Good afternoon. Looking for anyone who has BalenaOS up and running on a Banana Pi R64 (banana pi with built-in 4 port switch, PoE, WLAN, WWAN, etc. I tried the M1 IMG to no avail. Hoping I don’t have to start from scratch to build the OS on it myself, if that is even and option, but I’m going to start digging in that direction until someone saves me the trouble by providing a ready-to-use IMG file.
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Hello @wd-fusus welcome to the balena community. Looks like the balena M1+ was using an allwinner processor so they shouldn’t be compatibles. Did you try a balenaOS image of generic aarch64?
Meanwhile i will ping some of my colleagues to see how we can help you more!
Hi Will, welcome to the Forums. The BananaPi R64 certainly looks interesting, though rather unlike our currently supported boards…which means porting balenaOS to this board will be non-trivial. First and foremost, a couple of notes:
In the Arm world, you cannot take images built for other boards, and boot them on different hardware. So, taking a BananaPi M1 image, will absolutely not boot on the R64. They use very different boot processes, firmware, device trees, kernels, and more. Which then leads into the next points…
To boot this board, you need to figure out if there is Yocto support for this board upstream, and then you can work on building balenaOS from source following the guidance here: balenaOS - Docs. You’ll need to sort out the device tree, kernel, u-boot, and firmware, and if that already exists in Yocto you will save A LOT of time.
As we don’t have any existing MediaTek devices on the platform that I know of, you’ll have to start from scratch, instead of just copying an existing repo and going from there.
However, even more high-level, I am interested in your use-case. What is it that you are attempting to run on this board, or (if you can) perhaps sharing your intended application and product would be helpful. The reason for that ask, is that this is a dual-core Cortex A53, so there is not much compute power here, which might be ok depending on what you are running. Hope this helps get you started, and we do of course offer Custom Device Support as well if that is more feasible for you. Simply let us know, thanks!
Thanks for the point in the right direction. It does appear there is mainline support in yocto for the Mediatek MT7622 chip, I will take a stab at building balenaOS from source and update with how that goes. The use case at this juncture is as a potential Home Automation appliance using a Home Assistant build as well as potentially layering other service containers in, depending of course on performance. My hope is to put a 7" touch screen on the top of the case to interact with HA web interface, as well as provide PoE to devices (I’ll keep that under wraps for now) though it looks like that may require additional modules or modification of the board to support PoE on the switch ports (the WAN has a PoE hat capability OOB from what I’ve gathered).
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We’re very interested in having this device supported for the P2P Access-Point device we’re currently working on as part of a fund for the Secure Scuttlebutt community.
