The Banana Pi/Pro is a clone of the well known Raspberry Pi. It has advantages compared to the 'old' Raspberry Pi A/B/A+/B+ devices as it is based on the Allwinner A20 Dual Core Cortex-A7. It also has 1G Ethernet compared to 100M Ethernet on the Raspberry.

There is a lot of effort on Mainline Kernel to fully support the Allwinner Chips, for example Fedora 22 Arm will come with support for BananaPi/Pro which means that you will be able to have HDMI Output and a number of periperal modules work out of the box.

Pin-wise the Banana Pi matches the Raspberry Pi, the Banana Pro has a connector similar to the Raspberry Pi A+/B+

Revision Support

Banana Pi Banana Pro

Interface notes

PWM Whilst the Banana Pi is meant to have 1 PWM channel this is currently not supported.

SPI works fine when used with old 3.4 Kernels provided by Lemaker, on Mainline Kernel SPI does currently not work

COM I have created devicetree patches so that Mainline Kernel supports all COM-Interfaces, this is not yet visible in Kernel

Mainline Kernel requires the use of Device-Trees, mraa tries it's best to guess which gpio/serial/i2c/spi is connected where but there is currently no support to manipulate the Device-Tree settings from within mraa. If a device does not work as expected then please check syslog, mraa usually complains with a meaningful message when it is unable to initialize the device.

Pin Mapping

This pin mapping refers to the Banana Pi but gives an idea as to what the values are from mraa. Note that there is an emum to use wiringPi style numbers.

MRAA Number	Physical Pin	Function
1	P1-01	3V3 VCC
2	P1-02	5V VCC
3	P1-03	I2C SDA
4	P1-04	5V VCC
5	P1-05	I2C SCL
6	P1-06	GND
7	P1-07	GPIO(PI03)
8	P1-08	UART4 TX
9	P1-09	GND
10	P1-10	UART4 RX
11	P1-11	GPIO(PI19)
12	P1-12	GPIO(PH02)
13	P1-13	GPIO(PI18)
14	P1-14	GND
15	P1-15	GPIO(PI17)
16	P1-16	GPIO(PH20)
17	P1-17	3V3 VCC
18	P1-18	GPIO(PH21)
19	P1-19	SPI MOSI
20	P1-20	GND
21	P1-21	SPI MISO
22	P1-22	GPIO(PI16)
23	P1-23	SPI SCL
24	P1-24	SPI CS0
25	P1-25	GND
26	P1-26	SPI CS1

There is also a second 8-pin connector on the Banana Pi, the pins are as follows:

MRAA Number	Physical Pin	Function
27	P1-19	5V VCC
28	P1-20	3V3 VCC
29	P1-21	GPIO(PH5)
30	P1-22	GPIO(PI22)
31	P1-23	GPIO(PH03)
32	P1-24	GPIO(PI20)
33	P1-25	GND
34	P1-26	GND