The $38 Banana Pi BPI-M4 SBC with 4K Support and PoE

Back in February SinoVoip unveiled the Banana Pi BMI-M4 as an alternative development board to the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, touting superior performance with the same form-factor, but only costing a few dollars more. Four months later, and SinoVoip has finally released the Banana Pi BMI-M4 on AliExpress for $38, albeit with a change in the Ethernet department with opting for 10/100 over Gigabit.

While the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ is outfitted with an ARMv8 CPU, the Banana Pi BMI-M4 packs a more capable Realtek RTD1395, which features a 64-bit quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 with Mali-470 MP4 GPU, up to 2Gb of DDR4 RAM, 8Gb eMMC (up to 64Gb max) and support for 4K video output and decoding. Beyond the SoC, the board is equipped with 802.11 b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 4.2 (via RTL 8821 module) with u.FL antenna connector.

Rounding out the Banana Pi BMI-M4 feature set is an M.2 Key E slot (PCIE 2.0/USB 2.0), HDMI 2.0b port, 4X USB 2.0 ports, USB Type-C port, 40-pin header, and 3.5mm audio jack. It also sports a boot selection switch, power/reset/u-boot/install buttons, power/status/activity LEDs, and 3-pin debug UART header, power is supplied via 5V (@ 2A) USB Type-C port or PoE using the official Raspberry Pi PoE HAT.

The Banana Pi BIM-M4 can take advantage of Android and Linux OSs, and you should be able to use most of the Raspberry Pi HAT modules as well; however, it should be noted that software support is uncertain at this point, with limited information available on the board’s Wiki page.