Lemaker, a Chinese newcomer to the hobbyist electronics scene, isn’t a company to shy away from controversy. As the name implies, the Banana Pi is a riff on the Raspberry Pi theme but with a dual-core AllWinner A20 processor, SATA support and numerous other niceties.
The company gathered considerable ill will for its naming convention, then managed to fall out with the company it had asked to manufacture the boards – SinoVOIP. That company has now forged out on its own with Banana Pi variants, and Lemaker’s latest product suggests it’s learning from its past mistakes: it has a new manufacturing partner and a new design: the Banana Pro.
The first welcome change is in the name: the Pi suffix has been ditched in favour of making the Banana portion of the name the recognisable brand. It’s still arguably derivative, but fruit themes aren’t exactly rare in the computer industry: just ask Apple, Acorn, Apricot, BlackBerry or Tangerine, all of which hit the market well before Raspberries were on the table.
More significant changes have been made to the board design itself, in support of the Pro moniker. While the same 1GHz AllWinner A20 dual-core processor and 1GB of DDR3 memory is present, the GPIO header has been upgraded to be compliant with the Raspberry Pi Plus design and new Raspberry Pi 2. Mechanical compatibility is vastly improved too, although software support for Raspberry Pi add-ons – in particular HAT-standard boards – can be variable depending on the operating system chosen.
Its predecessor’s Gigabit Ethernet port is still present too, which is a great improvement over the 10/100Mb/sec port of the Raspberry Pi, and is joined by 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi supported with an external whip antenna connected via uFL. There’s no physical mount for the antenna, however, so be prepared to get creative with sticky-tape or Sugru.
The decision to mimic the Raspberry Pi Model B+ and Raspberry Pi 2 doesn’t, sadly, extend to the USB ports, which are limited to the same three – two full-sized host ports and one micro-USB On-The-Go (OTG) port – as its predecessor. In mitigation, the design still includes high-speed SATA support, which is missing from the Raspberry Pi altogether.
The feather in the Banana Pro’s cap, all these whizz-bang hardware features aside, is undeniably its software compatibility. As well as a port of Raspbian that offers nearcomplete compatibility with software designed for the Raspberry Pi, the Banana Pro can run every OS from Android 4.2 – rather outdated, admittedly, but better than no Android at all – to Gentoo, Fedora, Arch, OpenWRT, OpenMedaiVault, and Lemaker’s own Bananian Debian derivative.
There’s even Berryboot, a multi-boot environment for installing multiple images to a single micro-SD card.
In comparison with the Raspberry Pi Model B+, the Banana Pro is a vast improvement with considerably higher performance and the benefit of on-board wireless and SATA. Bring the Raspberry Pi 2 into the mix, however, and the comparison gets murkier.
Sure, the Pi 2 doesn’t have SATA, Wi-Fi, or Gigabit Ethernet, but its quad-core processor blows the Banana Pro out of the water on both single and multi-threaded processing. It may have fewer operating systems available – and, despite various promises over the past few years, still no Android port – but Raspbian remains the best general-purpose SBC distribution around, while the promise of Windows 10 support later this year opens up new possibilities.
The Banana Pro is available from www.aliexpress.com priced at £36.30 inc VAT, including a heatsink and SATA cable.