Banana Pi trial

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).

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.

This case looks even cooler in real life

I wanted Banana Pi also because it is has connector for external disk which can be quite useful if you have old disk laying around. And it also has infrared sensor directly on the board (hopefully for future XBMC support).

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.

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.