Banana Pi BPI-M2 Berry review

The BPI-M2 Berry is a compact Allwinner-based board with a quad-core CPU, 1GB of RAM and a 40-pin GPIO header. The specification points to light, single-purpose work and GPIO projects rather than anything memory-hungry. It is a tinkerer's board more than a general-purpose server.

The SoC is the Allwinner A40i/R40/V40. It has four Cortex-A7 cores and a dual-core Mali-400 MP2 GPU running at 500MHz. Memory is 1GB of DDR3 at 733MHz, and the GPU shares it.

With four A7 cores and a single 1GB tier shared with the GPU, the board suits one small service, a script runner or a dedicated sensor node. Running several containers would leave little headroom in that 1GB.

The board has a microSD (TF) slot, and SATA is supported. There is no onboard eMMC, and no M.2 or NVMe. That leaves microSD and SATA as the storage options. If you plan to keep logs or databases on the board, a SATA drive gives you somewhere other than the card to put them.

Ethernet is 10/100/1000Mbps, using a Realtek RTL8211E/D controller. Wireless is 802.11 b/g/n through an AP6212 module, with Bluetooth 4.0 on the same board. Wired gigabit and built-in wireless suit a headless network appliance, a small monitoring box or a bridge between a wired and wireless setup.

USB is the weak spot. The board has four USB 2.0 host ports and one USB 2.0 OTG port, with no USB 3. Any external drive or adapter you plug in connects over USB 2.0, so SATA is the better choice for storage that matters.

The 40-pin header has 28 GPIO. UART, I2C, SPI, PWM and I2S are available on some pins. The header layout matches the Raspberry Pi 3, which will help if you are following GPIO guides written for that board. Check the pin functions you need before you commit, since the specification says these interfaces sit on some pins only.

Video output is HDMI 1.4 for a TV. The board also supports a 4-lane MIPI DSI or RGB/LVDS panel. H.264 decode is listed up to 1080p60, which makes simple media playback and a small display project realistic.

Power comes in at 5V/2A over micro USB. The board has no 3.7V battery support, so it does not run directly from a single lithium cell. Plan for a 5V supply or a USB power bank.

The Banana Pi wiki has image sections for Android 6.0, Ubuntu, Debian, Raspbian, Armbian and others. That gives several starting points, from a Debian-family server install to an Android build for the display outputs. Check the release date and kernel version of any image before you build on it, because the wiki entries vary by section.

The BPI-M2 Berry offers gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, SATA and a Raspberry Pi 3-style header on a board with four Cortex-A7 cores. Its limits are just as clear from the specification: 1GB of shared RAM, USB 2.0 throughout, and no eMMC, M.2 or NVMe. It fits small, low-demand projects where the connectivity matters more than the processing power.