These pi’s sound and look really interesting. Both from a performance and cost standpoint. While aware of these for quite some time, I am not really aware of which is better, and of course as they have aged/grown, so has the acronym soup!
My questions are simple.
Which brand, and which model is the best to try with Xojo? I want all of the best, price is important, but not the most important - especially since they are so low and close anyway.
Raspberry Pi 2. Widely supported, available everywhere. Unless you have a specific reason, I’d be going with the original product.
Where are you in the world Tim? Try Adafruit.com if in the States or CPC, Farnell or Element14 in the UK. Plenty of suppliers elsewhere, let me know where you are and I’ll help you track down a supplier.
Put your location in your profile, otherwise you will always get people asking where you are to give good advice. Complete waste of time which could easily be avoided.
Added location per Markus’ suggestion. I like/want a sata port. The banana appears to have some better specs, such as the SATA port, but again, acronym soup. And yes, it is all relative - who’s nobody knows
If you need a SATA port (seriously?) then the Raspberry Pi won’t be much use to you without an expansion interface. The reason I’d recommend the Raspberry Pi is support and numbers - something like 6 million have been sold so it’s much easier to get guaranteed support than something like the Banana Pi which has sold in the thousands. But whatever you need, you need.
There is definitely something good to having large scale use. Right now, am looking around, but that is all. Probably will wind up getting one of each…
To answer your question then I would say Raspberry PI should be your first one to get, it just works and you get solid start without and hassles. The Banana PI is very compatible in every way, including their OS image and their IO pins are the same. But both Banana PI and Orange PI suffer from difficult display detection issues currently (hoping they fix that with better drivers down the road) but if you going to run it as headless computer mostly then low display resolution or display issues are not going to be showstopper.
The Orange PI is a bit further away I would say. Its not bad its just not as compatible as it comes out of the box.
I will have another Benchmark soon that focuses more on the CPU as in my first benchmark the IO played a big role in it.
