[Coco] Banana Pi info

[Tim Fadden]

For any interested.

There’s no shortage of single-board, low-power computers on the market 
these days. But several years after launch, the Raspberry Pi 
<http://www.raspberrypi.org/> is still probably the most popular. It’s 
just hardly the most powerful.

So what’s a Raspberry Pi lover who wants a bit better performance to do? 
How about buying a board with more memory, a faster processor but a 
virtually identical layout to the original Raspberry Pi and 
compatibility with pretty much every Raspberry Pi add-on boards and 
peripherals?

While the Raspberry Pi features a 700 MHz single-core Broadcom BCM2835 
ARM11 processor, the Banana Pi has a 1 GHz Allwinner A20 dual-core ARM 
Cortex-A7 processor.

The Raspberry Pi has up to 512MB of RAM, and the Banana Pi has 1GB.

The Banana Pi features an SD card slot, HDMI and composite video jacks, 
a 3.5mm audio jack and built-in microphone, Gigabit Ethernet, 2 USB 2.0 
ports, a micro USB port for power, an IR receiver, and Raspberry Pi 
compatible headers including a 26-pin header, camera connector, and more.

In other words, it should be pretty easy to use most Raspberry 
Pi-compatible hardware with a Banana Pi — but the Banana Pi offers more 
processing power and more memory, which could come in handy whether 
you’re looking to build a home theater PC, a general purpose computer, 
or a hardware prototyping system.

The official Banana Pi website has some typos and non-working links, 
which doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in the project. But if you’re 
interested in picking one up, it’s available from several sellers at 
AliExpress for around $57 and up 
<http://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?SearchText=banana+pi&catId=0&initiative_id=SB_20140420072100>.

Me:  AliExpress shipping is $24.  Look on Amazon better deals.

-- 
Tim Fadden
"Hey Schmidt, don't forget about the six P's.
Proper Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance!"