bpi-m64

Tests and other stuff on a Bananapi M64

For any further help, please feel free to use the documentation or the forum on armbian.com

Download and flash to sdCard

For our tests we’ll use the CLI (command line interface) version of Armbian. Download the image from https://www.armbian.com/bananapi-m64/

wget https://dl.armbian.com/bananapim64/Debian_stretch_next.7z

Flash it with 7zip piped to dd

sudo apt update && sudo apt install p7zip

Search for your sdCard and unmount all partitions. Maybe blkid helps here.

sudo umount /dev/mmcblk0p*
sudo 7za x Debian_stretch_next.7z -so | sudo dd of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=4M

Boot

After I plugged in the sdCard to the board the operating system started with the boot process. The bpi-m64 has 3 small (RGB) LEDs on the board. Only the red one lights up. After a few seconds the network card started to blink.

Configure over UART

You can either configure the operating system with UART over USB, see here http://blog.rothirsch.tech/SBCs/banana_pi/bpi-m64/#!UART or

Configure over SSH

you configure it over SSH. Therefore I did a scan on my network with nmap do find the new board

sudo nmap -sn 192.168.0.0/24

If you are not sure wich of them are the new one you can scan each of them or try to connect to ssh port 22.

sudo nmap -A 192.168.0.100

So we can connect to the board over SSH port 22. The password is 1234

ssh -p 22 root@192.168.0.100

Besides that you can see hardware information you have to change your password.

Warning

Unfortunately the board is not official supported by Armbian. This is because the maintainer of the bpi-m64 is not that accurate with information about there products. Nevertheless, the developers at Armbian working hard on getting this boards to run. So why not donate to them if you can do something with your board. You can directly donate to them over their site. A second option is, that you buy the bpi-m64 directly over our site http://bpi.rothirsch.tech/BananaPi/#!bpi-m64. We will donate an euro to Armbian for each board we sell.

Preparing the system for testing purpose

Before we do a few benchmarks we upgrade the system first.

apt update && apt -y upgrade

Executing sysbench

sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=20000 run

Source

7z to dd http://mark.koli.ch/howto-whole-disk-backups-with-dd-gzip-and-p7zip)

nmap https://hackertarget.com/nmap-cheatsheet-a-quick-reference-guide/

bpi-m64 over UART

This site represents a simple test for UART function on a bpi-m64.

For the test I used

• bpi-m64 v1.1 and 1.2
• Betemcu: BTE13-007 USB2TTL Adapter
• Armbian as operating system

Warning

Some sites report that a wrong connection to the PINs could destroy the board. So please be careful.

Exceptions

The TX and RX PINs are crossed on my configuration. So I have to plug in the TX Pin on the USB connector to RX on the Banana Pi board and vice versa.

How to connect

Plug in the 3 PINs on the Banana Pi and connect it with your PC or Notebook. On this device open a terminal and run

screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200

Now you can start the Banana Pi and the control it over your host.