Intro
I've been considering ordering Raspberry Pi B+ when it came out. But I found out that more ARM computers exist. I was considering between Beaglebone Black, Cubieboard and Raspberry Pi B+ (a nice comparison here). But all of them had one or more shortcomings. I wanted a machine which has fast processor with maybe more than one core. More RAM (most had 512MB) and also fast Ethernet (most have 100MBit/s max).
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| This is the ARM that I always wanted |
Contents
I ordered my Banana Pi together with SATA cable and case which came relatively fast – 3 weeks from China (Aliexpress). The case is very nice looking and luckily I ordered whole package. If I hadn't Banana Pi would lite my room up. It has 3 or 4 LED lights so it can be really annyoing especially if you use it in a dark room.
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| This case looks even cooler in real life |
First thing I did when I got it was to try to install Raspian on SD card. It worked without problem booting fast into the operation system. The only let down came later when I ran browser. While the experience is faster than Raspberry Pi, YouTube videos didn't play and with Midori as the default browser I couldn't do much.
Because I'm more inclined to Ubuntu universe I tried Lubuntu image. This one worked OK, and it even played YouTube videos. But the problem was the videos were laggy and skipping picture. So basically I couldn't watch or use it in real life.
I was also considering putting on Android since I heard it can do also video acceleration. But I got stuck with Lubuntu because I wanted to try more things with it. And also on Android I can't do much because I have no touch screen and there are no application which I want to try on (I have Nexus 5 for that).
As for the hardware part I really like, that you can physically turn off the machine. And as far as I found out it doesn't use any electricity when it's powered off. I tried running it of a battery which I bought cheap and found out it can run stable at 5V/1A. So I now have a nice little home made UPS.
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| This is the battery I'm using |
Conclusion
It's a really nice box and I have a few ideas of how to use it. I would recommend it to anyone who's deciding between single-board computers. The community for Banana Pi is growing really fast and I expect it to be better than Raspberry Pi considering the capabilities of Banana Pi.
Now for a few pro/cons.
Pro
- very low power usage
- it can run off a battery at 5V/1A without problems
- IR receiver
- on/off switch
- it's small and nice looking
Con
- it doesn't reach full 1Gbit speed (around 260Mbit/s)
- can't play YouTube videos out of the box
- no support for XBMC/hardware video acceleration yet
- very bright led lights (if you're not using a case)
Use cases/TODOs/ideas
A few ideas I have of how to use Banana Pi. Some of them were ripped from other people but I can't remember where it all came from.
- 3G internet tethering (use it as a modem)
- BitTorrent server (using Transmission)
- Cloud solution (using something like ownCloud)
- Cortana/Siri voice recognition
- Digital TV streaming
- Educational PC (LibreOffice/Gimb/Scratch/etc.)
- FM pirate radio station
- Git server
- HTPC (XBMC when available)
- Kiosk mode PC
- Mail server
- Music server for MP3 with web interface (Pi Musicbox, Rampr, RaspyFi)
- Nagios server
- NAS (even with 260Mbit it's better than the rest)
- Penetration testing (something along the line of Kali, Raspberry-Pwn, Pwn-Pi, etc.)
- Print server
- Proxy server (squid)
- SQL server (MySQL)
- SSH server
- Syslog server
- Video encoding (handbrake)
- Video streaming server
- VOIP server (Asterisk)
- VPN server
- Web cam server
- Web server (Apache/lighttpd + php5)
- WiFi/Bluetooth connectivity point
These are just a few I could think of. Hopefully some of the things I'll do and write about them in this blog.
