Banana pi VS raspberrry Pi, is the enemy a friend?

Now open source hardware, has become a trend, many open-source hardware projects continue to introduce their own open source hardware products. The mainstream in the market are: Raspberrry Pi, Arduino,pcduino , Cubieboard, in their respective development process, everyone in the maintenance of their respective communities an ecological environment, each has its own advantages and short board. Banana Pi is designed to be fully compatible with the open source platform, compatible with the Banana Pi pursuit of the goal. Many blogs and forums are talking about banana pie highly compatible Raspberry Pi. So, some discussion topics even say that the banana PIE Development Board is a "clone" of the Raspberry Pi

raspberry PI, the most successful open source hardware project, and shipments have been the largest, to public organizations to promote open source hardware, has been a great success. The advantage is the development of information and applications, community support. And the use of education-oriented. It is very convenient for students to cultivate their abilities. Shortcomings are also very obvious, hardware introduced for several years, has not updated hardware platform, performance can not keep up with the needs of the times, do not meet the multi-level application of developers. And the hardware is relatively closed, the Raspberry Pi is equipped with a 700MHz Bo Tong production arm Architecture BCM2835 processor, 512M memory (b type), but the BCM2835 chip, only to the Raspberry Pi supply, greatly restricting the developers to complete the development of their own new hardware products. And performance cannot keep up with the development needs of the times.

banana Pi's launch, became Raspberry Pi great supplement, faster CPU (Allwinner A20), 1G dual core. Larger memory: 1G DDR3, Richer interface support. More importantly, all the hardware is a market-ready chip, developers can freely develop their own new hardware products after development. Without any restrictions. All interfaces are also common interfaces, and any developer is free to develop phase-fitting components. Complete the process from development to production. and Banana Pi, through the developer's efforts, can be compatible with Raspberry Pi software system, even GPIO will be fully compatible with Raspberry Pi Gpio definition. In this way, Raspberry Pi software, open source data, Gpio accessories can be combined with Banana pi. Banana PI provides a stronger hardware platform, fully integrated into the raspberry open source community application. Let developers and learners have more choices. Complete different applications.

banana Pi, like Pcduino,cubieboard, uses the A20 scheme. From open source, you can integrate directly into the open source projects. Through a variety of developer-defined interface It is easy to be compatible with various accessories and community ecosystems.

But in our view, banana pie is not a simple" cloning "Raspberry Pi products, banana pie than Raspberry Pi has a lot of hardware and performance differences, the biggest difference in the following aspects.

1. The chips used are completely different. The Raspberry Pi is using the Broadcom ARM11 kernel, and the banana pie is using the Kangzhi (allwinner) ARM Cortex-a7 dual core CPU. Different arm architectures lead to major differences. The Banana Pi will have more features on the arm V7 architecture and can be compatible with various applications on arm V6.

2" is also somewhat different in product size. Please note that the existing Raspberry Pi shell cannot be used on banana pies and must be re-customized.

3. In terms of hardware connections, banana pie and Raspberry Pi more different points, adding a lot of Raspberry Pi previously did not interface, this is more obvious. For example, bananas are dispatched to increase the onboard micphone in interface, hard drive (SATA) interface, infrared control (IR receiver) interface, OTG interface , power switch, reset switch. 1000M network ports, these interfaces are completely not in the Raspberry Pi.

4. Also, the banana Pie LCD LVDS interface and the camera interface are also completely different from the Raspberry Pi. This means that now the Raspberry Pi camera accessory cannot be used on the banana pie. In addition, the Raspberry Pi does not support the DSi interface, and the banana pie also has the opportunity to use peripherals.

Roughly summing up, banana pie is more powerful than Raspberry Pi on hardware, and banana pie developers need to spend more time and effort porting different systems and applications to banana pie Allwinner A20 chips. , is not a simple cloning product, only with the support of developers, compatible with most of the Raspberry Pi now the application, and can operate the Raspberry Pi system, banana pie because of the beginning, in the technical support and documentation to improve the need for more efforts, need a longer time to adapt.