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.
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.
This and support. My dad could set up a pi, and he doesn’t know what a kernel is or how to compile.
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.
Current prices for the 8gb pi5 are around £80 which is about $100, and it won’t ship until some-when next year.
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.
“More reasons to Avoid the Raspberry Pi”
I didn’t know we even had reasons to avoid it
I think the reasons are they are pushing a competing product.
No need, RaspberryPi has been avoiding us. Finding to purchase one has become a tiresome errand.
What if you really hate support and ease of finding images online?
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?
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.
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
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.
Yeah, I figured. I’ll stick to the Raspberries then, mainly because the “just work”™
That’s a shame.
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.
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.
Yeah they are a massive fuck around unless you already know how
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s the reason why Armbian exists. So those devices will keep having newer kernels and software. Read into the things.
??? 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.
It’s the software, stupid!
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 $60-80 8th gen Dell/Lenovo/HP USFF PCs off ebay.
SBCs just don’t seem very competitive currently because they’re quite expensive for what you get, and require specialized software releases, plus stuff like hardware transcoding never seems very well supported even though the chip can technically do it.
So you share my opinion: https://lemmy.world/comment/5500098:
For eg. for 100€ you can find an HP Mini with an i5 8th gen + 16GB of ram + 256GB NVME that obviously has a case, a LOT of I/O, PCIe (m2) comes with a power adapter and outperforms a RPi5 in all possible ways. Note that the RPi5 8GB of ram will cost you 80€ + case + power adapter + cable + bullshit adapter + SD card + whatever else money grab - the Pi isn’t just a good option.
I even went further on GPIOs and low level electronics here https://lemmy.world/comment/5500638:
RPi 2B+ for around 10$ 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.
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
Well, I do kinda want a new router (but would also need to switch from opnsense to openwrt).
I’ve better suggestions for you than that board… way better.
- https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-R3
- https://openwrt.org/toh/sinovoip/bananapi_bpi_r3_v1.0_v1.1?s[]=bananapi&s[]=bpi&s[]=r3
- https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org/?version=23.05.2&target=mediatek%2Ffilogic&id=bananapi_bpi-r3
There’s an upcoming board the BPI-R4 with optional Wifi and 10G SPF cage: https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-R4
Oh, waw, this is amazing. And exactly why I don’t follow this kind of things :). I don’t need a new router. But then again, need is such a weird word …
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]
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.
Damn, I got a Pi 4 8GB ram. Still planning on putting recalbox on it though.
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 Tagging Lemmy Post ‘Banana Pi BPI-M7 - More Reasons to Avoid the Raspberry Pi’ (https://lemmy.world/post/8603826): #Selfhosted
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I assume this bot is for mastodon users or something?
Yes, see here: https://github.com/db0/lemmy-tagginator
Would it help to add a “what is this” type link. Or maybe “about bot”
ye I’ll add something soon
I recently bought a Quartz64
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.
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
