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.
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.
There’s an AliExpress link in the article that clearly prices it at $260…
Cool? I’m seeing $165, but my original comment was based on the article as it existed five months ago. I’m not sure the board was even shipping at that time
“More reasons to Avoid the Raspberry Pi”
I didn’t know we even had reasons to avoid it
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.
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.
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.
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
9 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.
[Thread #294 for this sub, first seen 22nd Nov 2023, 14:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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What an unpleasant and unnecessary turn of phrase .
