Tag Archives: Banana PI

The right case for Raspberry PI

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I have had some trouble getting happy with cases for the Raspberries. One falls apart, one does to have hole to take out the SD card, but today I had chance to 3D print, so I tested printing this case here:

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It has a VESA mount to fasten it on back of a TV, but I am not going to do that so I selected the smallest VESA mount so it would not take much space.

I am not able to really try it yet since I don’t know where to get suitable screws for it. Though I did find one out of 4 screws I need to screw the board down so that leaves 3 missing there and 4 different ones of some sort to close the case.

The case seems to be really nice, it has good access to the memory card and if getting screws then it won’t have the fall apart problem that I have with some other cases.

I encourage everyone if they get chance to access 3D printer to experiment there are a lot of drawings out there for really nice cases. And if you know how to use 123D Design then its really easy to customise them.

Here are examples of some of the other cases I have tested.

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This one is plain and access to the memory card is good but it falls apart very easily.

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This one is made of heavy metal (yes it is amazingly heavy). I thought this one would be really awesome, it has a fan at back that you can optionally connect. But it has no hole to access the memory card !. And it takes me about 30 min to tear this case apart and get it back together. Making this case not suitable for most cases, except maybe for servers that just need to run 24/7 without changes like Own cloud server for example. The case does have hole for cobbler cable, a good solution too since it sort of is slimmer and the case lid seals around it so it does not need to be as wide as the connector.

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This one is good, its for Banana PI though and not Raspberry PI. It has good access to the memory card, does not fall apart, and has hole for the cobbler cable.

Next set to boards to test and develop Xojo ARM plugins arrive

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Banana PI M2 and Orange PI 2

Next set of boards to develop and test arrived, this time it was Banana PI M2 and Orange PI 2.

I had seen reviews on the web on the hardware, that soldering on the Orange PI was crude, but I found both boards to be flawless in every way as far as manufacturing goes.

At first look then both of the boards solve what annoys me the most on the Raspberry PI, the power connector. On the Raspberry PI the power connector tends to be sensitive to movement when fiddling with the board so it tends to reboot. Thats not the case with the Banana PI and Orange PI where the connector is not sensitive at all, its a different kind than Raspberry uses.

Both Banana PI and Orange PI have huge issues with detecting the display, going through DVI adapter is very bad for example. Resolution is hard coded and you cannot change it without going through a lot of trouble changing the boot, which I have not figured out how to do. Default resolution is 1280 x 720 which many displays have problem displaying.

(I imagine on some displays it will manage to Auto detect 1920 x 1080 but I have not had that luck, from reading on the web then most seem to disable display auto detection and manually enter their display sync parameters, but I have not able to figure out how so far.)

Now if you get the display to work then both machines are really great. I only got it at the 1280 x 720 which is all right for me for now since I work on them remotely through SSH anyhow.

I got the built in wireless to work on both of them without too much pain.

The Banana PI’s Raspian installation is not much changed from the Raspberry PI version of it, everything in sudo raspi-config seems to work fine and it even has some new options there.

Orange PI seems to have forked a bit further away, there is not as much in their sudo raspi-config tool. But the OS comes very rich of features.

And at last a simple benchmark where the test case was to build the Einhugur GraphicsFormats plugin for ARM. (ALL machines used same type of Class 10 memory card, and building was done over SSH on all of them)

  • Raspberry PI 2 finished in 10 min and 45 seconds
  • Banana PI M2 finished in 6 min and 28 seconds
  • Orange PI 2 finished in 6 min and 15 seconds

Note the Orange PI did not produce 100% binary compatible result, I am guessing that it has different version of some library, it should not affect the speed test even if it will affect the usability for me.

Banana PI and Raspberry PI produced 100% same result.

This is of course just one type of benchmark and perhaps does not reflect well the higher clocked CPU in the Orange PI as much of compiling is just disk IO.

Hopefully we can soon attempt multi core image processing test with the PictureEffects plugin.