Review Quick review of Banana Pi M2+

[Melanrz]

Demo of armbian.Soon i buy hdmi recorder so make better demo.

[Igor]

Demo of armbian.Soon i buy hdmi recorder so make better demo.

 

Good job! 

I am using this one for my recordings, cheap and good enough.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HDMI-Video-Capture-YK762H-PCI-E-Card-Grabber-1080i-High-Definition-Video-Sources/151472362274

[tkaiser]

Good job! 

 

 

I agree. @Melanrz: If you discovered any settings/tweaks that are worth to be included in Armbian (read as: Armbian's build system since we always want to create 'virgin' OS images that were built from scratch), please feel free to do so.

 

BTW: Really funny. While all H3 users in the wild enjoy HW accelerated video decoding thanks to the linux-sunxi folks (especially Jens Kuske who did the main work on H3 VDPAU support) since a few months SinoVoip has still been busy producing fake videos showing manga stuff that can be decoded by CPU easily:

 

[Melanrz]

Good job! 

I am using this one for my recordings, cheap and good enough.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HDMI-Video-Capture-YK762H-PCI-E-Card-Grabber-1080i-High-Definition-Video-Sources/151472362274

wow,you are my hero!!! i searched all  yesterday but always stand alone box forgetting that i can use pci card on my pc!!!!!! hahaha lol,thanks

i search one with shipping in germany.

[Melanrz]

I agree. @Melanrz: If you discovered any settings/tweaks that are worth to be included in Armbian (read as: Armbian's build system since we always want to create 'virgin' OS images that were built from scratch), please feel free to do so.

 

BTW: Really funny. While all H3 users in the wild enjoy HW accelerated video decoding thanks to the linux-sunxi folks (especially Jens Kuske who did the main work on H3 VDPAU support) since a few months SinoVoip has still been busy producing fake videos showing manga stuff that can be decoded by CPU easily:

 

All of allwinner board manufacturers should pay a sunxi community like a free donate for what they did to make usable this hardware!!!!

I see your battle on banan pi forum to convince producer to get the right way,but it still same :/ 

Maybe have no people in grade to make some serius work,i dont know.

I will compile wifi bt driver soon so i share source.I see to that chip have to fm radio build,need only solder wire for antena and get proper driver.

[Melanrz]

i raport only not working nand-sata-install (pointed from Igor that its not yet done on m2p) but is on info from download page in spec.

EDIT
I noticed now

Bugs or limitation

• eMMC installer not ready yet.

[Melanrz]

Working many wifi dongles ready to go,bluetooth,dualschock based joypads,working many deb package from ubuntu only dependencies must be done before ,working reset button but maybe is hardwar short on soc because working on all img tested,or script.bin defined,must check it.Tomorrow i check dvb cards,smal lcd on gpio.

[Melanrz]

Hi Igor,Thomas,can you build with next release wifi/bt drivers for wireless chip?

[tkaiser]

Hi Igor,Thomas,can you build with next release wifi/bt drivers for wireless chip?

 

Nope, two weeks ago before I deleted my account on their forums @sinovoip told me they would fix the driver for WiFi/BT, then they said BT wouldn't work and another fix would come. Their last publicly available Github commit is older and I fear this breaks WiFi for Orange Pi boards. Since I'm not able to test with any WiFi enabled Orange Pi, since it's useless to try to communicate with @sinovoip and since I don't care about this 2.4GHz crap WiFi anyway I won't look into it.

 

BTW: If you've an account over there it would be nice if you open up two threads for M3 and M2+ and warn BPi users that any of the official OS images for their boards suffer from a serious security flaw discovered 3 days ago: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1108-security-alert-for-allwinner-sun8i-h3a83th8/

 

And guess what: No reaction so far, neither regarding M2+ nor M3. Just the usual annoying 'SinoVoip experience'...

[theguyuk]

Agreed, I think that the hardware vendors should sponsor projects such as this one, which will benefit not only them but the community as a whole

 

I read that Orange Pi gave some boards to the people working on Chrome OS and I even posted about it on Orange Pi forum. Do Orange Pi communicate at all with Armbian?

[Igor]

@Melanrz

 

I talked to Sinovoip regarding M2+ two weeks ago and until today they didn't sent me anything. I don't want / can't work on hardware which is not close to me. 

 

@theguyuk

 

Xulung / Orange Pi people support our efforts in a good way.

 

Some board makers understand our role and try to come closer and be cooperative, some don't and live in their own small world. We are trying but sometimes it's not possible to make a break.

[Guest lionwang]

@Melanrz

 

I talked to Sinovoip regarding M2+ two weeks ago and until today they didn't sent me anything. I don't want / can't work on hardware which is not close to me. 

 

@theguyuk

 

Xulung / Orange Pi people support our efforts in a good way.

 

Some board makers understand our role and try to come closer and be cooperative, some don't and live in their own small world. We are trying but sometimes it's not possible to make a break.

 

sorry , i have let our colleague send sample to you ,any need ,just contact  jasonye@banana-pi.com ,he will full support you.

[Igor]

@LionWang 

 

Yes, I made a contact in the mean time and received M2+ and M3 yesterday with expedited shipping. Thanks!

[tkaiser]

BTW: If anyone thinking about buying this board also thinks about an enclosure it's strongly recommended to use one that allows a fan: http://forum.banana-pi.org/t/case-for-bpi-m2-longbowx-z-design-it/1737/7 (and only a fan is pretty useless so it's also mandatory to mount a heatsink as large as possible)

 

BPi M2+ overheats horribly for yet unknown reasons (with tasks where even the smaller Orange Pi Lite will run happily above 1000 MHz the BPi M2+ will throttle down to below 312 MHz or even 240 MHz while also killing CPU cores)

 

We used a real world workload (cpuminer, a bitcoin miner that uses NEON optimizations and assembler code that also implements a benchmark mode to get the clue how good a specific device performs). On the left Orange Pi Plus 2E (without heatsink), in the middle Banana Pi M2+ (with heatsink) and on the right Orange Pi Lite (without heatsink and with slightly different throttling settings -- we now use better ones so performance of OPi Lite would be 2-3 percent higher):

 

 

It's obvious that BPi M2+ with its unregulated VDD_CPUX core voltage and most probably related to bad heat spreading capabilities of the PCB loses when it's about constant high load (see how the khash/s rate drops!). So you'll either have to use an annoying fan (and heatsink of course) or you end up with the slowest H3 board currently known (since it has to throttle down even with moderate workloads).

 

Further readings:

• https://github.com/igorpecovnik/lib/issues/298#issuecomment-223766311
• http://irclog.whitequark.org/linux-sunxi/2016-06-05#16666001;

[tkaiser]

In the meantime it seems we found the reason for this crazy overheating:

 

Since NanoPi M1 is also overheating like crazy and these two boards are the only ones using DDR3 instead of low-power DDR3L (to save a few cents most probably) I remembered and finally found a quote from Olimex making the type of DRAM responsible for the heat problems: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1322-testers-wanted-testing-dram-reliability-on-bpi-m2-and-nanopi-m1/?view=getlastpost

[freeman32]

Hello I just bought a Banana-Pi M2 + , I installed over armbian 5.14 server but I can not connect to the wifi.

I made a ifconfig wlan0 up I follow many "How To" on the internet but nothing to do, I can not seem to connect with.

 

Sorry for my english, google is my friend !

 

Thanks for reply and have a good day !

[kavaika]

Hello dear people of the forum.
I have Banana pi m2+ a week actually already have been struggling to install kodi,there are always some mistakes. I want to install Kodi on Raspbian finished Assembly \ Ubunru all my attempts have not crowned success.Tell me is there some sort of work instruction is time tested to install Kodi?
Thank you in advance for your answers

[Igor]

Hello dear people of the forum.

I have Banana pi m2+ a week actually already have been struggling to install kodi,there are always some mistakes. I want to install Kodi on Raspbian finished Assembly \ Ubunru all my attempts have not crowned success.Tell me is there some sort of work instruction is time tested to install Kodi?

Thank you in advance for your answers

 

If you want KODI on this board, check down.nu if there is an Openelec build for this board. This is only possible working solution.

[kavaika]

The fact that I want to use Banana pi as a torrent and web server, and not only as a media center

I want to have installed Ubuntu \ Debian and be able to use a Banana as a media center and torrent and web server, if I install the image,I understand that the problems that I described I can't use.
to OpenEleec you can connect via ssh? will I be able to install programs from the repositories?? and on what distribution OpenEleec based?

 

I understand that this is the address of the repository http://down.nu/repository/official/7.0/H3/arm/

 

I'm new to Linux, tell me how to add this repository in to KODI installed from it,and install dependencies automatically?

[Igor]

I'm new to Linux

 

I completely understand your wish but what you want to achieve is hard even for hardcore Linux users, since there is no working (stable and with HW acceleration) packaged KODI for Debian / Ubuntu for those boards (H3).

 

This doesn't mean it's impossible, but if you are a newbie, forget about ... Get some other platform, preferable Intel, where this is near to easy install ... or use one H3 board for server with Armbian and another one for media centre running Openelec.

[hendricus]

Hello,

 

I am also new to bpi m2+.

But i have ubuntu mate running from the official bpi website. In there Kodi run correctly. i install kodi by apt-get install kodi in terminal. Also you can install by synaptic package maneger..

i tried the rest off the img on bpi website. the most cannot unzip withoiut errors. not in windows ,not with lubuntu.

and even when i maneged to unzip, after image burn to sd, the bpi not react with this sd cards.

 

and emmc burn i not maneged it.,even with nand-sata-emmc script.

 

so kodi can run in mate 

 

with luck, franciscus

 

 

[Lion Wang]

update schematic : 2017-08-24

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4PAo2nW2KfnbzQ5MTB5eXNEN1U/view?usp=sharing

[Tido]

They say: BPI-M2+ V1.2 hardware version add PMU Voltage regulation.  Now is this an improvement or does it just sound like ?

http://forum.banana-pi.org/t/bpi-m2-v1-2-hardware-version-add-pmu-voltage-regulation-design/6260

 

[tkaiser]

6 hours ago, Tido said:

They say: BPI-M2+ V1.2 hardware version add PMU Voltage regulation

 

SinoVoip BS as usual. H3 has no PMU support (PMU --> Power management unit, something only Allwinner A and R series are equipped with and from H series only H6)

 

It seems they simply implemented simple GPIO triggered voltage switching between 1.1V and 1.3V via PL01 (same as on their Zero) so now we have the same problem as with NanoPi NEO2 and others: Older variants have been sold without any voltage regulations (but at least same voltage as the lower now: 1.1V), now voltage regulation has been added. So what to do?

 

A discussion how to solve this problem is ongoing here: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/5051-nanopi-neo2-cpu-frequency-issue/?tab=comments#comment-57746 -- @5kft made a proposal no one has reacted to so far.

 

It's important to keep in mind that older BPi M2+ variants use 1.2V and our images use this voltage level to allow an upper clockspeed of 1200 MHz that will for sure result in troubles when those new BPi M2+ should come up with voltage set to just 1.1V.

 

It's important to keep in mind that older BPi M2+ variants use 1.2V while our images accidentally assumed it would be 1.3V based on the review/developer samples SinoVoip sent out to us over 2 years ago. So the 1200 MHz maximum we currently allow for BPi M2+ may be considered stable on those v1.0 boards a few of us have but are already borderline with the V1.1 boards and will cause trouble for sure when the new BPi M2+ variant boots with voltage regulation set to just 1.1V.

 

I got confused since SinoVoip released wrong schematics for their rev 1.1 boards (see below). Rev 1.0 boards used fixed 1.4V while rev 1.1 boards used 1.3V (and schematics showed 1.2V for no reason).

 

So if BPi folks did not ensure that default voltage when the board boots is 1.3V buyers of the new BPi M2+ might experience crashes while booting with already existing images.

 

Let's wait whether we get those reports and whether one of those BPi folks clarifies whether the voltage regulation comes up with 1.1V or 1.3V when unconfigured. If it's the former most probably the simplest solution is to drop Armbian support for the board right now.

 

[tkaiser]

6 hours ago, tkaiser said:

one of those BPi folks clarifies whether the voltage regulation comes up with 1.1V or 1.3V when unconfigured

 

Since I doubt we ever get any useful answer I prepared at least legacy images: https://github.com/armbian/build/commit/57f90b0b69bb31cd190f064428c0d9b1e33fadf0

 

The next batch of images created with legacy kernel will use 912 MHz as upper cpufreq limit since users might get a new v1.2 board that boots with voltage regulator set to 1.1V only.

 

Users of rev 1.1 boards can use h3consumption to get their former maximum cpufreq (though this was set too high, see post above. With 1.2V Allwinner's official recommendation is 1008 MHz maximum while 1104 MHz might work with the majority of boards):

h3consumption -m 1200

Users of rev 1.2 boards have to do the following as root first:

cd /boot/
cat bin/bananapim2plus_v1_2.bin >script.bin && reboot

If the board reboots you're fine and can enjoy voltage regulation, if not the image you use is too old and needs to be updated first. Afterwards you can tweak settings with h3consumption as you want.

 

For the mainline kernel images there's no solution yet

[tkaiser]

Not mentioned by them of course... but it seems the new board revision also contains an eMMC 5.1 for which patches might be necessary: https://github.com/BPI-SINOVOIP/BPI-M2P-bsp/commits/master

 

No idea who's looking into this. It's 2018 and at least I'm not interested in wasting just a single second any more on fixing expensive H3 boards (those cheap ones at 10 bucks are still great as IoT nodes or those with A series SoCs and PMU/battery support)

[Tido]

4 hours ago, tkaiser said:

SinoVoip BS as usual. H3 has no PMU support

I have adjusted the posting over at SinoVoip - in order to not mislead potential customers.  Before it said PMU,  which is wrong as it is just a 2-step-voltage-design.

 

[chwe]

From the schematics, it looks like 1.3V will be default. Well, we will see...  That the board might not be that interesting.. normal for H3 boards. According to dl page, there are still some downloads. At least what I appreciate, they inform proactive that they changed something, and also what they changed. 

 

2 hours ago, tkaiser said:

those cheap ones at 10 bucks are still great as IoT nodes

The OPi Zero raised 8.49$ for the 256mb and 10.49$ versions (+ shipping 5.50$ here in switzerland). Depending on your needs, those boards are still good. For most of my needs the OPi PC+ is sufficient (29$ including shipping) the BPi M2+ is around 40$ with shipping, but it has GbE. So it's up to the user to decide what's more important. For this price a rock64 gets more and more interesting.  Powerful and cheap.

[tkaiser]

13 minutes ago, chwe said:

From the schematics, it looks like 1.3V will be default.

 

I'm so stupid... since I consulted schematics before and forgot that you can't trust in anything this famous company provides as 'information'. Their schematics for v1.1 board were wrong, they wrote 1.2V while in reality it's 1.3V and my early developer sample used even 1.4V (funny DIY instructions to fix this on Rev 1.0 boards).

 

Ok, time to edit linux-sunxi wiki again and our fex file once it's confirmed the board really comes up with 1.3V.

 

 

 

 

[chwe]

2 minutes ago, tkaiser said:

Ok, time to edit linux-sunxi wiki again and our fex file once it's confirmed the board really comes up with 1.3V.

IMO, keep it 'as is'. It should be a bit 'to warm' but it should be save as far as I understand? Better have a board which is a bit to warm than the support nightmare when those boards start to crash due to 'undervoltage' of the cpu. As long as nobody has the 1.2rev for testing, IMO we should go for a save approach (stability vs. performance wise).