The BananaPi M3
Mainly out of curiosity I recently got myself a BananaPi M3 single board computer. Out of all the single board computers available today I looked for a cheap yet powerful board that can also run Fedora Linux.
This led me to the BananaPi M3.
For about 69 Euro I got this board from ebay and every time I hook it up and play with it, it surprises me. My desktop has 4 CPU cores, but this little board has 8! These ARM cores are not nearly as powerful as the i5 cores, but when I compare it to my eee-PC, the BPI-M3 definitely wins.
Installing fedora has never been easier, just download an image, copy it to a micro SD card and you're ready to go.
First I was afraid that I would have to compile most additional software from source, but even that is not the case. Just use "sudo dnf install" to install almost anything you would like. I installed PHP and a Apache and had a webserver running in less than an hour (I didn't clock it, but I'm sure it was less than an hour)
I also tried some of the other operating systems but decided to stay with fedora as I have been using that for the last 20 years or so. So I copied the image to the onboard eMMC, freeing up the SD slot (and card) for other purposes.
It is a really fun board to play with, the only thing that I found missing are analogue inputs. Maybe I have to add a small arduino board to it, but then the possibilities are endless. I am thinking to do some home automation project sometime with a web interface so it can be controlled/monitored from any android that connects to my home wifi...
For those who want to know more, here is a small overview:
What type of home automation were you thinking of doing? Have you checked out thingspeak at all yet?
I do not have a plan, yet. But there are several things that I could think of;
1 - I use ground water in my home. That goes through several pumps and filters into a number of tanks. Now that is a semi-automatic process but I could make it full automatic.
2 - electricity is quite unreliable here. I want to add solar and diesel power and monitor and switch automagically.
3 - for internet goes the same. I want to be able to switch between ADSL and UMTS automatically.
4 - a security system with video, locking and unlocking of doors etc.
These are more or less necessary things, then there are less necessary things like lighting, music, wake-up alarms, airco control and who knows what I will come up with.
I didn't really see thingspeak yet, but I want my system to be independent of other computers outside of my home. I also quite like Alexa from Amazon, but the fact that it runs on Amazon servers and probably stores (and maybe even sells!) my data there is a big no-no for me.
Are you doing something with thingspeak?
I may mess around with it at some point with a Raspberry Pi 3... not anytime soon, but on the radar once a particular business venture has me in the maker space for hours on end.