Today, we’re taking a look at Banana Pi’s first RK3588-based board. Not even a full month after its release, we managed to get our hands on a review copy of the BPi ARMSoM W3 board (short for ARM System-on-Module), provided to us directly by the company.
Banana Pi
Two Banana Pi BPi-P2 models have recently landed on our review desk. The Banana Pi BPi-P2 Zero (based on the Allwinner H3 SoC) and Banana Pi BPi-P2 Maker (based on the Allwinner H2+ SoC) have been sent to us by the manufacturer to take a look at.
Banana Pi’s BPI-Pico-RP2040 is a cleverly designed iteration of Raspberry Pi’s Pico design. Experience gained over the course of two years allowed the Banana Pi team to present their own idea of a RP2040-based development kit. We’ve received our unit from the manufacturer for review purposes.
Sinovoip, the company behind the Banana Pi series of development kits and SBCs had an interesting product idea: to create a Raspberry Pi Pico pin-compatible development kit based on the 240 MHz Tensilica LX7 ESP32-S3R2 dual-core SoC and name it BPi-PicoW-S3.
Sinovoip’s Banana Pi family has gotten another interesting member alongside of BPi-PicoW-S3. In our hands today is an MCU development board with the newest Espressif ESP32-S3 SoC – a dual-core Xtensa LX7-based chip clocked at 240MHz.
SBCs are great. Reading through our extensive list of SBC reviews we’ve created over the past few years, one can notice our own love for these little systems enabling everyone to deploy IoT systems and create various server-based projects, among other things.
We’ve already had our hands on the excellent Banana Pi M5 SBC in our previous issue, and have explored some of its capabilities. Today, we’re taking a look at its smaller sibling, the Banana Pi M4, and the differences in features and price that might make it more enticing for some.
As a demo project, we created a little Wi-Fi enabled display stand using the SunFounder 10,1″ LCD touchscreen, Banana Pi M5 and the RT8822CS BPI WiFi/BT adapter. The display setup was extremely smooth and easy, but the WiFi module setup required some additional steps.
We all love our Rapsberry Pi 4s, but it’s not a secret that they tend to overheat. Painfully so. It’s been the main complaint of every owner of one of these SBCs – and in our initial review of it, we’ve discovered that these issues aren’t limited to cosmetics only – as they negatively impact performance due to thermal throttling.
The second SBC we have our hands on in this release is an interesting one. Hauling from China’s SINOVOIP is the Banana Pi M5. The Banana Pi lineup has been a trusted mainstay of the SBC industry for many years now, competing with the popular Raspberry Pi computers.
Hubor is a series or Raspberry Pi accessories by Xinguard, a relative newcomer to the SBC world, debuting their first products in 2019. They launched this line of products as an Indiegogo campaign, raising enough money by early backers to develop the line of cases and other add-ons for the SBC.