its a dev board, yeah, but your comparisons are far away from a fair comparison. its like comparing apples with bananas. when the ash tray is full, i empty it. thats a common task. adding some special shielding to a highly sensitive pcb is something far off a regular scenario. whats next, replacing some SMD chips because “its just missing this little resistor”?
Its not like “we can buy the shielding and plug it into the pcb and it will auto-fit without any skills”, like your usb-cable comparison…
I know the argument “it’s a developer board” comes up frequently, but what does that actually mean?
A developer board is a relatively raw platform intended for building your own projects — similar to the former Arduino boards. The hardware itself is already largely stable and free of major bugs when it reaches the market.
A developer board is a work-in-progress product that developers effectively buy into. As a developer, you help the company get the board across the finish line by identifying and debugging issues — in other words, you’re receiving something closer to a beta board, not yet ready for mass production.
I purchased it under the assumption that it was category #1, but it increasingly feels like what’s being sold is actually category #2.
Be14 = there was not only one bad batch with missing epprom data. I buy one in November and it’s faulty to.
So I’m limited to frimware with patches that will never go to mainstream openwrt!
1- If the answer to fixing a problem is replacing a board → then this would imply the board is faulty beyond repair.
2- If the answer to fixing a problem is doing a hardware modification to the board → this would imply the board is faulty, but within the realm of end users fixing it.
3- If the answer to fixing a problem is doing a firmware/software upgrade → this would imply the board could be faulty and software should be deployed to fix it (e.g., an acceptable workaround).
Given the above three;
If #1 → It would be respectable to be able to replace the board under warranty, exchange, or discount. I think we all feel that this will not happen.
If #2 → It would be respectable to replace the board under warranty, get documentation on how to fix it, or send it in to a repair service to fix it. I think we all feel this will not happen.
If #3 → We’ve seen evidence of mtk making software changes almost daily (mtk-openwrt-feeds). I would like to think if the SNR issue was a software issue, this would have been solved a very long time ago. Same with the bad eeprom issue.
My take? Observe the behavior of the manufacturer. If they do not ‘make it right’ by your standards, do not buy from them again. This is an educational moment.
I think exchange/discount/etc in exchange for our feedback, helping diagnose, troubleshoot, provide end user to end user guidance, etc, is an acceptable tradeoff for being the early adopters.
This heatsink with and without fan doesn’t fit in bpi-r4 with be14. It’s too big, and the holes don’t line up. It looks like this is intended for BPI-R4 Lite. It would be nice to know before i bought it. Please include it in the description of these items !
Yeah, i’m little pissed, but oh well. I just hope there will be some proper heatsink for the original bpi-r4 and be14 especially since i bought the taller case.
I still don‘t know how that fan would fit on the lite or pro, they use the same BE14 board?
Or do they also need a modified BE14 with spacers soldered to the gold-holes (like the same problem as with the massive fan)? And then rotate the fan 90° and screw them with 2 screws on the BE14 board and 2 screws on the main-router board?
Image of the modified BE14 boards with spacers soldered to it:
OK, that would make more sense - but at least for the normal BPI-R4 you could only screw two of those into the BE14 board, as the spacing on the heatsink are larger than the board itself.
I guess the same could work for the larger heatsink then… I ask Judy if that would work as well…
I apologize, I’ve always referred to the Pro version. It’s not compatible with the regular Banana Pi R4; it mounts underneath the board and doesn’t fit in the current case. Besides, I’m not sure if it uses the same mounting hardware as the Pro version.
I’ve always referred to the Pro version because it was designed for that board.
I’m very curious how my two heat sinks / fans will fit (in the also ordered new version of the case).
In the sinovoip shop of aliexpress it is clearly referenced as as made for BPi-R4 without any mention of “PRO”.
