Hi, My order banana pi m3 was arrive today, but i cannot test it due to the downloading speed problem. Tried to download the OS images for Banana Pi M3, but the download performance like a snail on google drive host. Please give us some other options where can be download fast.
I tried also to insert my sd card with raspbian os (orginally came from raspberry pi) to banana pi, but it doesn’t work, no display on my HDMI Monitor.
LOL! Really?
They sent you a board with 8GB eMMC with no Android pre-installed? Why Android? Because it’s the only “OS” that will run flawlessly from the beginning…
And no, you won’t be able use a normal Raspbian image since the A83T only works with an outdated 3.4.39 kernel today and the boot process between RPi and any Allwinner SoC is totally different.
I never been use before Banana pi, currently i am using raspberry pi, so it is my first time to use it. You have mention that the banana pi m3 has built in android os on emmc flash, so i try to boot without sd card and push the power button and uboot and nothings happen on the monitor. Only red led light i see, I don’t know if the unit may be defective or not.
Have you tried to login from your PC to the Banana Pi via SSH ?
No I didn’t mention that. I wondered that it’s obviously not the case – and that was what I was laughing at. But we will never know since the people responsible for this forum, the ‘official’ documentation and ‘official’ support don’t care about such things.
If the manufacturer would care, informations would be available. But they prefer to hide stuff here or here or there but you won’t find anything useful where everyone would expect it and would be able to find: http://www.banana-pi.org/m3.html (link to user manual? Nope. Correct informations? Nope – they simply don’t g*ve a shit)
The M3 is as incompatible to the original Banana Pi as the M2 was. Different SoC, different features, different capabilities. But since it’s easy to sell anything under a known brand they re-use the name as long as it’s possible…
How should that work without an OS available to the board?
And why don’t you recommend to simply read the two chapters ‘first steps’ and ‘troubleshooting’ in the product’s user manual?
Because noone would expect the user manual to be hidden inside a Google Drive link somewhere (but that’s easy, you just have to read through all forum posts made by ‘sinovoip’ to find such basic stuff) instead of being linked to from the product page? Or because the ‘user manual’ is mostly copy&paste from other SinoVoip ‘user manuals’ and the ‘informations’ therein are questionable?
The good news: they updated some wrong informations in the M3’s user manual. The bad news: the version remained “V1.0” so anyone searching for most recent informations is lost as usual.
And still so many informations are missing (is there something on eMMC or not when the M3 leaves the factory? It’s not even mentioned that you can also boot from eMMC but ‘SD-card is optional’! How to flash an image to eMMC? ‘First Steps’? ‘Troubleshooting chapter’?) or are still wrong (eg. no need to use SDFormatter in Windows or use fdisk/mkfs.vfat in Linux, that’s moronic copy&paste from somewhere else)
Wouldn’t it be nice to provide flashing installations together with a download link for an Android image if it’s necessary to use ‘Phoenix Card’ (this is the download link from within the user manual – broken link as expected) and you can’t use Win32 Diskimager? Of course, but they neither care nor will anybody find this Google Drive link since it’s just another useless forum post from ‘sinovoip’.
It’s so funny that these guys didn’t learn a single lesson. They simply don’t care about anything else than hardware even if that means that this hardware only can be used as a paperweight 
Hello ?
Why shall I search for such document, I didn’t get a unit to try out. So why shall I bother.
Thanks to me the Spec’s page is at least almost correct.
Beside, from work I cannot access any Google site, beside the search of course.
Nice from you that you were looking for it for the others 
If @sinovoip doesn’t put any image on the eMMC, shame on them !
This is no customer service.
Also ex-students should know what a customer expects 
Which one?! 
http://www.bananapi.com/index.php/component/content/article?layout=edit&id=85 (1.8 GHz) http://www.banana-pi.org/m3.html (2.0 GHz)
LOL, “A83T @ 2GHz”, that’s even more weird than Xunlong advertising their Orange Pis being driven by “H3 @ 1.6GHz” when in fact both SoCs contain the same Cortex-A7 cores being able to be clocked with 1-1.2 GHz. I love this marketing stuff, it’s too funny!
Is it not 2GHz? I am pretty sure H3 is a different SoC>
Who knows? The users that already received their M3 can’t boot since SinoVoip ships the M3 with eMMC unpopulated (see above – as usual SinoVoip doesn’t comment), SinoVoip refuses to answer simple questions that could clarify (as usual) and all we have as ‘information source’ is this http://www.allwinnertech.com/en/news/compnews/452.html
There Allwinner claims to be using TSMC’s 28nm HPC process. If this would be true then they would be able to get close to 1.8 GHz with optimized libraries. If you have a look in one of the fex files, there are big.LITTLE definitions with up to 2.2GHz. But the A83T uses 8 A7 cores so no big.LITTLE (but Allwinner also claims the opposite in the press release linked above – why should we then trust in clockspeeds?). If they would implement big.LITTLE then they would’ve to combine slow A7 with faster cores, eg. A15. So instead it could be either little.LITTLE or just 2 cluster of 4 A7 cores.
I would suspect little.LITTLE would also be bad news since kernel support for MP (being able to use all 8 cores simultaneously) came with kernel 3.10 and we’re stuck with kernel 3.4.39 with the A83T now.
The question what to expect from this “up to 2 GHz” thing can anybody answer easily that has an M3 already in his hands and takes the 5 minutes to follow these simple steps. @sinovoip is in such a position but refuses as usual to help. They simply don’t care about anything but selling hardware.
@alyainec: Did you succeed in the meantime? I would suspect support by @sinovoip was great so far?