The Banana Pi BPI-M7 single board computer is equipped with up to 32GB RAM and 128GB eMMC flash, and features an M.2 2280 socket for one NVMe SSD, three display interfaces (HDMI, USB-C, MIPI DSI), two camera connectors, dual 2.5GbE, WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2, a few USB ports, and a 40-pin GPIO header for expansion.

  • DaGeek247@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Is it $60 or less? Everytime one of these alternative boards with an assload of more features pops up, nobody bothers to mention the price. Obviously we could spend more money to get more features, that’s what spending more money does. You can’t replace something without actually offering an alternative. The pi’s biggest selling point was that it was cheaper than a steak dinner. If you dont match or beat that, you aren’t actually competing with the pi.

    • Oisteink@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      This and support. My dad could set up a pi, and he doesn’t know what a kernel is or how to compile.

    • Lutra@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Thanks for saying this. It’s features at price point.

      “It’s better than the Pi at only 3x the price.”

      And what’s with the “Avoid the Raspberry PI” sentiment? They are hard to get (?). I’ve been using the Pi for forever, and have zero ‘product’ complaints that would make me want to "Avoid the Pi’. If anything, I have plans for more. Again, the price - A Zero2W is $15 MSRP. For $15, You can put that in everything. A Pi4 is $35. Its just a great deal.

    • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Current prices for the 8gb pi5 are around £80 which is about $100, and it won’t ship until some-when next year.

    • AbidanYre@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It looks like it’s ~$100. But when I’ve used similar SBCs in the past the issue ends up being drivers. Even if something is faster and better specced than a RasPi, you end up outside that ecosystem with very little in the way of support for whatever oddball hardware your board has.

  • Virkkunen@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    “More reasons to Avoid the Raspberry Pi”

    I didn’t know we even had reasons to avoid it

    • MeanEYE@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      No need, RaspberryPi has been avoiding us. Finding to purchase one has become a tiresome errand.

      • TCB13@lemmy.worldOP
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        1 year ago

        What if you really hate the fact that The RPi foundation is being hostile against people nowadays with proprietary PCIe connectors, telemetry, requiring a custom flash tool to get SSH and whatnot?

  • ck_@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    My experience with Banana PIs is that they require some obscure kernel to run because the developers cannot be bothered to bring their hardware support and drivers upstream. Same was true for uboot. Has any of that changed in the meantime? If not, that this is a no go for me.

    • RegalPotoo@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, this is an absolute blocker for me. If its not supported upstream then it’s a no-go. I don’t want to be running whatever hacked up Ubuntu image the manufacturer put together then stopped updating in 3 months when the next iteration gets churned out

    • Pumpkin Escobar@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s the same, I picked up an Orange Pi 5 plus on sale and didn’t even think about the kernel and module driver situation. It’s rough. Joshua-Riek/ubuntu-rockchip and the other contributors do great work to un-fuck the situation and get a non-screwy ubuntu install cobbled together, but in the comments for issues even he gives off a “well, the situation is shit” sort of vibe.

      I won’t buy another rockchip sbc.

    • CmdrShepard@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      That’s too bad because the specs OP listed are pretty great plus I’d love to see the Raspberry Pi Foundation (or whichever corporate entity controls production and sales) knocked down a few pegs due to their anti-consumer behavior over the last several years.

      • ck_@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        Definitely, the specs are nice and I also cannot say I’m a huge fan of the RPi foundation. More competition in this space would be great, but not having mainline support is just too much of a hassle.

    • cucumber_sandwich@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I had the same impression until I dusted off my banana pi one last month and there was an up-to-date armbian image for it. Totally pleasant surprise.

      • ck_@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        Fair, but I’m not running armbian, so my requirements boils down to: Must run any up to date Linux distro without having to side-load custom kernels or anything. Should work out of the box.

  • dauerstaender@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    Does it’s run upstream Debian or SUSE? No? A custom distribution with proprietary binary blobs and no updates after one year you say? Sounds shit.

    • Jason2357@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      This is the only question that really matters. If it’s overpriced? meh, it’s a cheap alternative to a NUC. But if it’s going to be stuck on obsolete software forever, run.

      • TCB13@lemmy.worldOP
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        1 year ago

        That’s the reason why Armbian exists. So those devices will keep having newer kernels and software. Read into the things.

    • TCB13@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      ??? Armbian is open-source. Some boards eventually get stuff from Armbian merged back into upstream Debian however you’re still better running Armbian as it comes with optimizations to avoid burning SD cards etc.

  • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    I dunno, this is going to be expensive, unless you need the GPIO or the smallest size possible I’m not sure what the advantage is over spending $150 or so on one of those mini Intel N100 boxes with dual 2.5GbE, they are x86 so can easily run normal software like Opnsense or similar without worrying about support going away down the road.

    Or without 2.5GbE just one of those $60-80 8th gen Dell/Lenovo/HP USFF PCs off ebay.

    SBCs just don’t seem very competitive currently because they’re quite expensive for what you get, and require specialized software releases, plus stuff like hardware transcoding never seems very well supported even though the chip can technically do it.

    • TCB13@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      So you share my opinion: https://lemmy.world/comment/5500098:

      For eg. for 100€ you can find an HP Mini with an i5 8th gen + 16GB of ram + 256GB NVME that obviously has a case, a LOT of I/O, PCIe (m2) comes with a power adapter and outperforms a RPi5 in all possible ways. Note that the RPi5 8GB of ram will cost you 80€ + case + power adapter + cable + bullshit adapter + SD card + whatever else money grab - the Pi isn’t just a good option.

      I even went further on GPIOs and low level electronics here https://lemmy.world/comment/5500638:

      RPi 2B+ for around 10$ nowadays (…) other brand new cheap SBCs such as the Radxa Zero 3W or the Zero 3E or even the Raspberry Pi Zero W. The point is that it doesn’t make sense to buy a standard and expensive RPi for things that don’t require much CPU. If you don’t really need an OS and you code C or MicroPython a 3.5$ ESP32 board as well.

      • bruhduh@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I agree with you, i wanted raspberry pi for my EE practice in uni but it was way too expensive for what it gives and i bought raspberry pi pico 16mb type c for 2$ on sale, for those who want compact pc to tinker with it’s better to buy used mini pc because it’ll be much better bang for the buck

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzB
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    1 year ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    IP Internet Protocol
    LTS Long Term Support software version
    NAS Network-Attached Storage
    NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
    PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express
    PSU Power Supply Unit
    RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
    SBC Single-Board Computer
    SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access

    [Thread #294 for this sub, first seen 22nd Nov 2023, 14:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

  • splendoruranium@infosec.pub
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    1 year ago

    Unless it can natively run all the existing ready-to-go Pi images and software packages and will also receive community support when I ask for help in a Pi-adjacent forum it’s not really going to be a competitor to the Pi. The hardware is pretty much irrelevant.

    • TCB13@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      Do you research very well before buying other boards than a Pi. It may be for you or now, depends a lot on your use-case.

    • TCB13@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      The full PCIe slot on those boards is just gold. I have a NanoPi M4v2 that also has PCIe in a M2 slot, used a cheap board to get 6 sata ports out of it.

      • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        I actually got the B version but there is an adapter if I change my mind down the road. I wanted the wireless and ir sensor