Broke my bpi m3 in half

Banana Pi SBCs design BPI-M3(A83T/R18)
1

After years of trying to get this thing to work worth a crap, I just gave up and finally broke it half.

Save your self the hassle and just buy a Raspberry Pi … quality hardware and quality support for the RPi.

image_from_ios

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Rpi hardware design is nothing special and it’s definitely far from quality. It’s just popular. RPi is not even a pure ARM device but (evil) closed source main core with additional ARM core(s). Since it’s popular, hardware dump and simple and since the Linux kernel runs inside proprietary(!) RTOS, solid support was easy to made. I would say it’s boring at minimum.

M3 works OK by now with minor problems, but with modern kernel based Armbian image for example. It’s too late for yours I guess :slight_smile:

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I’ve had Pi’s from the first to the latest… never had bit of issues out of any of them.

Problems were right off the bat when I got this when they had the power issues then lack of working OS’s with all the features and the list goes on.

I had high hopes for it but every time I tried to do anything it would lock up / freeze / support not exist / ect…

Got my RPi 3B+ right next to me doing everything I needed and more without a hiccup.

Maybe in a few more years BPi can catch up to the RPi in terms of support and quality releases, and actual documentation but for now, I’ll stick with the RPi until then.

4

Rpi has dead end. RPi3B+ is only improved version 1 and they can’t improve anywhere without breaking compatibility with existing support. And start from scratch.

Can your ancient RPi compete with something like this: https://twitter.com/armbian/status/1043228923818139650

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May not be “as fast” but compared to the BPI-m3 … the fact that any and all RPi’s that I own all work without a hitch, in general, is light years better in my book.

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Rpi is sticking with a performance which is pretty limited for alot of uses, but it sells so what. I think the Bpi boards have got good potential once the kinks are ironed out. I don’t have much programming ability but know a bit about Linux so could I be of some use for testing etc? I have M3 and R2 boards, should have asked earlier.

7

I also broke my BPi-M3 in half! It’s the worst garbage I’ve ever used…

:triumph:

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actually I don’t understand what do you want to do on this board? If you met some problems you could post here, we can discuss this to solve it.

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Here are some advice for having a good experience with the board (or any other board)

  • Use always a good SD card (don’t use the cheapest SD card you find on the internet)
  • An OS Image written to a bad SD card will fail at some point no matter how good the distro is, no matter which distro you use.
  • USB SDHC Card Reader/Writer is also known to be a source of problems, a good SD CARD but a weak/faulty USB card writer will trash some sectors/cluster and this can go unnoticed until the file or files get corrupted., it can be at boot time or after some use.

Some things to think about:

  • Don’t give up until you try all the options

  • There are people happy running some OS images on the board, try all the OS Image available, find the best one that can meet your minimum requirements

  • You have Legacy kernel, and mainline kernel from Armbian and Arch

  • Describe the problems you are having with details, maybe someone has already fixed it

  • If you still having trouble and don’t want it anymore, why not to donate the board to someone willing to get one of this?

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