Daniel Blair - Learning Banana Pi

Daniel Blair is a tech entrepreneur and technologist from Winnipeg, Manitoba. He is heavily involved in start-up and maker communities in Winnipeg and regularly attends and organizes community events that are centered around development and open hardware.

When the Banana Pi board was first released to the community, Daniel got involved in the Banana Pi due to his experience with similar boards, such as the Raspberry Pi. He has worked on various projects, which includes bringing the Tor browser to the Banana Pi.

He has used nearly every incarnation of the Banana Pi and the boards that it has inspired. He has been a part of all kinds of projects related to software and hardware. Although Daniel has written a lot on the Banana Pi on his various websites, this is his first book on the subject.

Bit Space Development, a tech start-up founded by Daniel, offers various solutions to small businesses that need technology such as menu boards, Internet access points, and company dashboards. The power of open hardware has enabled them to offer top-quality support and robust hardware solutions as a small company.

I would like to thank my beautiful girlfriend, Erin, and my amazing daughter, Emily, for putting up with my long writing sessions and procrastination. I would also like to thank the good folks at Bold Innovation Group in Winnipeg for their encouragement and inspiration while writing this book.

I would also like to thank my mentorsGuy Dugas, Alex Trauzzi, and Yvan Boisjolifor keeping me in line and giving me the support and guidance that I needed to work toward the goals that I have achieved so far with regard to both this book and my career.

Ryad El-Dajani is a software engineer and a passionate technology enthusiast. He first became interested in computers when he was 10 years old. Soon thereafter, he began to learn various programming languages.

After he completed his training as an IT specialist, he worked on several e-commerce projects. Today, Ryad El-Dajani studies business computing and works at a big IT company in Germany, where he is a part of various IT projects that are based on Java or .NET technologies. Furthermore, he is authoring Banana Pi Cookbook , which will be released by Packt Publishing soon.

Besides the classic application development, he has professional experience in web frameworks such as Spring, Play, Symfony, eZ Publish, and Magento. Moreover, he has been interested in all kinds of Unix-like embedded systems since the revolutionary SheevaPlug.

Marcel Lange is a full-stack web developer from Hamburg, Germany, who specializes in the development of PHP-based e-commerce applications. He holds a degree in applied computer science.

He spends his leisure time experimenting with different kinds of electronics, from soldering LED watches to building home automation systems and remotely accessible robots. The rest of his spare time is devoted to working on his web blog, http://ask-sheldon.com, where he shares his knowledge and experience with various types of technologies and programming languages in the form of really short articles or code snippets.

I would like to thank my family and friends for putting up with my rare availability and sometimes brusque answers to e-mails and messages. Thanks for being so lenient with me.

Furthermore, I want to express my gratitude to Packt Publishing for giving me a chance to work on this very interesting project. It gave me many new ideas and experiences. Thanks a lot!

Martin Ltzelberger spent many years on biomedical and clinical research in the field of molecular genetics, bioinformatics, and data management. As a long-time Linux enthusiast, he developed a strong interest in microelectronics and physical computing. After much tinkering with Arduino, the Raspberry Pi, and the Banana Pi, he started to work as a teacher of informatics at a high school and brought these single-board computers into the classroom to teach the youth of today how to program and make them understand how computers work.

Igor Peovnik has been acquainted with electronics since his childhood, which spanned the early eighties. Transistors, tubes, ICs, and the first microcomputer were his devices. He fell into Ham Radio and spent many evenings talking to people all over the world long before the existence of the Internet. During his studies in the mid-nineties, he fell in love with Linux. In this period, he was involved in the mainstream Internet infrastructure deployment. He worked on various hardware and software projects and started his own web publishing company, where he spent a decade working as a CEO. The company operated one of the biggest local forums. He took a break from entrepreneurship for a while and went back to intensive humanistic study for years and focused on his family. After he became a father of two, he went back to his first loveelectronics. Once, he bought a small developer board and figured out that its operating system was crappy. This motivated him to start developing his own OS. The Debian Linux operating system, together with an open source build kit, is most popular for CubieBoard, Banana PI, and Olimex Lime, to name a few. He is a recognized member of the communities of these small boards. After devoting a few years toward the development of systems, he still develops and supports the basic Debian Linux for a dozen ARM boards.

I am working on a public project per se, so I have many coworkers whom I want to thank. Thanks to all those who use, test, and report problems, the ones who gave compliments and motivation, and the people who donate money and devices!