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  • Writer's pictureRobert Misior

Banana Pi Quickstart

We are without a doubt at the dawn of the Internet of Things (IoT) age. Small low cost embedded microcomputers now make the IoT more possible then ever before. The Raspberry Pi is the first microcomputer that probably is the first to come to mind for most people. However, there are many additional options to the Raspberry Pi such as: Beagleboard, Espruino or Banana Pi just to name few.  The majority of these use Linux based operating systems that require you perform an installation on an SD card before you can boot it. In this blog post I would like to share my recentinstallation experience of “Raspbian OS” on brand new Banana Pi using Mac OS X (10.10).


Step 1: Prepare the SD Card

  • Using  SD adapter connect SD card to your Mac. Card needs to be at least class 4 and 4GB in size

  •  Format SD card using the Disk Utility as MS-DOS (FAT)

  • Type Disk Utility in the Spotlight search

  • Select SD card on the left side menu, select Erase tab and select MS-DOS (FAT)



Step 2: Download and Load OS


  • NOTE: Once this is done  your Downloads folder should contain file such as Raspbian_For_BananaPi_v1412.img


  • Open Terminal and using  “disk” command locate the disk identifier of your SD card in our example it is disk5:



  • Next unmount (not reject) the SD card:  “sudo diskutil unmount /Volumes/UNTITLED”


  • Change your current path to  “Downloads” folder and using the “DD” command write the image to the SD card: “sudo dd if=Raspbian_For_BananaPi_v1412.img of=/dev/disk5 bs=16m”


FINISHED!!

At this point  you are ready to boot up and use your Banana Pi!



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