Banana Pi

[Dirk Broer]

The Banana Pi family differs hugely from that of the Raspberry Pi. The arch version (nowadays called Banana Pi BPI-M1) was April 2014 brought out as an attempt at a slightly better (and bigger) Raspberry competitor, offering a dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU (when the raspberry still did with a ARM11), Gigabit ethernet, an IR sensor and a SATA connector, amongst others. It lacked however the communiuty, software and hardware support of the Raspberry.


Within the first Banana Pi generation are two branches that appeared around the time Raspberry brought out their improved Model B+. The first to emerge was in October 2014 the LeMaker-produced Banana Pro, followed April 2015 by the Sinovoip-produced Banana Pi BPI-M1+. Both companies had produced the original Banana Pi BPI-M1 and another variant: the Banana Pi BPI-R1 (October 2014, basically a Banana Pi BPI-M1 with four additional ethernet ports and WiFi). The differences between the Banana Pi Pro and the Banana Pi BPI-M1+ are mainly in the colour of the PCB and the placement of the Allwinner A20 SOC. LeMaker has it at the same place as the original Banana Pi (at the rearside), Sinovoip aka Banana-Pi.Org having the SOC on top.

But in 2015 Raspberry.org was developping the quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU equipped Raspberry Pi 2B, causing Banana-Pi.org to responded in April 2015 with the likewise (Allwinner A31s) equipped Banana Pi BPI-M2 (since discontinued), and in November 2015 with the octo-core ARM Cortex-A7 (Allwinner A83t) equipped Banana Pi BPI-M3 and in November 2016 the Banana Pi BPI-M2 Ultra.

Banana-Pi.org brings out a still increasing greater number of boards, such as in April 2016 the Raspberry Pi A+ like Banana Pi BPI-M2+ -where Banana-Pi.org again manages to offer much more features than the competing Raspberry product, such as a quad-core Cortex A7 (Allwinner H3), 8GB onboard eMMC, WiFi and BlueTooth and 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet. BTW: the M2+ comes in H3, Edu, H2+ ad H5 variants, of which the last one, the H5 is a hybrid 2nd/3rd generation banana as it features a 64-bit quad-core Cortex-A53 SOC. For those than can do with even less features there's since November 2017 the Banana Pi BPI-M2M aka Banana Pi M2 Magic. Other raspberry-inspired Banana boards are the Banana Pi BPI-M2 Berry (brought out in May 2017, finally having the same size as the Raspberry Pi family) and the Banana Pi BPI-Zero, that packs a quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 on a board the size of a Raspberry Zero (where that board still has to do with a single-core ARM11). The Banana Pi BPI-M64, introduced in November 2016 was no doubt inspired by the ARM Cortex-A53 CPU equipped Raspberry Pi 3B, as it features a likewise Allwinner A64 or R18, depending on the sub-version.


But Banana-Pi.org does quite original things too. They improved upon the Banana Pi BPI-R1 router with their 2017 Banana Pi BPI-R2, offering a MediaTek MT7623N (a Quad-core ARM Cortex-A7), Mali 450 MP4 GPU, 2G DDR3 SDRAM and a Mini PCIE interface. Another router-like product is the Banana PI BPI-W2. They also have since April 2015 the Banana Pi BPI-G1, which is a next generation of IoT hub with WiFi, Zigbee, and BT support. For those even deeper in the internet-of-Things (IoT) there's the Banana Pi BPI-D1, a SBC/camera combo


LeMaker has stopped making Banana called products after the Banana Pro and their 2nd generation now has music-inspired names such as the vaguely Raspberry compute module-like LeMaker Guitar, the LeMaker Piano and the LeMaker HiKey. These boards not even remotely look Raspberry-like.