Banana Pi M2 (A31s based) ready to donate

[Thomas Kaiser]

Anyone interested in a chinese A31s SBC called Banana Pi M2?

The board works, UART is accessible but the software the vendor provides (and his attitude) really suck: http://www.bananapi.com/index.php/forum/general-discussion-for-bpi-m2/895-status-quo-of-m2-regarding-software-support#2538

If any of the A31/A31s developers is interested I could donate this piece of hardware (preferably in Germany/Europe -- shipping costs)

[Priit Laes]

Well, you can't fully blame SinoVoip for that because according to
Olimex [1], the A31/A31s has been EOL'd by Allwinner and is a dead end.

[1] https://olimex.wordpress.com/2015/05/18/a31-som-update/

Though, someone from Allwinner should confirm that for us too ;)


Päikest,
Priit Laes :)

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

On 18-06-15 08:53, Thomas Kaiser wrote:
> Anyone interested in a chinese A31s SBC called Banana Pi M2?

I'm interested, so that I can add upstream u-boot and kernel (dts file)
support for it. If you're ok with donating it to me let know and I'll
send you a private mail with my address (I'm in the Netherlands so
shipping should be ok).

> The board works, UART is accessible but the software the vendor provides
> (and his attitude) really suck:
> http://www.bananapi.com/index.php/forum/general-discussion-for-bpi-m2/895-status-quo-of-m2-regarding-software-support#2538

I feel I have to respond to this, I agree that bananapi.com is not
a good community player and the BPI boards they sell are best avoided (*).

However it is important to not mixup these bananapi people with the
original bananapi people from lemaker.org and the original bananapi
and bananapro boards. The people from lemaker.org are nice friendly
people who do work together with the linux-sunxi community, unlike
the people from bananapi.com.

Confusing I know, which is why I felt I had to put in a good word
for the people from lemaker.org, who as said are good people.

Regards,

Hans


*) Still as the sunxi community we should try to help people unfortunate
enough to have bought such a board

[Thomas Kaiser]

Hi,

Hans de Goede wrote:

On 18-06-15 08:53, Thomas Kaiser wrote:
> Anyone interested in a chinese A31s SBC called Banana Pi M2?

I'm interested, so that I can add upstream u-boot and kernel (dts file)
support for it. If you're ok with donating it to me let know and I'll
send you a private mail with my address (I'm in the Netherlands so
shipping should be ok).

Glad to hear that. Please send me address as well as the preferred shipping method based on your experiences (never sent anything to Netherlands before)

 

> The board works, UART is accessible but the software the vendor provides
> (and his attitude) really suck:
> http://www.bananapi.com/index.php/forum/general-discussion-for-bpi-m2/895-status-quo-of-m2-regarding-software-support#2538

I feel I have to respond to this, I agree that bananapi.com is not
a good community player and the BPI boards they sell are best avoided (*).

Yes, it seems they don't understand that it also helps themselves if they would contribute to the community. If they would just publish the fex file they used for their 3.3 based images I could add the necessary AP6218 stuff to the dts file I recreated from the dtb file they supply with their 4.0.0-rc5 based images (http://pastebin.com/GzHMW31m ) and I could use the board with mainline utilizing both GBit Ethernet as well as Wi-Fi. But they refuse to provide this stuff.

Regarding the M2 as a reference. I put some stuff online -- maybe it is of help to you or others working on the M2 or A31/A31s in general:

- stuff from their Raspbian 2.0 image (kernel 3.3.0, u-boot 2011.09-rc1-dirty): http://kaiser-edv.de/tmp/OYrTyl/

- console output from this Raspbian image: http://pastebin.com/bXtb1buf

- console output from their 'Bananian' rip-off (same settings as before but also display initialisation f*cked up): http://pastebin.com/MJSVSfBc

- console output from their "Google Rpitc Image for M2" (u-boot 2015.04-rc4 and kernel 4.0.0-rc2): http://pastebin.com/8uyu9hN6 

 

However it is important to not mixup these bananapi people with the
original bananapi people from lemaker.org and the original bananapi
and bananapro boards. The people from lemaker.org are nice friendly
people who do work together with the linux-sunxi community, unlike
the people from bananapi.com.

Yes, I totally agree. But unfortunately the LeMaker guys seem to focus on a different set of SBCs now (2 based on Actions Semi's SoCs and one on i.MX6 -- they published these images yesterday accidentally on their forum they messed up the last days totally: http://kaiser-edv.de/tmp/Wxnnxw/) so we'll have to see what that means regarding the Alwinner SBCs they supported in the past.

 

Regards,

Thomas

[Thomas Kaiser]

The board is now on its way to Hans and I just took some pictures before and created an early wiki stub for M2: http://linux-sunxi.org/Sinovoip_Banana_Pi_M2

[Thomas Kaiser]

In the meantime someone reverse engineered some stuff for the M2 and saud to send patches upstream:

http://www.bananapi.com/index.php/forum/general-discussion-for-bpi-m2/995-working-wifi-on-modern-kernels-4-1-tested#2747

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

That is good to know, thanks for the info.

Regards,

Hans

[Thomas Kaiser]

And in the meantime somewhere on baidu.com Sinovoip put their Android sources (using kernel 3.3) for the M2 online: https://github.com/BPI-SINOVOIP/BPI-Kernel4.0/issues/1

[lion...@sinovoip.com.cn]

dear all , i am lionwang from sinovoip . i am sinovoip CEO and founder.

sorry for bananapi.com forum not support good.

as everyone know . we do the first banana pi M1 work together with foxconn .

lemaker is my agent , we agree lemaker forum support maker at the first time. and transfer all hardware SCH and software to lemaker untill they copy banana pi hardware .

so we must build ourself forum and support bananapi.com the same time. but bananapi.com is build for Dr LUO ,he is at USA. but thid website forum not very good for post for user .

now , sinovoip and foxconn will build ourself forum ：forum.banana-pi.org/　
github:https://github.com/bpi-sinovoip　sinovoip and foxconn will do all banan pi support from here by ourself.

[lion...@sinovoip.com.cn]

sinovoip cowork with allwinner .and konw how to choose chip design new hardware. :)

ａｎｄ　ｗｅ　ｕｓｅ　Ａ８３Ｔ　ｆｏｒ　ｎｅｗ　ｂａｎａｎａ　ｐｉ　．