Banana Pi Pro - Review

Banana Pi Pro

What happens when you take the popular Raspberry Pi (RPi) microcomputer and hand it over to a Chinese company? You get an even more powerful and feature packed microcomputer with a similar name, the Banana Pi Pro. I guess “Blueberry” must have been taken already. The Banana Pi Pro is slightly larger than the RPi but it sure has more items added on. This board is a super-sized microcomputer if you look at the specs alone.

The processor is an Allwinner A20 ARM Cortex 7 that uses a quad core system on a chip design (SoC) which is nearly identical to the RPi. The same goes for the operating speed of 1GHz and 1 gig of onboard DDR3 SDRAM. You’ll find the identical 40 pin GPIO header and microSD slot underneath as the RPi, along with full HDMI and microUSB power connection. That is where the similarities stop.

Lemaker, backers of the Banana Pi Pro, threw in some great additions that make up for the $10 higher price tag. The Banana has an infrared receiver built onto the board. The Ethernet port is a 10/100/1000 gigabit interface where the RPi is 10/100 megabit. There is an SATA connection for your portable hard drives, which makes up for only having two....