Banana Pi Pro
Mike Bedford investigates how this SBC compares to its similarly named competitor…
Is it a full PC, a Raspberry Pi competitor, an Arduino board or some freakish mishmash of all thee? Mike Bedford finds out.
The success of the Raspberry Pi family of single board computers has spawned a large number of other low-cost SBCS, many of which can be considered compatible with the RPI at one level or another. Some competitors aim to provide RPI performance at a lower price, while others target their products at a higher performance level. From its name, it seems reasonable to assume that the
Banana Pi family of products claims compatibility with the RPI.
However, a quick glance at the specification would seem to suggest that the Banana Pi Pro (sometimes called just the Banana Pro) doesn’t compare too favourably with the Raspberry Pi on either specification or price. First impressions can sometimes be deceptive, though, so we were keen to take a more in-depth look and put it through its paces.
Performance
Right from the start, getting the Banana Pi to work wasn’t quite as easy as we’ve grown accustomed to with Raspberry Pi products. In fact we couldn’t get it to boot at all, so we ended up consulting the support team, who suggested trying a different microsd card. Despite being sceptical – because the card we used was of the required class and worked on a RPI 3 B+ – swapping to another card got us up and running. The bottom line, therefore, is that’s it’s rather annoyingly fussy in this respect.
For many applications, performance isn’t everything with an SBC but some of the Banana Pi Pro’s headline figures do appear to be somewhat dated, especially when we bear in mind that the Cortex A7 is a 32-bit architecture. The processor sub-system could be described as a two-core version of the four-core Raspberry Pi 2, with a slight boost to the clock speed.
The boot time wasn’t as bad as we’d feared, however; with Lubuntu, from power-on it took 36 seconds to the login prompt, and then a further 18 seconds until the complete desktop was displayed. Benchmarking with Sysbench, however, painted a rather grim picture. Calculating prime numbers up to 20,000 on both cores took 420 seconds, averaged over a few runs. By way of comparison, the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ completes this in about 90 seconds, and the new RPI 4 in 63.
Interfacing
Depending on your aims and aspirations, expansion capability could be as important, if not more so, than raw speed. While the Banana Pi Pro falls behind the RPI 4 in terms of the number of USB and HDMI ports, it has a DSI port for an LCD panel and a CSI port for a camera – RPI features that don’t appear on all lookalikes. For those who want to dabble with hardware interfacing, it has that all-important 2 x 40-pin GPIO header. What’s more, that header is RPI compatible – again, not something that’s universally true.
The Bananapi also has some interfacing options that aren’t found on the RPI. First up, and most unusually for SBCS, is a SATA 2.0 port for interfacing hard disks or SSDS. For storage-heavy applications, this will offer a big improvement over a flash memory card – so if you have a spare disk, this could be handy. Of course, a USB 3.0 disk, which some SBCS support, offers similar performance, but if you’re building your board into a case, this option would mean the disk has to be external and thus transported with the SBC.
Also unusual is its on-board infrared receiver and microphone, plus an analogue audio output. This could be handy if you intend to use the Banana Pi for some handheld applications.