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Banana Pi: The next generation of single-board computers?

zdnet.com

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Re: Banana Pi: The next generation of single-board computers?

#31

Post by tdicola »

quanticle wrote: post #26
tdicola wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Makers" is not an actual use case. I don't agree with that--it might not be a use case to you, but is certainly a valid use case for these small development boards. Look at the success of Arduino, Maker Faire, 3D printing, DIY drones, etc. to see evidence of a large and vibrant DIY and maker community.

I think a distinction can be drawn between the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi. I can see a use case for a (relatively) cheap, easy to program microcontroller with a board layout that makes it dead simple to integrate with sensors, motors, actuators, switches, etc. But that's an Arduino, not a Raspberry Pi. A Raspberry Pi is a small ARM SoC that tries to be both a microcontroller and a general purpose computer and doesn…

What about when you want to get those motors, switches, actuators, etc. accessible over the internet? Linux-based boards are fantastic for this use. There are options to get an AVR or similar 8-bit micro onto a network, but if you do anything non-trivial (like parsing web service responses, trying to communicate over SSL, etc.) you will quickly hit the resource limits of the processors. Linux + realtime microprocessor is a really great combo. Right now the Beaglebone Black and Arduino Yun are some options, but it would be nice to see more.

Re: Banana Pi: The next generation of single-board computers?

#32

Post by tdicola »

amit_m wrote: post #16

I was hoping for a cheaper board. Even if the Raspberry Pi foundation were to just take the old model A and drop the analog I/O ports and LED lights - with their economies of scale and the natural decrease in chip prices, I'm guessing they could ship a ~20$ board.

There is no analog I/O on the Raspberry Pi. You can do PWM output on a pin, but otherwise no analog input or output. There really isn't much to drop from the model A--it's just the processor and supporting passive components with some headers, connectors, etc.

edit: I guess you could drop the analog video and sound output, but that would probably just save a few cents for the connectors.

Re: Banana Pi: The next generation of single-board computers?

#33

Post by throwawayaway »

bananas wrote: post #2

Excellent. The more competitors to the Pi the better. I've been nothing but disappointed by mine - it's slow, convoluted and totally unreliable. I do expect the opposite for the money when you can get a generic android tablet for not much more.

there's many ways of measuring speed, but for a two watt computer i find the speed more than adequate. in addition if you wish to use it as a desktop the long awaited wayland port should mitigate gui performance issues.

i can't see the competitors being less convoluted than a debian install. if your hardware is unreliable you should make a repro to make it fail(i ran a performance benchmark in a loop on one i had trouble with til it crashed) and send it back to the manufacturer.

the rpi's popularity, and low power consumption are it's selling points.

i wonder what utility an android tablet provides than an rpi could be expected to.

Re: Banana Pi: The next generation of single-board computers?

#34

Post by tdicola »

outside1234 wrote: post #15

I actually don't want a faster version. What I want is a more energy efficient version (still ARM) with roughly the same performance that makes it feasible to run on batteries or solar. Does that exist?

Go bare metal and make constant use of sleep modes. The less time your system is awake and running at full speed the better. There are some cool low power chips like the Tiny Gecko: http://www.silabs.com/products/mcu/lowpower/pages/efm32tg-ti... However you can probably get most chips down into the sub-milliamp range while asleep and run for months or more off a few batteries.

Re: Banana Pi: The next generation of single-board computers?

#35

Post by pmjordan »

mongrelion wrote: post #19
maratc wrote: post #6

$74 after shipping? Newegg will sell you a motherboard with a dual-core x86 CPU for $50 ($32 after rebate). With a new AMD AM1 platform, you can get a four-core x86 and a motherboard for $69. Raspberry Pi is a nice thing for $35. For $75, much nicer alternatives exist.

Actually, I hadn't thought about this. My uncle's in need for a media center (he's already got the home theatre and the forty-something-inches LED T.V. and I was thinking of gettin'im a RPi with the rest of the fancy stuff but you totally would get waaaay better performance with a little bit more "expensive" board. The last time that I checked for this kind of solutions I was fancying some Zotac box but that one was…

The Intel NUCs are in a similar price range, especially once you take case, PSU, etc. into consideration. You can get them motherboard-only, but in the pre-built ones you just add RAM and Flash/HDD and you're done. The NUCs probably also win on overall power consumption, just check that you can use accelerated HD video decoding in the model you choose with the software you want to use.

Re: Banana Pi: The next generation of single-board computers?

#36

Post by agumonkey »

Narishma wrote: post #22
chm wrote: post #3

I'm quite surprised the RPi team hasn't created a new model in two years. Sure they just released a new "compute module", but that's not destined to the same crowd. I'd like to see an RPi revision C. Other than that, do any of you know of a chip I could buy to program from scratch? I'd be interested to learn a very simple processor but I have no idea where to start. I heard M68Ks are nice.

They intentionally haven't released a new model, and don't plan to do so any time soon. They want to have a stable hardware platform, and spend time optimizing the software so it can benefit all the RPi owners, instead of continuously releasing new models and fragmenting the community.

So basically rpi was LTS from start.

Re: Banana Pi: The next generation of single-board computers?

#38

Post by userbinator »

chm wrote: post #3

I'm quite surprised the RPi team hasn't created a new model in two years. Sure they just released a new "compute module", but that's not destined to the same crowd. I'd like to see an RPi revision C. Other than that, do any of you know of a chip I could buy to program from scratch? I'd be interested to learn a very simple processor but I have no idea where to start. I heard M68Ks are nice.

I'd be interested to learn a very simple processor

Look at Atmel ATTiny and Microchip PIC10/PIC12 series.

Re: Banana Pi: The next generation of single-board computers?

#39

Post by PhasmaFelis »

outside1234 wrote: post #15

I actually don't want a faster version. What I want is a more energy efficient version (still ARM) with roughly the same performance that makes it feasible to run on batteries or solar. Does that exist?

Why does it seem to be so difficult to run a Pi off of batteries? It draws less power than many phones. I was boggled that the Raspberry Pi AdaFruit store, which has dozens of different Pi-compatible displays, keyboards, cases, and exotic sensors and output devices, doesn't have a single external battery pack.

Re: Banana Pi: The next generation of single-board computers?

#40

Post by PhasmaFelis »

> the $35 Raspberry Pi, which was introduced in 2012, with its 700MHz ARM11 processor and 512MBs of RAM, is looking a little dowdy these days.

Someone has fundamentally understood the reason that the Pi exists.

Also, these guys have immediately blown their trustworthiness by deliberately creating confusion between their brand and an established one ("[fruit] Pi").

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