<h2 id="the-banana-pi---first-impressions">The Banana Pi - First Impressions</h2>
<p>They say duplication is the sincerest form of flattery, substitute the word of your choice for 'duplication'.</p>
<p>The Banana Pi is made in China and bears an uncanny resemblance to the Raspberry Pi.</p>
<p>Not just the name, the board is fractionally larger, some of the features on the board are similarly placed:</p>
<ul>
<li>26-pin GPIO</li>
<li>3.5mm analogue audio jack</li>
<li>RCA composite video jack</li>
<li>SD card slot</li>
</ul>
<p>There are things the RPI does not have:</p>
<ul>
<li>Power button</li>
<li>uBoot button</li>
<li>Microphone</li>
<li>USB-otg port (otg = on-the-go, a bi-directional USB port)</li>
<li>SATA connector</li>
</ul>
<p>The processor is a dual-core running slightly faster than the Raspberry Pi, although to be fair, of course, the RPI can be over-clocked.</p>
<p>The Banana Pi has twice the RAM and a dual-core processor.</p>
<p>The SoC is the ARM Allwinner A20.</p>
<h3 id="getting-my-hands-on-a-banana-pi">Getting my Hands on a Banana Pi</h3>
<p>My first Banana dropped through the letterbox a couple of days ago.</p>
<p>Thanks to some kind soul on the Raspberry Pi Facebook group who described the connectors on the edges of the board I narrowly avoided plugging the power supply into the USB-otg port. The power micro-USB is on the underside of the board between the SATA power and data connectors which are on the upper side of the board.</p>
<p>Can't really say much about it because I can't actually see the build quality, but it feels nice. The PCB is fractionally thinner than the RPI.</p>
<h3 id="problems">Problems</h3>
<p>I had an initial struggle to find a download link for any images.</p>
<p>The downloads page of lemaker.org has a two row table on it which appears to be upside-down and it has links to Google-drive, two different public DropBox links, a MS One-Drive link, and something I didn't initially find, an FTP link.</p>
<p>Both of the DB links are duff because they have suspended the account because of excessive traffic.</p>
<p>This is the FTP download link:</p>
<pre><code><a href="https://filez.zoobab.com/bananapi/mirror/">https://filez.zoobab.com/bananapi/mirror/</a></code></pre>
<h3 id="available-images">Available Images</h3>
<p>When I found the FTP page I grabbed images for:</p>
<ul>
<li>Arch Linux</li>
<li>Bananian-latest</li>
<li>Lubuntu</li>
<li>Raspbian</li>
</ul>
<p>I downloaded and extracted all of these images to my Debian desktop machine and tried to write and boot them in succession.</p>
<p>The first I tried was Arch, on the assumption that would not have a desktop installed.</p>
<p>After writing the card I looked at it on my Debian machine with parted and it appeared to have two partitions. As with the Raspberry Pi there is a small FAT16 partition and a bigger ext4 partition.</p>
<p>The FAT partition contained the same files as the Raspberry Pi:</p>
<ul>
<li>config.txt</li>
<li>cmdline.txt</li>
<li>kernel.img</li>
</ul>
<p>And some others I can't remember.</p>
<p>In addition it contained:</p>
<ul>
<li>uEnv.txt</li>
<li>uImage</li>
</ul>
<p>It appears uEnv.txt is equivalent to the Raspberry Pi cmdline.txt file, and uImage is, of course, the kernel.</p>
<p>So oddly it has the files for the RPI and it's own in the FAT partition.</p>
<p>Then I tried Bananian, and this appears to be Debian Wheazy for ARM.</p>
<p>Similar story with the FAT partition.</p>
<p>It is a very minimal installation which has little more than the Linux Standard Base (LSB) packages. I like this because I like to have control.</p>
<h3 id="sound-and-stuff">Sound and Stuff</h3>
<p>I found a review from April this year that said the sound driver snd-bcm2835 was not available. At the name snd-bcm2835 my heart sank because I expected the BPI to have the same stuttering text-to-speech problems as the RPI.</p>
<p>Not expecting much I did, as root:</p>
<pre><code>apt-get install alsa-base alsa-utils</code></pre>
<p>Looking through /lib/modules/... blah blah I found a driver called:</p>
<pre><code>snd-aaci.ko</code></pre>
<p>I did:</p>
<pre><code>modprobe snd-aaci</code></pre>
<p>And then:</p>
<pre><code>speaker-test</code></pre>
<p>And I got pink noise!</p>
<p>Next I did:</p>
<pre><code>apt-get install espeakup
update-rc.d espeakup defaults
modprobe speakup_soft</code></pre>
<p>And speakup burst into life with no stuttering!</p>
<h3 id="immediate-conclusions">Immediate Conclusions</h3>
<p>The online community and code-base for the Banana Pi is not yet very mature, and because the origin of the beast is China, a lot of what's out there is in Chinese.</p>
<p>But it is growing. And after all, it took the RPI a while to take off and go ballistic.</p>
<p>At the moment I would say the Banana Pi is not for the faint-hearted or the total newbie, although, a lot of newbie questions are generic and don't have machine-specific answers.</p>
<h2>Links</h2>
<p>LeMaker page:</p>
<pre><code><a href="https://www.lemaker.org/">https://www.lemaker.org/</a></code></pre>
<p>Australian community page with forums:</p>
<pre><code><a href="https://www.bananapi.com/">https://www.bananapi.com/</a></code></pre>
<p>The worst thing about the Banana Pi is, when writing emails about it, and these show-notes, typing the word 'banana' and knowing when to stop!</p>
