The Banana Pi BPI-M7 single board computer is equipped with up to 32GB RAM and 128GB eMMC flash, and features an M.2 2280 socket for one NVMe SSD, three display interfaces (HDMI, USB-C, MIPI DSI), two camera connectors, dual 2.5GbE, WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2, a few USB ports, and a 40-pin GPIO header for expansion.
Is it $60 or less? Everytime one of these alternative boards with an assload of more features pops up, nobody bothers to mention the price. Obviously we could spend more money to get more features, that’s what spending more money does. You can’t replace something without actually offering an alternative. The pi’s biggest selling point was that it was cheaper than a steak dinner. If you dont match or beat that, you aren’t actually competing with the pi.
It looks like it’s ~$100. But when I’ve used similar SBCs in the past the issue ends up being drivers. Even if something is faster and better specced than a RasPi, you end up outside that ecosystem with very little in the way of support for whatever oddball hardware your board has.
I have a BananaPi M3 and the software support was horrific. Getting a kernel to compile with the hacked drivers and firmware was like black magic.
Orange pi worked quite well but I mostly used python & GPIO.
Oh yeah, I had to debug and recompile that GPIO lib so no it was kind of not very user friendly…
The RPi does have a nice ecosystem but the trick is to pick a board supported by Armbian - that will ensure future kernel updates and low level things working fine. For instance I’ve been using a NanoPi M4v2 since 2018 with a RK3399 CPU mind that at that time it already had a PCIe x2 interface, 4GB of RAM and was cheaper than the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ from the same year that had Ethernet shared with the USB bus.
For $100 you can buy a micro form factor Optiplex PC which has several orders of magnitude more computing power, but it does have a bit larger form factor and less ports than what OP listed.
And power, that’s a pretty important metric if you plan on running something 24/7.
Yeah, I’ve mostly given up on Pis at this point.
Your OptiPlex will have considerable PCIE expansion though, so you could slot in a second hand dual-port nic if you wanted to (10GbE might be easier to find than 2.5 and they are still relatively inexpensive as second hand hardware)
There’s an AliExpress link in the article that clearly prices it at $260…
Cool? I’m seeing $165, but my original comment was based on the article as it existed five months ago. I’m not sure the board was even shipping at that time
This and support. My dad could set up a pi, and he doesn’t know what a kernel is or how to compile.
Current prices for the 8gb pi5 are around £80 which is about $100, and it won’t ship until some-when next year.
Have you considered that if you buy a RPi5 today it wont be 60$? Either if that’s your price point, depending in your use case, there might be better options. For a NAS for 100€ you can find an HP Mini with an i5 8th gen + 16GB of ram + 256GB NVME. For electronics Radxa Zero 3W / Zero 3E.
Those zero 3W sticks have been unavailable ever since I saw it here.
Looks like they are available now. I have never used a Zero 3W, but that price is real nice.NM, I misread the site. They are not in stock.
AliExpress? I swear I saw em there the other day