Hands-On with the D1: A Banana Pi Micro-Camera

One of the fun parts of my job working with Arm’s global IoT ecosystem is getting to unbox and play with new IoT gadgets from around the world. This week, I got a very special box from my friends at Foxconn (in partnership with Shenzhen SINOVOIP Co.,Ltd.) containing a few samples of boards from the Banana Pi series.

I wanted to write a little bit about Banana Pi and why it might make a good choice for startups, enterprises, industrial or embedded developers seekinglow-cost variants to the Raspberry Pi and it’s progeny. To start with, I am going to talk about the Banana Pi BPI-D1, an open-source camera computer.

Opening the box we have a Banana Pi BPI-D1 with an attached camera. According to the Banana Pi website, the BPI-D1 is capable of 720p video out of the box running at 30fps. BPI-D1 seem to retail for between $40 — $50 online, I found a few resellers including New Egg, results may vary.

The camera is attached via a 24-CMOS pin connector. If you want more details on the GPIOs and board-layout, you can view them all over here on the Banana Pi website.

For a small board (38x38mm), the BPI-D1 actually has some interesting capabilities aside from the camera (which comes attached). The specification reads that BPI-D1 includes Night Vision LED sensor as well as a 4mm microphone directly on the board.

Night Vision sensor…that could come in handy!

The processor on the BPI-D1 is an Ankya 3918 aimed at providing low-cost media capabilities to edge devices and features a 32-bit Arm processor running @ 4oo Mhz as well as an Arm Mali-400 GPU to handle the video processing. BPI-D1 comes with 64MB DDR2 RAM and 16MB of flash on board expandable to 32 MB with an SD card (optional).

Anyways, I plan to spend some more time testing the camera out in coming days once I get my PC setup to burn the image.