The Raspberry Pi has been improving in connectivity and performance as new models have been launched. One of the improvements that the most recent models include with respect to the first ones is the inclusion of a Gigabit Ethernet port or WiFi 5. Now, one of its biggest competitors has launched a version with five ports.
We are talking about the Banana Pi BPI-R2 Pro. This new model arrives to replace the Banana Pi BPI-R2 that precedes it, which also had five Ethernet ports, and with a price of around 95 euros. Both plates are the same size, so the same accessories can be used as before, such as the housings for the plates.
Five Ethernet ports
The Banana Pi BPI-R2 Pro has two USB 3.0 ports, a USB 2.0 OTG connection, a connector for the CSI interface of cameras, and support for dual displays via MIPI. It also has a mini PCIe connector, an M.2 slot, and a 40-pin GPIO connector. At the network level, we find the aforementioned five Gigabit Ethernet ports , and optional 4G or 5G connectivity through an mPCIe or M.2 card.
The most important change in this new board with respect to the previous model is the inclusion of the Rockchip RK3568 as SoC. This chip features a 2 GHz ARM Cortex-A55 quad-core processor, a 0.8 TOPS NPU, and a Mali-G52 GPU. You can choose between versions with 2 or 4 GB of RAM, or 16, 32 and 64 GB of internal storage. Storage is expandable via microSD card, convenient enough to also switch between operating systems more quickly.
What the board does not have is a wireless module with WiFi and Bluetooth , since in the previous model there were users who complained about compatibility problems with the drivers. Therefore, they have left the slot free for users to integrate the wireless module that works best for them.
The company has not announced its price, but it is expected to be around 100 euros. The first units will begin to be on sale throughout the month of September .
Why do you need so many Ethernet ports?
If you have noticed, the Ethernet port configuration of the board has the four Ethernet ports together, and then it has a fifth separately. If you have looked at a neutral router from behind, you will have noticed that it has exactly the same port configuration, where the fifth port that is separated is equivalent to the WAN port.
And, indeed, this board is a kind of router, since it is a development board for fully customizable smart routers. With it, we can have a more powerful and stable router , being able for example to use it as a NAS , a multimedia player, analyze traffic in real time, VPN for the whole house , etc. OpenWRT can be installed, as well as Linux distros such as Raspbian, Ubuntu or Android.