Checking Out the Banana Pi M3

Alright, so my journey through the box of hardware I got this week from Foxconn and the Banana Pi folks continues. Today’s episode? The Banana Pi M3. So far I have taken a quick look at the Banana Pi BPI-D1 (a small board for tiny embedded camera prototyping) and the Banana Pi M2 Magic (a slightly larger board carrying a quad-core Allwinner A33 SoC).

The Banana Pi M3 is a larger variant of the Banana Pi with several additional capabilities not found on a generic Raspberry Pi board. The folks at Foxconn and Shenzhen SINOVOIP have added an IR Receiver, Mic, SATA as well as an onboard eMMC (8Gb), 2GB DDR3 SDRAM. I have found BPI M3 retailing from between $50 — $65 online on sites such as RobotShop.

Like the Raspberry Pi, Banana Pi M3 comes with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capability as well as being bundled with an added antennae. Operating system support includes Debian, Android, Linux, as well as several flavors of Ubuntu. Compared to the M2M and D1, it seems there is a stronger level of OS and ecosystem support for the BPI M3.

Carrying an Octa-Core Allwinner A83 SoC, the performance of the BPI M3 is going to be quite higher than it’s smaller bretheren. The A82 uses Arm A7 processors and was built targeting mobile and tablet applications for low-cost Android handsets and tablets. This means the BPI M3 is likely a better choice for more performance intensive applications such as robotics.

Thats it for my quick overview of the Banana Pi M3, hoping to follow up soon with a rundown on the new Banana Pi Zero.