2026-07-17, by Frank Delporte
In a new post on my blog, I tried out Java on two Banana Pi boards that step outside the usual Raspberry Pi comfort zone: the BPI-M4 Zero, an ARM board built around the Allwinner H618 (four Cortex-A53 cores at 1.5GHz, 4GB RAM), and the BPI-F3, an industrial RISC-V board powered by SpacemiT’s eight-core K1 SoC. Both keep the familiar 40-pin, Raspberry-Pi-compatible header, but under the hood they are a different world entirely.
Read the full article: First test of Java on Banana Pi ARM and RISC-V, plus a blinking LED with Pi4J on webtechie.be.
Java 25 was installed via SDKMAN on the ARM board and via apt on the RISC-V board. HelloWorld.java, a JSON parsing example, and JBang scripts all ran without any special tricks on both boards. Performance-wise, the BPI-M4 Zero beat a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 by 35-47% in the benchmarks, and the BPI-F3 held its own against other RISC-V hardware.
Blinking an LED turned out to be the hard part, not because of Java, but because of how the Allwinner H618 organizes its GPIOs. Where a Raspberry Pi has a single gpiochip0 behind the header with numbering that matches Pi4J’s BCM values directly, the Banana Pi exposes GPIOs in lettered banks (PA0-PA31, PB0-PB31, …) spread across multiple gpiochip devices — in this case gpiochip0 (32 lines) and gpiochip1 (288 lines).
Working from the board’s official pinout table, physical pin 16 turned out to be PI15. With the banks indexed A=0, B=1, ... I=8, the absolute line offset became (8 × 32) + 15 = 271 on gpiochip1. That offset was verified with gpioset gpiochip1 271=1 before touching any Java code, using the RGB LED’s other two pins (272 and 230) the same way.
With the correct offsets in hand, only a small change to the JBang RgbLed.java example was needed: adding .bus(1) to target gpiochip1 and swapping in the calculated .bcm() values. The result: the RGB LED blinked — the first working Pi4J example on a non-Raspberry-Pi board.
This exact workflow — finding the pinout table, identifying the right gpiochip, computing the line offset, and verifying it before writing code — is now documented step by step in Using Pi4J on Other Brands, using the same Banana Pi M4 Zero as an example. It ties directly into the FFM provider’s new “GPIO Chip Selection” section, which explains how .bus() and .bcm() work together to target a specific chip and line offset when your board doesn’t put the header on gpiochip0.