BTT Pi evaluation

Some time ago I came across an offer in a Facebook Raspberry Pi group to evaluate a new RPi alternative The BigTreeTech (BTT) Pi. Evaluators were expected to do a serious evaluation of the board, and in turn could keep the board, off course I was interested and volunteered.

After a few weeks I received the board, which looks pretty neat with some nice extra features compared to the Raspberry like:

  • Color coded GPIO pins (black: ground, red 5V, yellow 3.3V, green: IO
  • Connector for (optional) CAN interface
  • Extra power connector for 12-24V power supplies
  • Connector for external Wifi antenna (nice if you want to use a metal / alu case).
  • Infrared receiver for remote controls
  • Cool red alu heat-sink

It is also missing a few features compared to the RPi 3B that weren’t an issue for the use cases I wanted to test:

  • Only USB-2, so no high speeds
  • No Bluetooth
  • The GPIO pin layout is ‘inversely’ oriented, so not compatible with Pi hats.

Installation

Installation was quite straightforward, although you can’t use a regular Raspberry Pi image, BTT made available an image on their Github repo: GitHub – bigtreetech/CB1: OS System image for CB1. I used the minimal_kernel image as I wasn’t going to use Klipper for 3D printing. BTT als made a nice Youtube video explaining the installation process making the installation a breeze. Normally I use my RPi’s headless, so after adapting the system.cfg file on the boot partition (from Windows) and inserting the card and powering it up, I found it on the network after a minute or so using my favorite IP scanner:

SSH was enabled, so I could login immediately using the default credentials mentioned on their github repo:

A few basic checks didn’t show any serious issues:
dmesg shows only a few not too worrying messages:


Install OpenCV

As I wanted to try OpenCV on this board (which can be a pain on some OS-es), I just followed the generic steps to do this (using pip instead of apt, as that allows me to use a more recent version of OpenCV:

sudo apt install python3-pip # few warnings about 'missing 'Description' field'
sudo pip install opencv-python
sudo apt-get install libgl1
sudo pip install requests
sudo pip install imutils

But other than a few warnings, all went smooth, and I was able to run all my self-built Python based OpenCV scripts without a hassle adding some object/person recognition to my somewhat older and thus ‘dumb’ EzViz IP-cams (which are still functioning reliably after more than 4 years outside in various weather conditions).

I will add some more details about my experience with this board later, my current observation is that all-in-all it’s a very decent board, that has a sturdy feel for a very competitive price. Although originally created for controlling 3D printers, I think it is a good alternative for a Raspberry Pi 3 for many applications where you don’t need the ‘missing features’.

Various links

Below are various links that might be interesting w.r.t. this board.