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.
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.
That’s too bad because the specs OP listed are pretty great plus I’d love to see the Raspberry Pi Foundation (or whichever corporate entity controls production and sales) knocked down a few pegs due to their anti-consumer behavior over the last several years.
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.
This and support. My dad could set up a pi, and he doesn’t know what a kernel is or how to compile.
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
I think the reasons are they are pushing a competing product.
You may want to have a read at this: https://lemmy.world/comment/5357961. The Pi is becoming the least consumer friendly SBC and a money grab like no other.
What if you really hate support and ease of finding images online?
What if you really hate the fact that The RPi foundation is being hostile against people nowadays with proprietary PCIe connectors, telemetry, requiring a custom flash tool to get SSH and whatnot?
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.
This is the only question that really matters. If it’s overpriced? meh, it’s a cheap alternative to a NUC. But if it’s going to be stuck on obsolete software forever, run.
Hopefully it’ll beat pi4 prices as well
It’s the software, stupid!
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 $60-80 8th gen Dell/Lenovo/HP USFF PCs off ebay.
SBCs just don’t seem very competitive currently because they’re quite expensive for what you get, and require specialized software releases, plus stuff like hardware transcoding never seems very well supported even though the chip can technically do it.
So you share my opinion: https://lemmy.world/comment/5500098. I even went further on GPIOs and low level electronics here https://lemmy.world/comment/5500638.
I agree with you, i wanted raspberry pi for my EE practice in uni but it was way too expensive for what it gives and i bought raspberry pi pico 16mb type c for 2$ on sale
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.
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What an unpleasant and unnecessary turn of phrase .
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