this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 101 points 11 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I have a BananaPi M3 and the software support was horrific. Getting a kernel to compile with the hacked drivers and firmware was like black magic.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Orange pi worked quite well but I mostly used python & GPIO.

Oh yeah, I had to debug and recompile that GPIO lib so no it was kind of not very user friendly...

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (3 children)

For $100 you can buy a micro form factor Optiplex PC which has several orders of magnitude more computing power, but it does have a bit larger form factor and less ports than what OP listed.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

And power, that's a pretty important metric if you plan on running something 24/7.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Yeah, I've mostly given up on Pis at this point.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Your OptiPlex will have considerable PCIE expansion though, so you could slot in a second hand dual-port nic if you wanted to (10GbE might be easier to find than 2.5 and they are still relatively inexpensive as second hand hardware)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

SBCs in the past the issue ends up being drivers. (...) outside that ecosystem with very little in the way of support for whatever oddball hardware your board has.

The RPi does have a nice ecosystem but the trick is to pick a board supported by Armbian - that will ensure future kernel updates and low level things working fine. For instance I've been using a NanoPi M4v2 since 2018 with a RK3399 CPU mind that at that time it already had a PCIe x2 interface, 4GB of RAM and was cheaper than the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ from the same year that had Ethernet shared with the USB bus.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

There's an AliExpress link in the article that clearly prices it at $260...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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