vs Rapsi : https://hardware-libre.fr/2014/06/raspberry-vs-banana-hardware-duel/

   Banana seems to have great perf and compatibility. not a bad clone.

4. A Banana board is currently tested by the free developpers of HWL. We’ll see what it reallly is.

   https://hardware-libre.fr/2014/05/banana-pi-unboxing-first-impressions/

5. The Banana PI more powerful then the Raspberry pi

6. We are now try to build a great Banana Pi developer forum to help each other,
   we also hope you could join us and we could have fun togather,thanks
   https://forum.lemaker.org/ .
   [email protected]

7. I got the board as an engineering sample. Also was told the target price would be US$30 around instead of $50. I think those were re-seller or someone to sell his own board and get profits.

8. My RPI can play 1080p videos on Linux. Does this clone play it?

   1. I highly doubt it has hardware support via OpenMax that allows the RPi/Broadcom combo to do this

   2. yes,i can play 1080P too

   3. RTFM

9. OK ordered it..Just could not pass it up at that price. It has all the things the Pi doesn’t for about the same price. Sata connector, reset button, more ram, more speed. This should be a no brainer to setup as a media box or a low powered web surfing box laptop. And it has one more bonus you can run Android 4.2.2 on it. That clinched it for me.

   1. Tell us how it goes!

      1. Won’t get it for about a month. Coming from Hong Kong

      2. Ok I am reporting back.
         Welcome the age of the low cost mini computers.

         I have had the Banana Pi about 2 days. And have spent a total of
         4 hours with it.

         Things you should know.
         1) You need a 2amp 5V supply, I picked up a 2.5amp USB charger from
         Walgreens(local drug store) and it worked just fine. It uses a micro USB input
         to power the board.

         2) I recommend a good 8GB SD card to start with. I have a San Disk Class 10.The image for the Raspberry Pi image they provide requires an 8GB card.

         3) It does not come with any directions. Just a white box and a static bag. Just like raspberry pi’s. The website/forum have plenty of information for anyone to get started.

         I have tried both the Android and Raspberry Pi OS.

         They work and the UI performance makes my PI seem so slow.

         Installation, for Android
         After fixing my own mistake of not formatting the image correctly onto the SD drive
         the Android name came up as the Banana Pi booted.

         But alas the image file is set up for Chinese.
         I spent a little time guessing what Android line would allow me to configure this to

         English in the settings section. Once I found it I was on to my next challenge.
         The built in ethernet was set to on. I poked around in the settings until I found the location to swtich it to on in the settings. After that I was off to the races.

         You log onto the Play Store via Play.Google.com.
         I downloaded FireFox, Hangouts,

         I was able to surf the web, and and basically do anything I could do with my smart phone except with Android.
         I nabbed ESFile server and was able to connect to my NAS drive

         The performance was decent. I type pretty quickly and the keyboard input did not lag at all. The web pages came up in good order and basically it did very well.
         I am not sure everything is up and running and configured to my liking yet as I only spent about 2 hours on it but I could not find a fault or anything that I could not work around. Horrah a $60 dual core mini Android computer.

         On the Raspberry Pi Side, installed the image and it started up without a hitch, expect the keyboard was setup for the UK. The PI GUI was very responsive and really outperformed the Raspberry PI. That said I have read about some pinouts being

         different so not everything is the same.

         Next up on my plate is to try and get the SATA port going so I can see how this thing
         really flies with a real drive.

         So that’s my report for now. Would I recommend this for a novice, well I think
         with the support on the forums you can get by, for a semi pro if you want a low powered mini computer I dont see a better deal around, if so let me know.. 🙂

   2. Thanks for yous support,!

10. Still loving my Odroid-U3 from Hardkernel.
    It’s not a Raspberry Pi clone, but does offer a quad-core ARM processor, 2GB RAM, and can boot from SD or eMMC. It can run Linux or Android and XBMC. The board, case, 16GB eMMC, and power supply was $132 US total price, shipped from South Korea. The board alone is $59 US, but you are better off buying everything you need in one shot because shipping is a flat $25 fee.

    1. That’s a Samsung Exynos 5410 CPU isn’t it? Does that thing have on-board radios – like Wi-Fi/Bluetooth etc or does it only support interfaces for supplementary chips? I wanted one but couldn’t get to the bottom of the connectivity thing. In other words – does the Odroid-U3 ship with wireless connectivity out the box? Who wants a dev board that’s prone to security breaches by design???? Or is it rock-solid secure (sans radios) from the get-go????

11. A lot of people have been wanting a faster Raspberry Pi. But it’s a different processor and graphics card.

    Part of the reason why so many people use the RPi is because it’s well supported. I don’t really care but about physical dimension matching. If all the software development people have done for the various projects don’t work, there’s no reason to switch to a Pi clone. It’ll just basically be a different device.

12. With a real sata connection this really ups the game.

13. Winner!! Been hoping some one would do this. Cant wait to get one. $57 no problem.

14. Any word on the GPU? The Raspberry Pi’s just got open-sourced, another bonus. Hopefully this is the same graphics chip. Means you can tinker with SIMD and parallel programming for medical/financial processing and stuff – great package at this price.

    1. Mali-400MP2

15. Seems more like a cubieboard with the IR receiver and SATA jack

    1. The Cubieboard 2 and 3 do have SATA and IR.

    2. The cubieboard 3 is waaaay bigger than a a RPI though.

16. Hmm I wonder if it will be able run the Pi camera and distros. Very interesting.

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