Episode: 1629
Title: HPR1629: Banana Pi - First Impressions
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1629/hpr1629.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 06:01:54

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It's first May 30th on October 2014.
This is an HPR episode 1,629 entitled But On A Pie First Impressions.
It is hosted by Mike Ray and is about 17 minutes long.
Feedback can be sent to Mike at Raspberry.org or by leaving a comment on this episode.
The summary is An On A Pie First Impressions.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
At 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
Bet your web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hello, welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
My name is Mike Ray.
First Impressions of the Banana Pie.
If you're a Linux head like me and you've not been living in a cave or on a desisland for the last two or three years,
you would have heard of the Raspberry Pi.
This is a single board computer about the size of a credit card.
It's quite a powerful little beast. It has an ARM processor and it runs Linux
and also one or two other operating systems which are a bit more obscure.
It has a general purpose input output pins as well which allow you to connect electronics
and control relays and switches and lights and sounders etc.
It's proved very very successful, very popular with hobbyists.
It was actually created for promoting education of computing, teaching of computing in schools.
I don't need really to reiterate everything about the Raspberry Pi because everybody out there
that's listening to HPR will have heard of it or even played with it.
There's been some shows on here about the Raspberry Pi.
A few days ago, a Banana Pie dropped through my letterbox
and I've been playing with it for a couple of days to run it and put it through its paces
and this show is my immediate first impressions of the board.
So what is it? How does it match up against the Raspberry Pi?
Well it's a similar beast. It's about the size of the Raspberry Pi.
A couple of millimeters bigger in both dimensions, width and length
and it has a lot common to the Raspberry Pi.
It has a 26 pin general purpose input output bus.
It has an SD card slot. It has a pair of USB ports.
I know the Raspberry Pi B plus has got four but the original B had two ports
as does the Banana Pie. It has an Ethernet port.
It has an analog audio jack and an RCA jack for composite video
and an HDMI port to connect to a monitor.
So those are all things which the Raspberry Pi has as well.
But the Banana Pie has some things that the Raspberry Pi doesn't.
It has a SATA connector for a hard drive which is really nice
and it has a micro USB OTG which I understand is an on-the-go port.
I think this is a bi-directional USB port and it has an onboard microphone
and twice as much RAM as the Raspberry Pi.
The processor on the Raspberry Pi is an ARM 6, a Broadcom 2708
on the Banana Pie. It's an all-winner. It's another ARM processor.
The GPU apparently, the graphics processing unit on the Raspberry Pi is
reported to be inferior to the Raspberry Pi but so I don't know much about that.
It runs slightly faster than Raspberry Pi.
Although the Raspberry Pi of course can be overclocked as can the Banana.
It's got twice as much memory as the Raspberry Pi which is the really attractive thing about it.
So how's it performed in the last couple of days? Well,
one of the things you notice online is that the Raspberry Pi has an absolutely massive,
massive following. It's really gone viral and the creators of the Raspberry Pi
originally thought they might sell 10,000 units but they today they've sold about 3.8 million.
And the online community is huge. There's lots of websites, lots of promoters,
lots of resellers, lots of people selling accessories for the Raspberry Pi.
The nice thing about the Banana Pie in its current model is things like the GPIO bus
is actually pin compatible with the Raspberry Pi. So lots of the accessories
which are designed to be used with the Raspberry Pi will work with the Banana Pie as well.
So images, operating systems, I went to the, I think I suppose it's LeMaker,
LeMaker, EAR, www.leMaker.com I think it is, it's in the show notes.
And on there, I struggled initially to find links to download images. There is a
Google Drive link, a couple of Dropbox links, a Microsoft OneDrive and something in
called ASUS Drive or something, I'm not sure about that. But I didn't initially notice the
FTP link. Both the Dropbox links are actually disabled because there's been so much traffic
that Dropbox have actually suspended the account. But the FTP link is in the show notes.
If you go to the FTP link, you will find images for Android, Arch Linux, something called
Bananian, Bananian Latest, Rasbian for Banana Pie and Lubuntu, which is Ubuntu with LXT-E desktop.
Interesting to see the Android image, but I've not tried that because as some of you already
know, I'm blind. So unless there's screen reader or something, I know that the Android handset,
like I use has got a screen reader on it, but I wouldn't know how to enable it. I probably
maybe try that later time. Anyway, I wrote initially an Arch Linux card because I thought the
Arch Linux would not have a desktop. So I wrote the Arch Linux card on my Debian desktop machine.
And just as with the Raspberry Pi image, it has two partitions. It has a FAT 16 partition
and an EXT 4 partition. And in the FAT 16 partition, that's the partition that the thing will boot from.
And on the Raspberry Pi, you'll find config.txt, cmdline.txt, fixup.l, fixup.dant, a couple of other
files, and kernel.img, which is the image, the kernel image. But on the Bananian Pie, you will see
UENV.txt, which appears to be the equivalent of cmdline.txt, and UImage, which is the kernel.
And interestingly, on the Arch image, kernel.img, cmdline and config are all there, although they're
not relevant to the Bananian Pie. So they've taken a Raspberry Pi image, put a UImage and a UENV
file in there, and it boots. And the repository that it downloads from when you do an update,
or you try and grab any packages, is actually the same. And when I did an upgrade,
I noticed that Raspberry Pi was flying by quite a lot. So I thought initially that it might not
reboot after I did an update. I thought maybe it got firmware that it wasn't going to work,
but it did reboot, so it's running basically the same Arch Linux. Then I tried Bananian
latest, and Bananian is actually basically Debian Weezy for ARM. And that worked very well.
I expanded the partition to fill the entire 8GB card, and it really works pretty much the way
a Raspberry Pi works, noticeably, when you look at the command for showing how much memory there is,
you will see that there is twice as much memory. So chances are it will perform a little bit better
with some tasks. But like I say, the GPU, the graphics processing unit, is rumored to be inferior
to the GPU on the Raspberry Pi. I don't know anything about that because being blind,
I'm not really interested in graphics. What I can say is, unlike the Raspberry Pi,
when I discovered the sound driver, unloaded the sound driver, and then installed eSpeak, speech
synthesizer, and eSpeakUp, the connector program that connects the SpeakUp screen reader to eSpeak,
it worked without stuttering, which the Raspberry Pi stutters very, very badly, and I'm actually
working on code to fix that at the moment. So the SpeakUp actually works out of the box on the
Bananian Pi, where it doesn't on the Raspberry Pi, at least using eSpeak anyway.
So to conclude, I should say a bit more about the physicalities of the board. The build quality,
a lot of people say that stuff coming out of China seems to be a general attitude
that everything that comes from China is rubbish, and now that is an attitude that annoys me a bit
because it just isn't true. And for decades now we've been using Chinese to manufacture cheap
electrical goods because we want to buy stuff at knockdown prices, and
you know, we want to buy t-shirts and CDs for five bucks. And now they're catching up and
making stuff for themselves, and they're actually making a pretty good job. The build quality of
this thing feels nice. So as obviously I can't see it, but it feels nice. The PCB is a little thinner.
Actually, it's about 53%, then I think we printed circuit board of the Raspberry Pi is 1.5
millimeters, and this is 1 millimeter. But you know, you put it in a case, and it's fine.
I've seen one or two reviews online, which are a bit negative, but that was back from April.
I think the code base has matured a little bit since then, but the online community is still
nothing like as big as for the Raspberry Pi. So it's perhaps not for the newbie just yet,
although of course some of the questions, which you might be asked about Raspberry Pi is for
a Linux newbie that, you know, it's not generally Raspberry Pi specific, it's just sort of Linux
specific. So some of the questions will be common to both, but for the newbie it's probably worth
waiting a little bit to see if the code base and the online community matures a little bit.
In the show notes, there are some links to downloads, and there's a link to an Australian
community that I found, which has got four rooms, but there's currently only about 370 members,
so it's quite small. And there's actually two versions of the show notes. There's the text
version on the HTML version, so have a read. And basically says everything that I've been
telling you about the banana pie. It's interesting little beast.
Oh, I should maybe say something about the price. Compared to the Raspberry Pi,
and the UK here, the Raspberry Pi from the likes of CPC or Final Elements 13, I think you can get
it for around 27, 28 quid, 28 great British pounds, something like that. The banana pie cost
me 43 from Amazon. There are a couple of other sellers I found later that selling it a bit cheaper,
but it is, what's that, 50% more expensive? I don't know. I'm not sure really whether that's worth
twice the RAM. It's maybe a little bit pricey, but I don't know, you know, it pays you money to
take your choice. A big old bone black, which is another single board computer, is perhaps a little
bit more expensive at a similar sort of power, but you know, there's lots of single board computers
out there. I think that's about it. Really? Don't think there's anything else to say?
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