LeMaker Banana Pi

The Banana Pi is trying very hard to mimic the formfactor of the Raspberry Pi and to cash in on its popularity, but it fails to match both the exterior dimensions, the exact connector placing and the software support.

Despite claims of being open source, this is not open source hardware. If you are thinking of getting this device, you should also try looking into the hardware from our Community instead. There is also little actual support to be had from LeMaker, at best, they are rehashing things from the linux sunxi community.

= Identification = The PCB has the following silkscreened on it: BP-A20

= Sunxi support =

Current status
Supported

Note: Banana Pi's GMAC is not supported in the community kernel. A commit within Lemaker's Banana Pi Github fork of linux-sunxi-3.4 seems to provide GMAC support for Banana Pi. This has to be proved and merged into linux-sunxi.

Manual build
Everything else is the same as the manual build howto.
 * For building u-boot, use the Bananapi target.
 * The .fex file can be found in sunxi-boards as Bananapi.fex

Mainline kernel
Use the sun7i-a20-bananapi.dtb device-tree file for the mainline kernel

= Tips, Tricks, Caveats =

FEL mode
The button marked K3, located between the HDMI and USB host connectors, triggers FEL mode when pressed during boot. (K3 pulls the A20 BOOTSEL pin to low level.)

If no SD card is present, the A20 will automatically fall back to FEL mode (as this device has no other means of booting, like e.g. onboard NAND flash). So if you want to enforce FEL mode, you may simply remove the SD card and connect to the Banana Pi via the OTG micro USB (the one right next to the SD slot). This also supplies power to the board at the same time.

LEDs
For those with a transparent case (or no case at all) the Banana Pi's LED activity might get annoying. The red power LED (D7) can't be turned off, but the behavior of the two other (green and blue) may be changed.

The blue LED (D6) is coupled to the Ethernet PHY, and only able to indicate network-related activity. A small utility named bpi_ledset can control it (together with the other LEDs directly on the network connector). The green LED (D8) is GPIO-driven via PH24, and thus user-definable. It usually can be controlled by writing to the special file /sys/class/leds/green:ph24:led1/trigger (requires root privileges). Many configurations set the green LED function to "heartbeat" by default, causing it to flash constantly - "none" will turn it off instead. (Check the output of  for possible values.)

See: related thread on LeMaker forum

= Adding a serial port =

While the GPIO pinout of the Banana Pi is designed to be compatible to the Raspberry Pi, it's important to notice subtle differences in the serial ports. The Banana Pi has some additional pins that already provide two more serial ports.

The default serial port /dev/ttyS0, used for (bootstrap) debugging and the serial console, is located at J11 - refer to the picture and instructions below. The Raspberry's "original" serial port on GPIO 14 and 15 (CON3, pins 8 and 10) can usually be accessed as /dev/ttyS2 on the Banana Pi. J12 also provides another serial port on pins 4 (RXD) and 6 (TXD), which should map to /dev/ttyS3.

Note: The actual mapping between physical pins, UART numbers and/or device names may depend on the specific kernel and configuration used. If in doubt, check the boot messages:



Locating the UART
The UART pins are located in the upper left corner of the board. They are marked as TXD, RXD and GND on the PCB. TXD and RXD is in J11, GND can be grabbed from pin 7 or 8 of J12. Just attach some leads according to our UART Howto. Do not connect the red wire (VCC or 3.3V/5V), as that might damage your board.

= Pictures =

= Also known as = There aren't any known rebadged devices at the moment.

= See also = There are several websites about Banana Pi and claiming to support it. It has to be clarified, what is "official" and who is behind this sites.


 * LeMaker Banana Pi site, LeMaker (Distributor), "Official" Github Repository
 * BananaPi R&D Team, Github Repository
 * Sinovoip Banana Pi site, Sinovoip (Manufacturer?)
 * Schematic.
 * OpenWRT support for the BananaPi with mainline kernel - Daily build / Manual for building an SD-card image

Manufacturer images
A various amount of prebuilt images is provided via LeMaker's Website.