FriendlyArm Nano Pi M1

[Brian Beuken]

One of my favourite of the clones, mainly becuase it comes with all drivers and fully working pretty much out of the box, it does not take a lot to get this very cheap quad core up and running.

Of course being cheap it does not have much in the way of performance, its ancient Mali400MP2 mean it has much less power than the Raspberry, and it only has an H3 running at 1.2ghz  its also a little prone to overheating but not too much.

Its a game little beast, comes with Debian and Ubuntu, I tend to use Debian, and GLMark2-es reports a modest speed of 72, so it is accelerated, its just not fast.

Setting up is pretty much the standard case of installing all the additional libs, locating where the standard libs are, they are not the same as Raspberry, check the generic build demo to see what it does.

And then simply compile and run as usual, it runs about 80% the speed of a Raspberry which is a good excuse to practice some GPU optimization concepts we never covered in the book.

Sadly FriendlyArm seem to have discontinued this very cheap fun board and replaced it with a more expensive M1Plus version with more RAM, eMMC store, Wifi and BT, but at 3 times the price....not sure I can justify the extra cost for the same cpu and gpu.

[Brian Beuken]

Interestingly I have quite a few of these M1's,. I bought some for work, and set them up, and they all work fine on everyday tutorials.  As its been a while since I tested them, I just noticed the one I use at work has a 1080p screen, the one at home a 720p

I guess I must have downloaded and installed slightly different versions of debian. (I always use maker supplied versions)

What is a concern though is the 1080p refuses to compile my generic maze hunt project, complaining of a vague internal compiler error...that usually means an overheat in other SBC I had this on, causing a shut down...but it does have other causes, its just very hard to pin down.

The home 720p board however has no such issues and compiles and runs the demo in full screen.

I will look into this issue at a later date when I have time and report back on any findings.

Edit..(I hate confusion) I reflashed an SD with the latest debian which indeed is 1080p and re-configured for it. There is for sure some issue with the GCC taking a horrible amount of time and that may be the cause of an overheat/shut down, bit it did compile and build, however it refused to open a window or EGL context, so that needs more review..

Edit edit yup latest version of Debian is screwed, you get UMP: ump_arch_open() failed to open UMP device drive when you try to init EGL, thats something deep in the kernal I can't really fix, so for now avoid the later version of Debian and use the older one which is fine but low res. I'll ask FriendlyArm if they can fix it.