Banana Pi M2 Zero: Low-Cost, Quad Core SBC

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers comm this time we're going to take a look at this the banana pie m20 this has a form factor the same size as a Raspberry Pi zero 65 by 30 millimeters but this board has got a quad-core processor so let's go and take a closer look so here we have our banana PI + 2 0 which comes in this generic banana pie box but if we look on the back were assured it's definitely a an m2 0 it says it down there and if you're wondering about the price of this board this is one of the cheaper single board computers but the price seems to vary a great deal but I found in late February 2020 you could purchase it for the $20 99 or 16 pounds 54 so that's a open it up I think it's very simple we just open the box like that under or we are and to study bad which is a seals that will bring in a mr. scissors to get it inside here there we are cut into the the bag and here we have our tiny little 35 gram computer which is based as you can see on an all winner 82 plus system on a chip which contains 4 arm cortex a7 CPU cores running at up to 1.2 gigahertz and an arm Mali 400 MP 2 GPU running at 600 megahertz located next to a system on a chip just here we have a Ram chip this is a 512 megabytes of ddr3 RAM and then along here we have a wireless module which provides 802 1-1 B G and n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 next to that here we've got our micro SD card slot this slot supports our card up to 64 gigabytes in size and then at the other end of the board we find a CSI or camera serial interface connector into which you can plug a Raspberry Pi compatible camera in terms of other connectivity on this long edge we meaning of the microwave mini HDMI connector supporting up to 1080p video at up to 60 frames a second and then over here there was a micro USB port for power and another micro USB 2 port for connecting peripherals and this also has OTG capabilities also on this edges between these we find buttons of reset button and a power button which is a rather nice and we've also got a connector here for an antenna if you want to extend the range of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth finally the last connectivity I've not mentioned are the pads on the top of the board 40 pads here where you could fit a Raspberry Pi compatible GPIO connector if you wish you could fit for example a header like this it's one of the nice ones with the colours on the pins but you could solder in a connector here to do all kinds of GPIO work with this board and finally we'll flip the thing over to see there anything exciting on the back there isn't it's just a sticker which don't be pushing this through the board a second ago but other than that nothing to write home about on the bottom of the board so that's a flickr banana pie m20 back the right way up before we test out the banana pie and to zero I thought it'd be a good idea to put it in the context of its most obvious competition which as far as I'm concerned or the Raspberry Pi 0w which clearly has the same form factor and the raspberry pie 3/8 plus which is physically twice the site and the banana pie m20 is very much between these two pies in terms of price and actual power in terms of price the best prices I can find online at the moment for the Raspberry Pi zero w are about ten dollars or nine pounds two thirty whereas the when I'll apply em to zero cost about $20 ninety nine or 16 pounds 54 and the pie 3/8 plus costs about $25 or 23 pounds for T in terms of the processors the Raspberry Pi zero W has got a single core 1 gigahertz processor whereas if we look at the banana pie m20 we've got a 1.2 gigahertz quad-core processor and on the Raspberry Pi 3 plus we've got one point 4 gigahertz quad-core processor so the power goes up here as the price goes up but other than that the boards are very similar they've all got 512 megabytes of RAM they've all got micro USB power they've all got one USB 2 port for connecting peripherals they've all got an HDMI port up to 1080p video they've all got a camera connector they've all got Wi-Fi and bluetooth on board the only real differences is that you've got the GPIO connector pre soldered onto the Raspberry Pi 3 8 plus and it's got their 3.5 millimeter jack for the audio out and composite video out oh it's also got a display connector but other than that very similar board you might want to use in projects so what I'm going to do now is to take fear and to zero and connect it up get it running try at a few operating systems and then I'll do some comparative performance tests with these other two boards right as you can see I've now got the banana pie m20 all connected up and running and I'm using a a hub as you can see here to connect him my mouse and keyboard because we've got the one USB port and right now we're booting into ambien and I've been trying various operating systems because there's lots of images available for this board but not many of them seem to work at least for me I've tried several versions of Android couldn't get into those but I have successfully installed ambien five point of 4:1 running the command line interface and got it online and that that's taught me several things at least this board runs a rather hot anyway here we riving in an ambien also 5.41 but with a new bug to xenial desktop and it works as you can see which is a rather good the only problem I've got here is this is running in 720p and whatever I do I can't get it to were than any other resolution 11:07 20 P 60 frames a second and I've been through all the configuration tools for arm bit all that sort of stuff and that's that's the only options I've got if I go into here into settings and - where are we display settings is there I just don't have other options available and I've been trying to go through config files and things but I'm afraid just can't be done but never mind I'm still running on bit here on the another pipe and to zero and we can go to things like well processor it's coming up here there we are we've got LibreOffice writer of all it's going to bring up word processor I know many of you be saying why would you run a word processor are on a half gig ram superball computer because i want to it somehow you always want to do so it'll come up and there we are we can printer pad I will type hello and put it into the obligatory very large letters which of course sir I think is the law in a test of a computer there we are nice big hello there that's absolutely fine and we could also know we won't save that I think the world can lose that we can go to the internet here we've got the chromium browser which works perfectly well I think hopefully it'll come up in a second or would you going to come up it's exciting isn't it yes it's getting there and that we can hopefully go to the world's a favorite web site without work you we can get to explaining computers here in Arlen but I'd like to try out some other operating systems as well so I think now what I'm going to do is to close things down that are Hickson to the board and to try out on raspbian greetings here I am back again I've now fitted a heatsink onto the Penelope m20 it's going to need it given what I'm about to do to this poor little board and we're now booting into a raspbian and do note the size of a text on screen here indeed the text that's just disappeared off the screen because that takes was at 1080p and we've now got Ted's coming back on the screen which is clearly not after 1080 people back to 720p we've got the four little penguins here to show we've got a quad-core processor that's very good and if we wait a second if we speed forward will arrive in raspbian and here we are we've arrived in raspbian but we are back in 720p which annoys me I've actually tried very hard to get this board running at 1080p and I've only managed it from the start of the boot process but if I show you here we just go into a terminal I'm just going to go I think like that's this run up idle I've been editing the config texture file here in idle I just like doing it in idle could use anything else but I happen to like idle we just bring up on the screen they're gonna go down a bit you'll see my frame buffer is set to a 1920 1080 and more significantly I've set my HDMI group to a group one which you see EA and mode 31 which should be at 1080p 50 frames a second but it makes no difference at all unfortunately if we look here under preferences and Raspberry Pi configuration we should be able to go into resolution setting we can't go into resolution setting it's not there so unfortunately for me at least the banana pie m20 is a 720p board this said it's running very nicely in raspbian everything is here it's nice and responsive we can go into the task manager there you can see it's running along not taking up too much of its half gig of memory just for running raspbian so that's a pretty nice and we can do all the normal things have even gotta minecraft here if you particularly want to use minecraft here on this board and we can get to the internet we can run up a browser again very much the same as we saw in ambient a few minutes ago not it takes a little while to run up chromium but it's quite a reasonably large program for this poor little board to run up but it'll do it I'm sure will it get there yes it will and we can hopefully go to the world's favorite web site and will that work yes so we can do browsing and that type of stuff and as you would expect but the thing I really want to do here is to test out this board relative to the other two boards we looked at a second ago the Raspberry Pi zero W and the Raspberry Pi 3/8 plus and so what we're going to do you might have noticed it a second ago and first of all go to just clear this displace I'd like to do that and I've got sitting in the buffer there there it is a syst bench command I've installed suspend on this machine and it's going to factor prime numbers up to a value of 10,000 which could be enough to give us a reasonable test and they will see it step to number threads equal forces to a quad-core processor so let's kick this thing off I would note that this board when you install suspense installs an early version that the zero point for point 12 is we can see that that's significant because this version of suspense the earlier version will run full of full 10,000 fracturing of prime numbers and see how long it takes whereas later versions of cyst benches we've discovered in other videos run for a set time and then tell you what's happened in the time but on this particular version assist bench which we run an all aboard were testing we'll see how long it takes a factor up to 10,000 and we'll get some comparable time figures normally I go into a fast-forward mode at this point but it can't take that long to finish I wouldn't imagine so let's sit here and be very excited about what it's going to do what result is going to come up let's just move the window around whilst we're doing it so we'll put that up there come on little board you can get they're probably getting very hot yes I've just touched this heat sink it is getting slightly hot but - never mind hopefully in a second it'll give us a result I once threatened to learn to play the harmonica to cover moments like this when things were not happening but oh oh there we are we've got a result well then it's sixty two point five seconds it's taken two factors a prime numbers up to a value of ten thousand and you might be thinking what's the relevance about number well of course we need to have something comparable and earlier I ran this on the Raspberry Pi zero W and it took quite a while this is a single core board so I actually used the command just for Swan's thread and it gave us a result over 230 point six seconds so it is the case that via Bernardo pi m20 is about four times faster at least running this suspense test than rugby PI 0w I also did a test using the Raspberry Pi 3 a plus and that completed this this bench test in twenty nine point nine seconds so significantly faster so there we are we've got some comparable numbers showing us the relative performance of the banana pie m20 the Raspberry Pi zero W and the Raspberry Pi 3 A+ banana pie m20 is a low-cost single board computer that packs more processor power than the Raspberry Pi 0w into the same very small form factor this said software support for this board is not what it could be it's not as good as it is for the Raspberry Pi models and therefore unless you need a low-cost board with this much power in this form factor I would suggest you probably should consider buying a Raspberry Pi 0 w or a Raspberry Pi 3 A+ but now that's it for nother video if you've enjoyed you seen a pre-specified like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and I hope to talk to you again though reason [Music] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 432,499

Keywords: Banana Pi M2 Zero, Banana Pi Zero, Banana Pi, Raspberry Pi Zero W, Raspberry Pi 3A+, Raspberry Pi Zero alternative, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, Armbian, Banana Pi Armbian, Banana Pi Raspbian, Sysbench

Id: 51OMXTElStM

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 08 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Reed_Solomon]

512mb of ram? meh

[u/Bearcat_Bro]

Are the gpio layout the same. Could you put it in a Gpi case?