Banana Pi M5: ARM SBC with eMMC

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers this time we're going to take a look at this the banada pi m5 single board computer this is a raspberry pi 4 competitor with onboard flash storage so let's go and take a closer look right here we have our banana pie m5 indicated as a bpim5 on the back of the box and i purchased this from ali express where it cost me 84. which converted to 64 pounds 32. so let's open the thing up looks quite straightforward just like that and there we are the usual anti-static bag which is it's sealed it is sealed so we'll bring in mr scissors is here but in the runway up you can hopefully let us in up here like that will we get it right this time yes there we are we've got in and here is our new single ball computer it's always nice to open up another new single board computer and as you can see the banana pi m5 is a raspberry pi form factor board in fact it's very slightly different in size to a raspberry pi apparently it's a couple of millimeters different in each direction but effectively this is a raspberry pi form factor single board computer so let's turn our attention to the specification at the heart of the machine the system on a chip is an amlogic s905x3 which has forearm cortex a55 cord running at up to two gigahertz as well as an armali g31 mp2 gpu on one side of the soc we then find four gigabytes of low power ddr4 ram and then on the other side we find this chip here which is the onboard flash storage specifically this is 16 gigabytes of vmmc flash storage if we cut out to a wider shot and then flick the board over you will see that underneath we've also got a micro sd card slot hardly a surprise so we can boot the banana pi m5 either from the internal emmc flash storage or from a micro sd card and i understand the boot holder is emmc flash storage first then micro sd card which is not the way around i would like it but there we are i'm sure we can cope and we can use up to a 256 gigabyte micro sd card if we flip the ball back the other way stop it getting too disoriented and we turn our attention to the main long edge we find on the end usbc connector which is used to power the board and next to that a reset switch and then in the middle there is a single full-size hdmi 2.0 connector which offers up to 4k output at up to 60 frames a second the standard switch here which is labeled just behind it as sw3 which i believe is a power switch and then on the end we've got a 3.5 millimeter audio connector just like those we don't find on so many other devices these days gyrating to the first short edge we then come across a very familiar configuration with here gigabit ethernet and then four type a usb 3 ports spinning 90 again we then find a three pin uart connector and then next to that a 40 pin gpio connector which i'm pretty certain is raspberry pi compatible last but by no means least if we rotate again we get to the second short edge which boasts an infrared and ir receiver and then behind here there's another switch tiny little thing in there and this switch is labeled i'm pretty certain sw1 the quality control sticker is partially on top of the switches label but i think that is sw1 and the banana pi m5 wiki page says that the board has three switches for reset power and you boot and i'm not quite sure which switch this happens to be because also on the board up here nestled behind the gpio connector we find another switch labeled sw4 clearly switch 4 it is the fourth switch we found on the board but the board's defined in its specs as having three switches so i'm a little bit confused about what all these switches do one of the switches as we saw is labeled reset so we know what that switch does the other three perform other functions and i have to admit i'm a big fan of printing what a switch does next to it on the pcb but maybe i'm just being a bit old-fashioned i'm sure i'll find out what all these switches do in the fullness of time finally i should point out that unlike on the raspberry pi we don't on the banana pi m5 have a camera connector a csi connector and we don't have a display connector a dsi connector and we also don't have on-board wi-fi or on-board bluetooth and this is both a surprise and a shame because other banana pie boards do have wireless networking but sadly it's not here on the banana pi m5 so we're going to have to rely on ethernet or the usb wi-fi dongle for our network connection greetings here i am back again and i've got the banana pi m5 connected to my laptop where i'm using a program called the amlogic burning tool to write an android image to the board's emmc flash storage all of this is explained in the banana pi m5 wiki where there are links to download both the burning tool and the android image itself and when all of this is complete we can hook up a keyboard a mouse a monitor and an ethernet lead and as you can see i've also added a small heatsink for good measure so let's turn on the power and the banana pi m5 will begin to boot up into android this will take a little bit of time and so we'll speed on through and here we are on the android desktop and what we basically have here is a very stylishly presented development image it's very little pre-installed behind these panels here if we look for example at a online video it's just waiting to have things added in we look for example at my apps you'll see what's on the machine at the moment there is a clock which is always good we can find out what time it is i sometimes struggle to know what day it is let me know what time it is so that's very handy to have we've got droid settings let's just check out for example with display screen resolution here should be 1080p it is 1080p at 60hz that's clearly all working there's a file browser normal sort of android stuff there's nothing to look at on this machine of course but the stuff is is there we've got the media center if you want to play files again i'm sure that would work that's fine nothing exciting with that and there is an app installer as you can see just click on app installer you'll see this is not the play store this is simply an application to install apks from a local drive and if i scan a local drive around on there but if you had files to install that way you could install via that method there is a web browser there let's just click on it to prove it's there this i think is a web browser for testing more than anything else so but we'll try typing in explaining computers dot com as a random web address and click up there to make it work and there we are it works that's good we can get to web pages they're loaded nice and smartly that's a perfectly good but really i think the android image here is something that's waiting for you to do something very exciting with it so what i'm going to do now is to install the desktop linux distro right here i am back again we're now running ubuntu mate 20.04 which is installed on the banana pi m5 onboard emc storage this is all working very well although installation was not trivial as to set things up i first needed to erase the emmc and then to write an operating system image for ubuntu mate to a microsd card i then had to boot up from the microsd card and running the operating system from the microsd card to image the operating system for a second time to the emmc on the board and i did this using a utility called bpi tools and in the end this all worked absolutely fine but you have got that intermediate step of first installing the operating system to a microsd card and then installing it from the microsd card to the internal flash storage so i would caution that whilst everything is working very nicely there were little things i had to overcome in the process and that the banana pi m5 really is not a board for newbie sbc user anyway as i've said once you get it working it's pretty good let's just look up here and we'll look to about this computer and you will see there we are the system monitor confirms we're on a banana pi running ubuntu mate 20.04 we look under resources you'll see things are running along nice and frugally we've got our quad core system here all the cpus not doing very much as we're idling along only about a 700 megabytes of memory being used as a things are running along here we'll look across to the the menu on the left the main menu you'll see this is a standard install of ubuntu mate i really like ubuntu mate a great operating system loads of things are pre-installed here you really have got everything you need straight out of the box once you've installed the operating system itself i have though added in which we'll test out in a second i've also added in somewhere down here i think under sound and video i've added caden live which we'll also use for a test in a minute under our system tools let's go to the terminal bring up the terminal there let's do an ls vlk just so you can see drives on the system which is just our internal flash storage let's just clear that and let's just do a test of the speed of the mmc flash storage i'm sure you want to see that i think i've got the command ready to paste in there we are we're using hd parameters it'll give us an arrow when it first tries to identify the drive but it will give us a speed so let's do that we have to put in the password i forgot that banana pie if i got that right i have it's given us the arrow i anticipated and the timing is going to be always exciting what is 144 megabytes a second which is not a colossal speed it's not too bad for internal emmc flash storage it's better than we get from a microsd card so having a done that i think we'll do a few more tests i think first of all we'll go into firefox let's see how the browser is working coming up there we are we've got the world's favorite website comes up fine but more significantly i'm sure you're wondering what is youtube playback like and i can assure you there is no hardware played back here everything is playing back through software and youtube playback is not very good at all but i will show you my test clip actually maybe it'll be better when i'm showcasing there maybe it's going to work fine this time but anyway here's the test clip let's make sure it's in 1080p i think it's gone to something else there we are there is 1080p and we'll also bring up stats for nerds and there actually it isn't too bad you see i told you it was terrible but actually that's better oh you never know what's going to happen do you that's actually not too bad at all if i keep things playing like that we've got drop frames clearly but that's actually usable performance isn't it so i i spoke too soon my earlier tests were obviously not as well they weren't as good as this one so there we are we're getting reasonable youtube playback here in the browser on the banana pi m5 anyway let's uh close that down and let's do another test i want to go into caden live which i mentioned earlier down in sound and video there's kaden live and if you've been watching my channel for a while you know i've been testing kaden live on lots of different single board computers most recently on the four gigabyte raspberry pi 4 and the rock pi x and there i had a test edit put in very small test i didn't hear it here it is just to uh we could test things out some ducks as you can see 10 seconds of ducks not a fantastically complicated edit it does play here we've got proxy clips enabled here so it should play reasonably well it doesn't play that well it doesn't play as well as it did on the raspberry pi 4 or the rock pi x and certainly not as well as it would play on the jets and nano in the in caden live but the real reason i've got this here is so we can do a render test we can go to render and we can run the same script to render out this 10 second clip of docs in the 1080p as i did on the raspberry pi 4 4 gigabyte model and the rock pi x which took respectively 36 and 35 seconds to run this script so let's start it on the banana pi m5 and it'll take a second to run through so will speed on through and here we are coming to an end it's getting very exciting i think it's going to be longer than we saw on the raspberry pi 4 or the rock pi x what's it going to be always always a weight at the end 47 seconds yes quite a lot longer to render out the same clip here on the banana pie m5 than on the a raspberry pi 4 or a rock pi x anyway that is a result let's do a final test let's get rid of that and let's go to the fantastic graphics package we've all got available to us for free that's wonderful here is let's run up there we are 210 and what we're going to do here is a test i've also done lots of computers over quite a while now we're going to do a new document if i can remember what i'm doing a new document we'll use the default 1920 1080 and we're going to render using filters the lava filter which takes a little bit of time so it's a good thing to test comparing computers so we'll bring up lava and we'll use the defaults and i'll let you know that on the raspberry pi 4 this took 17.3 seconds and on the rock pi x it took 16.0 seconds so let's bring in the clock and see how long it takes to run on the banana pi m5 oh it's exciting isn't it how long is it going to take i think we'll again speed on through and there we are we have a result of 22.6 seconds and so once again the banana pi m5 at least in these tests shows it's not quite as fast it's not as nippy as comparable competitor single board computers the banana pi m5 is a very solid single board computer which i've really enjoyed using while making this video this said as we've just seen it's not as powerful as a raspberry pi 4 at least not in the tests i've done here and not having wi-fi on the board not having wireless networking really does count against it particularly at its price point this said the m5 does have a full-size hdmi socket and i'm a big fan of those and running the board's operating system from onboard emmc flash is a great improvement over using a microsd card but now that's it for another video if you enjoyed using it please please type the like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and i hope to talk to you again very [Music] soon you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 66,728

Keywords: Banana Pi M5, BPI M5, BPIM5, Banana Pi, Banana Pi eMMC, SBC onboard flash, SBC eMMC, Banana Pi M5 review, Banana Pi M5 demo, BPI M5 demo, BPI M5 review, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt

Id: ZZn30-b9Cj0

Length: 16min 43sec (1003 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 11 2021