Banana Pi: A Raspberry Pi alternative with an AI accelerator that costs just US$16

Sinovoip has brought its latest single-board computer (SBC) to AliExpress, the Banana Pi BPI-EAI80. The Banana Pi cannot run Windows 10 or Raspbian like the Raspberry Pi can, but it can connect to external devices via its 40-pin GPIO header like the Pi.

The Banana Pi has an Edgeless EIA80 dual-core Cortex-M4F microcontroller, which integrates 384 KB of SRAM and 8 MB of SDRAM. The EIA80 also features a 300GOPS AI accelerator (CNN-NPU) and reserves 256 KB of its SRAM for its CNN-NPU. The 86 x 54 mm supports flash storage via its SPI flash module and packs a host of other connections, as the image below demonstrates. The Banana Pi can be powered over USB Type-C or a 3.7 V Li-ION battery. The board also has built-in Wi-Fi courtesy of its ESP8266 module.

Sinovoip intends for the Banana Pi to be used as a platform for AI development and has pre-installed uGelis, which can be programmed using the Kelis SDK. The company has published a wiki with a link to GitHub for using the Banana Pi, so there is not as much support on offer for the board as there is with the Raspberry Pi, for example.

The Banana Pi BPI-EAI80 costs US$16 on AliExpress, although this only gets you the board. Alternatively, you could purchase an US$80 kit, which features the BPI-EAI80, a 7-inch touchscreen, an OV5640 camera module and a USB Type-C power supply.